Volume 3 / Book 1 — CHAPTER XXX. OF NATURE.
Reading edition
Empedocles believes that Nature is nothing else but the mixture and separation of the elements; for thus he writes in the first book of his natural philosophy:
Nature gives neither life nor death, Mutation makes us die or breathe. The elements first are mixed, then all Do separate: this mortals Nature call.
Anaxagoras is of the same opinion, that Nature is coalition and separation, that is, generation and corruption.