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From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.
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Page 8
Empedocles was a Sicilian, and like other philosophers of Magna Graecia combined his search for the ultimate nature of things with the demands of a deeply religious outlook, to which the nature and destiny of the human soul was of fundamental interest. He saw the answer to Parmenides in the substitution of four ultimate root-substances or elements (earth, water, air and fire) for the single principle of the Milesians. Anaxagoras brought the spirit of Ionian physics from Asia Minor to Athens, where he lived in the time of Socrates and Euripides, and enjoyed the friendship of Pericles and his circle. His doctrine of matter as consisting of an infinite number of qualitatively different ' seeds' was a kind of half-way house to the culmination of this pluralistic physics in the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus.
An interesting result of the uncompromising logic of Parmenides was to face philosophers with the problem of a moving cause. At its start, rational thought had inherited from mythology the conception of all physical entities as in some degree animate. The separation of matter and spirit was as yet undreamed-of, and to the Milesian monists it was therefore natural to suppose that the single primary substance of the world water or mist or whatever it might be was the author of its own transformations. It did not occur to them that this was something that needed explaining, or that anyone might demand a separate cause of motion. The intellectual drawbacks of this naive combination of matter and spirit, moved and mover, in one corporeal entity are already becoming obvious in Heraclitus. By bringing the world to a full stop, as it were, Parmenides drove home the lesson that motion was a phenomenon in need of its own explanation, and in the later Presocratics we see not only the change from a unity to a plurality of physical elements, but also the emergence of a moving cause beside and apart from the moving elements themselves.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=8
