facing ancient philosophy

By explaining generation and destruction, if not all change, in terms of mixture and separation, Empedocles sought to reconcile Heraclitus's insistence on the reality of change with the Eleatic claim that generation and destruction are unthinkable. Going back to the Greeks' traditional belief in four elements, he found a place for Thales' water, Anaximenes' air, and Heraclitus's fire, and he added earth as the fourth. In addition to these four elements, which Aristotle would later call "material causes" Empedocles postulated two "efficient causes": strife (Heraclitus's great principle) and love. He envisaged four successive ages: an age of love or perfect mixture in the beginning; then gradual separation as strife enters; then complete separation as strife rules; finally, as love enters again, a gradual remixture.

How romantic... :X Four elements + two causes of everything, babe.

Anaxagoras taught that everything consists of an infinite number of particles or seeds, and that in all things there is a portion of everything. Hair could not come from what is not hair, nor flesh come from what is not flesh. The names we apply to things are determined by the preponderance of certain seeds in them - for example, hair seeds or flesh seeds. Like Empedocles, he added to such "material causes" an "efficient cause" to account for the motion and direction of things; however, unlike Empedocles' two, Anaxagoras added only one "efficient cause", which was mind, in Greek. The introduction of mind led Aristotle to hail Anaxagoras as the only sober man among the Pre-Socratics; yet Aristotle found fault with Anaxagoras for not making more use of this new principle to explain natural events.

Could Buddhism be a li'l related to this concept?

Atomism accepted Parmenides' idea that being must be one seamless whole but posited an infinite number of such "one's." According to Democritus, the world is made up of tiny "un-cutables" that move within the "void" (corresponding to Parmenides' non-being). These atoms combine in different patterns to form the material objects of the observable world. Democritus applied this understanding of reality to human beings as well. Both the soul and the body are made up of atoms. Perception occurs when atoms from objects outside the person strike the sense organs inside the person, which in turn strike the atoms of the soul further inside. Death, in turn, is simply the dissipation of the soul atoms when the body atoms no longer hold them together.

- about Democritus
And death is always so romantic, no matter how you put it... Did you ever think about that?

I think that...