Empedocles' pores theory

For Empedocles, the eyes are Aphrodite's work. In the extant fragments, the example of the eyes illustrates most clearly what he means by the work of Love as an essential component for successful perception. One of the finest surviving fragments gives a poetic (and accurate) description of the structure of the eye: "As when a man who intends to make a journey prepares a light for himself, a flame of fire burning through a wintry night; he fits linen screens agaisnt all the winds which break the blast of the winds as they blow, but the light that is more diffuse leaps through, and shines across the threshold with unfailing beams. In the same way the elemental fire, wrapped in membranes and delicate tissues, was then concealed in the round pupil -these kept back the surrounding deep water, but let through the more diffuse light."

- Siegfried Zielinski. "Deep time of Media" MIT Press. 2006. P. 47.

The fragment he writes about is of a papyrus interpreted in the early 1990s about Empedocles' view on nature not being Aristotelian, as it was thought (concerning the separation between nature and the human soul): "The papyrus demonstrates that this approach was in error -the physics of the four 'roots' on the one side, and crime and punishment of the soul daimon on the other, are so closely intertwined in the new text that these must be seen as integrated elements of one and the same unified theory." Ibid. P 40.