  The poetic Empedocles, who speculated that reality is the product of ever-recurring cycles of Love and Strife, held that sensation, perception, and even wisdom, is a matter of knowing “like by  like”.[1] His rival Anaxagoras held that “perception is by  opposites”.[2]  One way to read these obscure fragments is to see them as emblematic of two different ways of thinking about the mind. For Empedocles, the mind is made for the world. Mind grasps reality because it is pre-tuned to the world and resonates with it. For Anaxagoras, the world has to impress itself upon us; to shape our unformed minds into its form. This image of the world ‘informing’ the knower becomes the tabula rasa of 17th century Empiricism. But there is another connection. Empedocles, with his cycles of Love and Strife, is unabashedly speculative.  Anaxagoras, on the other hand, comes down to us as “dry, clear-headed, …[having a] common sense attitude”. This difference in intellectual personality is reflected in the subsequent debate. Empedocles would be very much at home with the Nativistic Rationalist philosophers and their “rather dreamlike vision of the universe”, as Bernard Williams has put it. The British Empiricists are more likely to share Anaxagoras’ commonsensical impatience with such flights of fancy.