Just as our soul, being air, holds us together and controls us, so do breath and air surround the whole cosmos.
So runs the one fragment that survives in something like his own words. Theophrastus preserves the doctrine: air differs in its nature by rarity and density. Rarefied, it becomes fire; condensed, it becomes wind, then cloud; condensed further, water, then earth, then stones — and everything else comes to be from these.
Hot and cold, he held, are not substances but conditions of the common matter: what is compressed is cold, what is loose and rare is warm. So a man cools his food by blowing with pursed lips, and warms his hands with an open mouth.
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