From the Beginning to Plato

194 ANAXAGORAS AND THE ATOMISTS
when they separate, then they call that dismal destruction; they do not call
it as they ought, but I too assent to their usage.
But there is a crucial difference, in that Anaxagoras rejected Empedocles’ core
belief in the primacy of the four elements. Even if we accept (as I shall assume)
that Anaxagoras’ book was written later than Empedocles’ poem on nature, it
must be a matter for conjecture how far Anaxagoras arrived at his view of what
was physically basic through conscious opposition to the views of Empedocles.
What is, however, indisputable, is that Anaxagoras’ view of the physically basic
constituted a radical departure from that of Empedocles (and a fortiori from that
of his Ionian predecessors); that divergence, moreover, marked a fundamental
innovation in the conception of physical reality and of the relation between
reality and appearance.
For Anaxagoras’ account of what is physically basic we may begin with
fragments 1 and 4. Fragment 1, according to Simplicius the opening sentence of
Anaxagoras’ book, describes the original state of the universe, in which
everything that there is was so mixed up together that nothing was
distinguishable from anything else. What these things were fragment 4 tells us;
they were ‘the wet and the dry and the hot and the cold and the bright and the
dark and a lot of earth in with them and an infinite number of seeds, all unlike
one another’. In this list we see: first a list of the traditional opposite qualities, as
in Anaximander for example; second, earth, one of Empedocles’ four elements;
and third, an infinite number of seeds. ‘Seeds’ is a biological term, denoting
roughly what we would call the genetic constituents of organisms; the seed of a
kind of plant or animal is what develops into a new instance of that plant or animal
type, and, as Vlastos [6.19] points out, the process was ordinarily conceived as
one in which the seed, seen as ‘a compound of all the essential constituents of the
parent body from which it comes and of the new organism into which it will
grow’ (p. 464), develops by assimilating more of the same kinds of constituent
supplied by the environment. That these constituents were identified by
Anaxagoras with the organic stuffs, flesh, blood, fibre, etc., which compose
organisms of different kinds, is suggested by fragment 10: ‘How could hair come
to be from what is not hair, and flesh from what is not flesh?’ For the naked
embryo to develop into the hirsute adult, the seed must have contained hair, the
presumably minute quantity of which was supplemented by the amounts of hair
contained in the nourishment which the growing animal assimilated.
In Anaxagoras’ primeval mixture, then, we find qualities, namely the
opposites, and stuffs mingled together without any categorial distinction. The
stuffs include the four Empedoclean elements; earth is mentioned in fragment 4,
and air and aithēr, the bright upper atmosphere, (traditionally conceived as a
form of fire) in fragment 1, while the principle of fragment 10 (‘F cannot come
to be from what is not F’) implies that water is a constituent in the mixture too.
But the elements have no special status relative to other stuffs; earth is no more
primitive than bone or flesh (contrast Empedocles frs 96 and 98). In fact the