Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/277

Rh contains a portion? It once was usual to represent the theory of Anaxagoras as if he had said that wheat, for instance, contained small particles of flesh, blood, bones, and the like; but we have just seen that matter is infinitely divisible (fr. 3), and that there are as many "portions" in the smallest particle as in the greatest (fr. 6). That is fatal to the old view. However far we carry division, we can never reach anything "unmixed," so there can be no such thing as a particle of simple nature, however minute.,

This difficulty can only be solved in one way. In fr. 8 the examples given of things which are not "cut off from one another with a hatchet" are the hot and the cold; and elsewhere (frs. 4., 15), mention is made of the other traditional "opposites." Aristotle says that, if we suppose the first principles to be infinite, they may either be one in kind, as with Demokritos, or opposite. Simplicius, following Porphyry and Themistios, refers the latter view to Anaxagoras; and Aristotle himself implies that the opposites of Anaxagoras had as much right to be called first principles as the "homoeomeries."

It is of those opposites, then, and not of the different forms of matter, that everything contains a portion. Every