PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO Here is his account of the beginning of the universe: ‘All things were together, inWnite in number and inWnite in smallness; for the small too was inWnite While all things were together, nothing was recognizable because of its smallness Everything lay under air and ether, both inWnite’ (KRS 467) This primeval pebble began to rotate, throwing oV the surrounding ether and air and forming out of them the stars and the sun and the moon The rotation caused the separation of dense from rare, of hot from cold, of dry from wet, and bright from dark But the separation was never complete, and to this day there remains in every single thing a portion of everything else There is a little whiteness in what is black, a little cold in what is hot, and so on: things are named after the item that is dominant in it (Aristotle, Ph 187a23) This is most obvious in the case of semen, which must contain hair and Xesh, and much, much more; but it must also be true of the food we eat (KRS 483–4, 496) In this sense, as things were in the beginning, so now they are all together The expansion of the universe, Anaxagoras maintained, has continued in the present and will continue in the future (KRS 476) Perhaps it has already generated worlds other than our own As a result of the presence of everything in everything, he says, men have been formed and the other ensouled animals And the men possess farms and inhabit cities just as we do, and they have a sun and a moon and the rest just like us The earth produces things of every sort for them to be harvested and stored, as it does for us I have said all this about the process of separating oV, because it would have happened not only here with us, but elsewhere too (KRS 498) Anaxagoras thus has a claim to be the originator of the idea, later proposed by Giordano Bruno and popular again today in some quarters, that our cosmos is just one of many which may, like ours, be inhabited by intelligent creatures The motion that sets in train the development of the universe is, according to Anaxagoras, the work of Mind ‘All things were together: then Mind came and gave them order’ (D.L 6) Mind is inWnite and separate, and has no part in the general commingling of elements; if it did, it would get drawn into the evolutionary process and could not control it This teaching, placing mind Wrmly in control of matter, so struck his contemporaries that they nicknamed Anaxagoras himself the 25