126.The Fragments. I give the fragments according to the text and arrangement of Diels:
(1) All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite. And, when all things were together, none of them could be distinguished for their smallness. For air and aether prevailed over all things, being both of them infinite; for amongst all things these are the greatest both in quantity and size.[1] R. P. 151.
(2) For air and aether are separated off from the mass that surrounds the world, and the surrounding mass is infinite in quantity. R. P. ib.
(3) Nor is there a least of what is small, but there is always a smaller; for it cannot be that what is should cease to be by being cut.[2] But there is also always something greater than what is great, and it is equal to the small in amount, and, compared with itself, each thing is both great and small. R. P. 159 a.
(4) And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours (R. P. ib.), and that men have been formed in them, and the other animals that have life, and that these men have inhabited cities and cultivated fields as with us; and that they have a sun and a moon and the rest as with us; and that their earth brings forth for them many things of all kinds of which they gather the best together into their dwellings, and use them (R. P. 160 b). Thus much have I said with regard to separating off, to show that it will not be only with us that things are separated off, but elsewhere too.
But before they were separated off, when all things were together, not even was any colour distinguishable; for the mixture of all things prevented it—of the moist and the dry; and the warm and the cold, and the light and the dark, and of much earth that was in it, and of a multitude of innumerable seeds in no way like each other. For none of the other things
- ↑ Simplicius tells us this was at the beginning of Book I. The sentence quoted by Diog. ii. 6 (R. P. 153) is not a fragment of Anaxagoras, but a summary, like the πάντα ῥεῖ ascribed to Herakleitos." (Chap. III. p. 146).
- ↑ Zeller's τομῇ still seems to me a convincing correction of the MS. τὸ μή, which Diels retains.
