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Wellsprings
cosmology

The Original Mixture (All Things Together)

ὁμοῦ πάντα χρήματα

Before the world began, everything was everywhere at once — a seamless mixture in which gold already hid inside flesh, and night inside day.

Anaxagoras taught that the cosmos began not from nothing but from a boundless, undifferentiated blend in which "all things were together," with a portion of everything present in everything else — bone in bread, dark in light, the seeds of all qualities intermingled. Nothing is ever truly created or destroyed; the visible world emerges only as Mind (Nous) sets this primordial stuff spinning, so that ingredients separate out into the things we see. Because every substance still contains a share of all others, the mixture is never fully unwound — there is no smallest part and no pure, unmixed thing except Mind itself. The doctrine answered how change is possible without anything coming from what is not.

Where this idea shows up

7 Greek sources

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