a line of defence that was to remain popular into the Middle Ages, interpreting the Homeric deities as
allegories of the physical world. What Empedocles is doing is akin to this. He elevates the gods' love
and strife into a pair of supreme powers who rule in regular alternation by the terms of a treaty. When
Love's power is absolute, the divine elements are completely blended into a featureless, homogeneous
sphere. As Strife gradually makes its way in, they begin to separate and form a cosmos. Eventually they
will be four separate masses, a ball of pure earth in the centre with successive spheres of water, fire, and
air surrounding it. We can see that the universe is on the way towards that state. Subsequently the
reverse process will operate until the cycle is completed. Empedocles went into much ingenious detail in
explaining astronomical and meteorological phenomena and the evolution and physiology of living
creatures. He apparently found room for gods within the cosmos other than the elements themselves.
They are presumably entities of a fiery nature. When one of them yields to the influence of Strife, he is
torn away from the company of his fellows and forced to consort with the other elements for myriads of
years, a soul going through countless animal and plant lives.
Empedocles has turned away from the idea held by some Ionians that one original substance can change
into others. To account for the diversity of substances in the world he finds it necessary to postulate a set
of contrasted primary elements which can be combined in countless ways. This pluralist approach was
taken to an extreme by Anaxagoras, an Ionian who taught at Athens for many years in the mid fifth
century. Like Empedocles, only without his cyclicalism, Anaxagoras begins his cosmogony from a state
of perfect mixture which is then unbalanced by the operation of a divine force. But there is no limit to
the number of ingredients in the mixture, and the separation process is never absolute. There always
remains a proportion of every substance in everything; we name each thing according to what
predominates in it, as if it were composed purely of that substance. This is why whatever Miss T. eats
turns into Miss T. It always contained flesh (even the vegetables), and when she eats it a material
rearrangement takes place making flesh the dominant constituent. The only thing not mixed with
everything else, and therefore able to control everything else, is the finest and purest of all: Mind. This is
the divine force that gives the cosmos its initial impulse and supervises the whole process of creative
separation.
Socrates, according to Plato, read Anaxagoras' book and was disappointed that he still made so much use
of mechanistic explanations instead of making Mind shape each detail of the -world for an intelligent
reason. Anaxagoras seems here to have fallen between two stools: the Milesian desire to explain the
world as the natural product of certain given processes, and a new inclination (perhaps implicit in
Xenophanes and Heraclitus) to see it as planned. Diogenes of Apollonia, a somewhat younger man who
began his book on human physiology with a cosmology, argues explicitly that the balanced arrangement
of the seasons, among other things, must be the work of intelligence. He identifies this divine
intelligence with the material element air, which, like Anaximenes, he regards as the single substance
from which all others are derived. Everything that breathes air partakes of intelligence.
A sense of proportionate arrangement, whether imposed by a divine Mind or resulting automatically
from natural processes, had been a feature of cosmological thought since Anaximander. The discovery
that simple mathematical ratios underlie the fundamental musical concords led some Pythagoreans to
focus on number as the essence of the universe. One of them (perhaps Philolaus) formulated a theory