Book 12
3
And this is the one of Anaxagoras; for his all things were together,Anaxagoras Fr. 1 (Diels). and the mixture of Empedocles and Anaximander and the doctrine of Democritus would be better expressed as all things were together potentially, but not actually. In this passage I follow Ross’s punctuation and interpretation, which seem to me to be certainly right. Anaxagoras’s undifferentiated infinity of homoeomerous particles (although contrasted with the unifying principle of Mind, cf. Aristot. Met. 1.8.14) can be regarded as in a sense a unity. Again, μῖγμα(as Ross points out) in its Aristotelian sense of complete fusion is a fair description of Anaximander’s indeterminate. The general meaning of the passage is that in each of the systems referred to the material principle in its elemental state should have been described as existing only potentially.
4
Hence these thinkers must have had some conception of matter. All things which change have matter, but different things have different kinds; and of eternal things such as are not generable but are movable by locomotion have matter; matter, however, which admits not of generation, but of motion from one place to another.Cf. Aristot. Met. 12.1.3, Aristot. Met. 8.1.7, 8.
4
One might raise the question from what sort of not-being generation takes place; for not-being has three senses.(1) the negation of a category, (2) falsity, (3) unrealized potentiality. Cf. Aristot. Met. 14.2.10. If a thing exists through a potentiality, nevertheless it is not through a potentiality for any chance thing; different things are derived from different things.
