The Anaxagorean chaos is not an immediately evident conception; in order to grasp it one must have understood the conception which our philosopher had with respect to the so-called "Becoming." For in itself the state of all heterogeneous "Elementary-existences" before all motion would by no means necessarily result in an absolute mixture of all "seeds of things," as the expression of Anaxagoras runs, an intermixture, which he imagined as a complete pell-mell, disordered in its smallest parts, after all these "Elementary-existences" had been, as in a mortar, pounded and resolved into atoms of dust, so that now in that chaos, as in an amphora, they could be whirled into a medley. One might say that this conception of the chaos did not contain anything inevitable, that one merely needed rather to assume any chance position of all those "existences," but not an infinite decomposition of them; an irregular side-by-side arrangement was already sufficient; there was no need of a pell-mell, let alone such a total pell-mell. What therefore put into Anaxagoras' head that difficult and complex conception? As already said: his conception of the empirically given Becoming. From his experience he drew first a most extraordinary proposition on the Becoming, and this proposition necessarily resulted in that doctrine of the chaos, as its consequence.
The observation of the processes of evolution in nature, not a consideration of an earlier philosophical system, suggested to Anaxagoras the doctrine, that _All originated from All;_ this was the conviction of the natural philosopher based upon a manifold, and at the bottom, of course, excessively inadequate induction. He proved it thus: if even the contrary could originate out of the contrary, _e.g.,_ the Black out of the White, everything is possible; that however did happen with the dissolution of white snow into black water. The nourishment of the body he explained to himself in this way: that in the articles of food there must be invisibly small constituents of flesh or blood or bone which during alimentation became disengaged and united with the homogeneous in the body. But if All can become out of All, the Firm out of the Liquid, the Hard out of the Soft, the Black out of the White, the Fleshy out of Bread, then also All must be contained in All. The names of things in that case express only the preponderance of the one substance over the other substances to be met with in smaller, often imperceptible quantities. In gold, that is to say, in that which one designates _a potiore_ by the name "gold," there must be also contained silver, snow, bread, and flesh, but in very small quantities; the whole is called after the preponderating item, the gold-substance.