elements together in whole bodies. Anaxagoras also imagined “order” as a
kind of force, creating animals and humans, flowers and trees. He called this
force mind or intelligence (nous).
Anaxagoras is also interesting because he was the first philosopher we
hear of in Athens. He was from Asia Minor but he moved to Athens at the age
of forty. He was later accused of atheism and was ultimately forced to leave
the city. Among other things, he said that the sun was not a god but a red-hot
stone, bigger than the entire Peloponnesian peninsula.
Anaxagoras was generally very interested in astronomy. He believed
that all heavenly bodies were made of the same substance as Earth. He
reached this conclusion after studying a meteorite. This gave him the idea that
there could be human life on other planets. He also pointed out that the Moon
has no light of its own—its light comes from Earth, he said. He thought up an
explanation for solar eclipses as well.
P.S. Thank you for your attention, Sophie. It is not unlikely that you will
need to read this chapter two or three times before you understand it all. But
understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn’t admire a
friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
The best solution to the question of basic substance and the
transformations in nature must wait until tomorrow, when you will meet
Democritus. I’ll say no more!
Sophie sat in the den looking out into the garden through a little hole in the
dense thicket. She had to try and sort out her thoughts after all she had read.
It was as clear as daylight that plain water could never turn into anything other
than ice or steam. Water couldn’t even turn into a watermelon, because even wa-
termelons consisted of more than just water. But she was only sure of that because
that’s what she had learned. Would she be absolutely certain, for example, that ice
was only water if that wasn’t what she had learned? At least, she would have to have
studied very closely how water froze to ice and melted again.
Sophie tried once again to use her own common sense, and not to think about
what she had learned from others.
Parmenides had refused to accept the idea of change in any form. And the more
she thought about it, the more she was convinced that, in a way, he had been right.
His intelligence could not accept that “something” could suddenly transform itself
into “something completely different.” It must have taken quite a bit of courage to
come right out and say it, because it meant denying all the natural changes that people
could see for themselves. Lots of people must have laughed at him.
And Empedocles must have been pretty smart too, when he proved that the
world had to consist of more than one single substance. That made all the transfor-
mations of nature possible without anything actually changing.
The old Greek philosopher had found that out just by reasoning. Of course he
had studied nature, but he didn’t have the equipment to do chemical analysis the way
scientists do nowadays.
Sophie was not sure whether she really believed that the source of everything
actually was earth, air, fire, and water. But after all, what did that matter? In principle,
Empedocles was right. The only way we can accept the transformations we can see
with our own eyes—without losing our reason—is to admit the existence of more than
one single basic substance.
Sophie found philosophy doubly exciting because she was able to follow all the