Both Empedokles and Anaxagoras begin their constructive process from a state of stagnation and confusion both tantamount to Chaos; which is not so much active discord (as Ovid paints it), as rest and nullity arising from the equilibrium of opposite forces. The chaos is in fact almost a reproduction of the Infinite of Anaximander.[157] But Anaxagoras as well as Empedokles enlarged his hypothesis by introducing (what had not occurred or did not seem necessary to Anaximander) a special and separate agency for eliciting positive movement and development out of the negative and stationary Chaos. The Nous or Mind is the Agency selected for this purpose by Anaxagoras: Love and Enmity by Empedokles. Both the one and the other initiate the rotatory cosmical motion; upon which follows as well the partial disgregation of the chaotic mass, as the congregation of like particles of it towards each other. [Footnote 157: This is a just comparison of Theophrastus. See the passage from his [Greek: phusikê\ i(stori/a], referred to by Simplikius ad Aristot. Physic. i. p. 187, a. 21 (p. 335, Schol. Brand.).] [Side-note: Nous, or mind, postulated by Anaxagoras--how understood by later writers--how intended by Anaxagoras himself.] The Nous of Anaxagoras was understood by later writers as a God;[158] but there is nothing in the fragments now remaining to justify the belief that the author himself conceived it in that manner--or that he proposed it (according to Aristotle's expression[159]) as the cause of all that was good in the world, assigning other agencies as the causes of all evil. It is not characterised by him as a person--not so much as the Love and Enmity of Empedokles. It is not one but multitudinous, and all its separate manifestations are alike, differing only as greater or less. It is in fact identical with the soul, the vital principle, or vitality, belonging not only to all men and to all plants also.[160] It is one substance, or form of matter among the rest, but thinner than all of them (thinner than even fire or air), and distinguished by the peculiar characteristic of being absolutely unmixed. It has moving power and knowledge, like the air of Diogenes the Apolloniate: it initiates movement; and it knows about all the things which either pass into or pass out of combination. It disposes or puts in order all things that were, are, or will be; but it effects this only by acting as a fermenting principle, to break up the huddled mass, and to initiate rotatory motion, at first only on a small scale, then gradually increasing. Rotation having once begun, and the mass having been as it were unpacked and liberated the component Homoeomeries are represented as coming together by their own inherent attraction.[161] The Anaxagorean Nous introduces order and symmetry into Nature, simply by stirring up rotatory motion in the inert mass, so as to release the Homoeomeries from prison. It originates and