  Anaxagoras links mind and soul in B12: “nous has control over all things that have soul, both the larger and the smaller.” This suggests not only that Anaxagoras took the actions of humans and animals as the model for how nous controls the cosmos, but also suggests how nous differs from the other ingredients. He claims that it is the purest and finest of all things. Some scholars argue that it is only in Plato that we meet a genuine notion of the immaterial (Renehan 1980, Sedley 2007), but Anaxagoras’ denial that nous is mixed with or partakes of other ingredients (while still being in some of them) and his insistence on its fineness and purity may suggest that he is thinking of mind as a non-corporeal entity that can pervade and control a body or even the whole cosmos without being a material part of it (Curd 2009). On either interpretation, if nous were simply an ordinary ingredient on a par with the other basic ingredients, then, as Anaxagoras notes in B12, its relative smallness would allow it to be swamped and overcome (“thwarted”) by the other ingredients.