The term 'mixture' appears in the depth-psychology corpus as a genuinely philosophical problem rather than a merely physical description—one that traverses cosmology, psychology, and ontology from antiquity through modernity. Its most sustained treatment derives from Platonic and Stoic sources, where mixture designates the compositional logic of reality itself: the Timaeus constructs the World-Soul through the forced blending of Sameness and Difference, while Stoic physics articulates 'through-and-through blending' (krasis di' holōn) as a mechanism by which substances interpenetrate without losing their individual characters. Plotinus inherits both traditions but subjects them to rigorous interrogation, asking whether mixture is a matter of contact, quality-fusion, or genuine volumetric interpenetration. Aristotle provides a cautionary counterpoint, insisting that the soul cannot be identified with harmonic mixture—either as the ratio of material ingredients or as the composition of parts. In depth-psychological reception, mixture becomes a figure for the coincidentia oppositorum: Jung's account of the World-Soul in the Timaeus, and the alchemical coniunctio in which opposed substances are compounded into something new, both invoke 'mixture' as the generative matrix of psychic transformation. The related Sceptical tradition, as represented by Long and Sedley, uses the variability of humoral mixture to undercut any claim that a single natural state yields unambiguous impressions—a methodological deployment of mixture as epistemological solvent.
In the library
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he made a mixture of the indivisible and the divisible, thus producing a third form of existence … forcing the nature of the Different, though it resisted the mixture, into Jungian with the Same. Thus, with the admixture of being, the three became one.
Jung explicates the Platonic Timaeus to show that the World-Soul is constituted through the forced mixture of metaphysical opposites, establishing mixture as the foundational act of cosmogonic and, by extension, psychological creation.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
certain bodies, when assisted by one another, are so mutually unified through and through that while being preserved together with their own qualities they are mutually coextended as wholes through and through.
The Stoic doctrine of total blending holds that substances can interpenetrate completely while each retains its distinctive qualities, establishing the concept of krasis as the model for soul-body union and organic unity.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
how can we possibly think that in a mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is contact and that only the qualities are fused? The pulp is not merely in touch with water outside it or even in its pores; it is wet through and through so that every particle of its matter is drenched in that quality.
Plotinus argues that genuine mixture cannot be reduced to surface contact or quality-transmission alone; it must involve the total interpenetration of matter, pressing beyond both Atomist and Peripatetic accounts.
since the healthy also have mixtures of humours, it is possible that external objects are in their nature such as they appear to people in the so-called 'unnatural' state, and that these mixtures make
The Pyrrhonist fourth mode deploys the variability of bodily humoral mixture to show that no perceptual state can claim normative privilege, turning mixture into an epistemological argument for suspension of judgment.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
there are two things that we refer to when we use the term harmony. The main use is to denote the composition of quantities … and the secondary use is to denote the ratio of ingredients in a mixture. In neither sense is it reasonable to call the soul a harmony.
Aristotle distinguishes two senses of mixture-as-harmony and systematically rejects both as adequate definitions of soul, marking a critical limit on the use of mixture as a psychophysical explanatory concept.
the necessary pleasures should certainly be allowed to mingle … for any single class to be left by itself pure and isolated is not good, nor altogether
In the Philebus, Plato argues that the good life itself requires the mixture of pleasure and wisdom, treating isolation of any single genus as deficiency and mixture as the condition of value.
fill up both the double and the triple intervals, cutting off yet more parts from the original mixture and placing them between the terms, so that within each interval there were two means.
The mathematical construction of the World-Soul in the Timaeus proceeds by inserting harmonic and arithmetic means into an original numerical mixture, showing mixture as the generative principle of cosmic proportion.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
The Stoic conception of 'through-and-through blending' sets no limit to the relative quantities of its constituents; so we may reasonably conjecture that the proportions of air to fire in 'breath' vary in relation to the different qualifications they generate in matter.
Stoic pneumatic theory specifies that the variable proportions within the air-fire mixture of breath account for the entire range of qualitative differentiation in material bodies.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
hot with cold, dry with moist, soft with hard and in other mixtures that result, by chance, of necessity, from the combination of opposites, generate a world, by nature and chance.
Plato summarizes the materialist cosmogony according to which elemental mixtures arising from the collision of opposites produce the ordered world through natural necessity rather than divine reason.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
the 'right' mixture of the four elements produces health, whereas an excess of one over the others brings about sickness. His emphasis on the harmonious tension of opposites, however, is ultimately based on Heraclitus.
Snell shows how Empedoclean element-mixture, channelled through Heraclitean tension, defined health as correct proportionality—an ethical-medical deployment of mixture central to Greek normative thought.
Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Melikratos means not only a mixture of honey and milk, but also, as Hippokrates and Aristotle bear witness, the beverage later known as hydromeli.
Kerényi documents the sacred ritual mixture of honey and milk as melikratos, situating archaic Greek mixture-practice within the religious calendar and the cult of the dead.
Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
these three Forms are wholly distinct. They are, indeed, 'all-pervading' in that every one of them 'combines' with every other and with every Form there is.
Cornford's commentary on the Timaeus clarifies that Existence, Sameness, and Difference are the all-pervading Forms whose mutual combination constitutes the structural logic behind the World-Soul mixture.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
for the soul to supervene would be for a one-way relationship to hold … it follows, a blend. Alexander insists, rightly, that his view is in an important respect very different from the idea that the soul is a blend.
Sorabji distinguishes Alexander of Aphrodisias's supervenience theory from the claim that the soul simply is a material blend, showing the philosophical stakes in differentiating supervening emergence from mixture-identity.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
all smells are of a half-formed nature, and no element is so proportioned as to have any smell … smells always proceed from bodies that are damp, or putrefying, or liquefying, or evaporating, and are perceptible only in the intermediate state, when water is changing into air and air into water.
Plato situates olfactory sensation in the transitional, half-mixed state between water and air, making the phenomenology of smell dependent on incomplete elemental mixture.
in the embryo, the bones, tendons, nails, contents of the head, and whites of the eyes come from the father, 'who sows the white'; skin and colored parts are derived from the mother, 'who sows the red.'
Hillman traces the gendered symbolic chemistry of seed-mixture in Jewish and Aristotelian embryology, showing how the red-white opposition organizes theories of generative blending.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside