SOURCE: B. A. G. Fuller, "Heracleitus," in History of Greek Philosophy: Thales to Democritus, Henry Holt and Company, 1923, pp. 118-42.

[In the following excerpt, Fuller provides an overview of Heraclitus 's philosophical theories, focusing in particular on the doctrines of flux and wisdom.]

Just a hundred years separate Heracleitus from Thales. Born at Ephesus some time in the latter half of the Sixth Century, he was in his prime about 500 B.C., and it is probable that he lived to see the battle of Marathon, and perhaps that of Salamis. Of his work we possess only fragments, and these are written in a style which already in antiquity had gained him the title of "the obscure." By birth an aristocrat of the aristocrats—the religious title and office of "king" seems to have been hereditary in his family—he was himself, a later biographer¹ tells us, an arrogant and haughty man. For the "people" and democratic government he had a keen disdain, founded not wholly upon the prejudice of his class, but in part at any rate upon a very just appreciation of their faults. Certainly he had estimated quite correctly what has proved to be a constant and apparently incorrigible petulance in the temper of democracy at all times and places, when, apropos of the exile of his friend Hermodorus, he put into the mouths of his fellow-Ephesians the cry, "We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others."² We may wonder what he would have said had he known that in later times this sentiment would come to be regarded by some as the last word in the art of government, and that the voice which uttered it would be called the voice of God.

For such middle-class nonconformity, half ritualistic, half evangelical, as Orphism he had also scant respect. The Orphies, he tells us, are to be classed along with "night-walkers" and "mystery-mongers." "The mysteries practised among men are unholy mysteries."³ The phallic rites with which Dionysus was worshiped are shameless, praying to images as senseless as invoking the walls of a house, and purification by the cleansing blood of a sacred animal as foolish as trying to wash off mud with mud. The "orthodox" Homeric theology, however, fared no better at his hands than at those of Xenophanes. Homer he tells us "should be turned out of the lists and whipped,"⁴ and for Hesiod he had as little use. "The wisest man" he felt was "an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man."⁵ God is all things, as Xenophanes had declared. He is "day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savor of each."⁶

Still, for reasons which we shall point out later, Heracleitus considered Xenophanes superficial and second-rate. Nor had he any higher opinion of Pythagoras. Both of them he dismissed with the remark that a varied learning does not inculcate understanding, else it would have taught them something.⁷ Indeed he seems to have felt that all of his predecessors had been quite in the dark, and that it had been reserved for him to discover and enunciate the first philosophic system of any account. This conceit was in part justified, for his interpretation of the world is regarded by many as by far the most brilliant and profound philosophy of the two centuries which intervene between Thales and the teachings of Democritus and Plato.

In their table of the ten fundamental oppositions the Pythagoreans had already included the antithesis of Rest and Motion. In their preoccupation, however, with the relations of the Limited and Unlimited, which their interest in music and mathematics disposed them to regard as the central philosophic problem, they had passed over the other antitheses as of secondary importance.

But the interweaving of change and changelessness throughout the pattern and fabric of the world, though it might for the moment escape the attention of the philosopher, had already arrested the vision and moved the imagination of the prophet and the poet. Man had measured the transitoriness of his own existence against the fixity of nature and the deathlessness of the blessed Gods, and Homer and Hesiod and the Gnomic poets had divined the tragedy of a creature whose mind could move for a brief space, free and godlike, amid things eternal, whilst its body must stumble a little while and fall at last amid the wreckage of Time.

The conflicting magic, too, of rest and restlessness is as old as the human soul, whose varying moods of zest and weariness, its "bugles of dawn" and "flutes of dawn" and "flutes of rest" alternately enchant. Desire wavers like Odysseus between the longing for final homecoming and the thirst for fresh adventure. The Gods of the one mood are throned in unshaken serenity high above all the noise and the running to and fro, rescued from Time and Change. Their seats are upon the "pillours of Eternity," afar off in some bright stormless space unreached by wind and frost and rain, bathed in steady and unclouded light. The Gods of the other are no calm Olympians. Their dwelling is the storm cloud, the surge, the hurricane, the misty land seen through the driving rain, the beckoning finger of smoke spied over the treetops of the unknown forests, the cave of Polyphemus, the Sirens' Isle. For they are, Dionysus-like, just the wine, the intoxication, the exhilaration, the inexhaustible novelty of the ever-unfolding adventure.

With the contrast, then, of change and changelessness ever before his eyes, and his desire continually torn by their appeal to the intermingling moods of a spirit half eager and half weary, it was inevitable that as soon as man began to guess behind the face of things a heart, he should ask himself whether permanence or change was the truer index to its nature. Is the essence of all things restlessness or rest? Is Reality changing or changeless? Is it, to use the language of modern science, dynamic or static, energy or matter? Is it, as the modern philosopher might say, an Activity and Process, or is it a Substance? Is it, to employ the terms which the Greek used, Becoming or Being? …

It is perhaps from the quarter of the Milesian School that we may best directly approach the Heracleitan theory that Reality is essentially Change rather than a Substance unaltered by its apparent changes. The Milesians had unwittingly raised a question as important as it was difficult. In reducing the variety of the world to a single principle they had assumed both that a simple substance like Water or Air can become different things, and that it can somehow at the same time remain itself and still continue to be Water or Air underneath all its apparent transformations. To speak more technically, they had on their hands—without handling it—the problem of the relation of the One to the Many, and of the persistence of Identity through Change.

Now, a little reflection upon this problem might easily breed a certain skepticism of mind. Is it thinkable, we might ask, that any given substance should of its own initiative, and without the admixture of any outside force or element, turn into something else? Is it any more reasonable to suppose that Water really can surreptitiously turn itself into a suit of clothes, for instance, than that a red bandana handkerchief can actually within the privacy of a conjurer's tophat become a white rabbit or a glass of beer? This, however, represents only half the strain to which our credulity is put. For we are also asked to believe that the World-Substance remains the same during and in spite of its transformations. The suit of clothes is really Water all the time that Water is supposed to have become a suit of clothes. The red bandana handkerchief is both itself and also a white rabbit and a glass of beer all at once. The One is both One and Many, Reality is simultaneously both the single homogeneous thing it really is and the many different things it really is not.

The Milesian theory, then, that all things are made of one and the same single World-Substance might on investigation look suspiciously like a mere juggler's trick, and the marvelousness of its feat was bound to inspire criticism and distrust. We would seem, indeed, to be confronted with a dilemma. If the Universe is really always the same single substance, then it is not really many different things and does not really change. In other words, the many, variety, alteration, motion are merely matters of false opinion. On the other hand, if change and variety are real there can be no unchanging self-identical Unity at the heart of things.

As we shall see later, the Eleatic School apparently accepted this dilemma as absolute, and faced frankly the consequences of clinging to the theory that the World is a single self-identical Substance. Whether Heracleitus really faced the difficulty at all, and deliberately sought to escape it, we cannot say. Certainly he was not caught on either of its horns. Both his own words and the testimony of later philosophers show how his imagination was obsessed by the changing, impermanent, diversified, kaleidoscopic character of the spectacle of existence. Becoming, multiplicity, the ceaseless transformation and interchange of the Many, are no superficial misinterpretation of the nature of the Universe but are rather its very self and essence. But at the same time, Heracleitus was just as convinced as the Milesians or the Eleatic Parmenides that the Universe is one. He would not entertain the Pythagorean supposition that two equally fundamental and absolutely opposed Principles were needed to explain things. He felt like Anaximander that even the deepest and most irreconcilable opposition was grounded in an underlying unity. His problem, then, might well have been to find some sort of Oneness which, unlike the unity of the fixed elemental substances or unities proposed by the Milesians and Xenophanes, should preserve and explain, instead of destroying, the reality of Change and Multiplicity.

The solution occurred to him perhaps even before the problem was articulate in his mind. And it was very likely this sudden insight which in his opinion distinguished him from his predecessors as the first philosopher of any consequence. It seems to have flashed across him that this new kind of Oneness which he sought lay plain and bright before the eyes of every man who had the mind to understand the witness of his senses. To see it from without a man had only to look at the fire on his hearth. To feel it from within he had only to give heed to his own consciousness of living and experiencing. Life and experience are forever going on, different at each new instant, crowded with variety and novelty. Yet they are somehow one and the same life and experience and career through all their changes and episodes. So, too, fire in its flaring, quivering restlessness is never the same from moment to moment. It is all bright movement and agitation, the antithesis of an ever self-identical stuff like Water or Air. Yet it, too, is unbroken and continuous, one and the same fire through all its ceaseless alteration. Here, so plain that not only he who runs may read, but curiously enough that he who runs fastest may read best, is this new sort of Oneness and Identity which permits of Multiplicity and Change. Only think of the Nature of Things as something which goes on like Life or Fire, and not as a mere state of being always the same thing like Water or Air, and we have reconciled the real change and variety of the world with its no less real unity.

We shall not be surprised, then, to learn that Heracleitus felt that in Fire he was beholding face to face the stuff of which all things are made. At its touch he could see all things yielding up their individual natures and disappearing merged and indistinguishable in the moving brightness of its burning. To life and thought it exhibited an extraordinary affinity. Our bodies glow. All higher forms of life are warm to the touch. And even to-day, for all our modern chemistry and physics, we still find Fire the most animate of inanimate beings, likening, as figure after figure of speech shows, our inner experience to its brightness and heat and fitful moodiness, and making of it a companion and fellow-being in whose presence we never feel quite friendless and alone. "This world," says Heracleitus, "which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out."⁸ "All things are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold and gold for wares.'⁹

So swift, fluid, and unarrestable is this process of cease less transformation and exchange of which Reality consists, that the senses are unable to keep pace with it. They are always lagging behind, perceiving and recording the events of any given instant only after they are gone. They really only photograph, as it were, the trajectory of a flying projectile, and so-called specific things or moments are in reality merely sections of flight. In the words of Heracleitus' own simile, "You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."¹⁰

But the idea of Reality as Flux and Fire did more than overcome the difficulties, inherent in the Milesian systems, of deriving the Many from the One, and Change from a single simple Substance. It also enabled Heracleitus to see through the conflict of opposites which the Pythagoreans had regarded as fundamental, and to supplement the vague statements of Anaximander that opposites can arise within a single Principle, with the startling assertion that they are really identical. Flowing and burning mean a multiplicity of aspects and episodes succeeding, superseding, melting out of and into one another. Without another and different moment into which to go on, and another and different aspect to assume, there could be no such thing as Change and Flux. For it is by the contrast and opposition of the new to the old that we mark and measure change. Thus we only note and measure the waning of winter by the waxing of summer, the disappearance of hunger by the increasing feeling of satiety, the coming of day by the going of night. It is the very essence then of Process that all things should be constantly melting into their opposites, of Becoming that all things should be constantly becoming the negations of their former selves.

But at what precise instant in this inconceivably smooth, oily, and unbroken Flux of things are we to say that the old has become the new, that one moment of time has become another, that day has at last faded into night, or that spring has really come? Such an instant cannot be discovered or even conceived. For divide and subdivide Time and Change as you will, it is impossible to discover a moment which contains simply the old, or simply the new. On the contrary, there is no moment so minute as not to contain both the old and the new caught in the act of the one becoming the other.

Indeed, could we find an instant which was not a tran sition—an instant, for example, in which we could say that winter or night had come to a definite end but that spring or dawn had not yet begun—we should have arrested Time and destroyed Change. We should be dealing not with a transition and transformation of the old into the new, but with a mere substitution of the new for the old. The old would have been cut off short and an absolutely fresh beginning made in its place. In that case the Universe, if such it could be called, would be a collection of full stops and fresh starts, of moments and things annihilated with a bump and new moments and things suddenly jerked with a jolt into being from nowhere, like an American railway train entering and leaving way stations. And the inhabitant of such a world would be like a traveler forced to change cars at the junction of each instant with the next.

Change and Becoming cannot, then, consist in a succession of different occurrences rapidly substituted for one another. The new occurrence must be developed, budded off, prolonged from the old. In a word, it must be one with the old. Change means Identity in Difference. This doctrine that opposites are identical is at first sight startling, and Aristotle later accused it of transgressing the law of self-contradiction. But after all, to take even the pairs of opposites upon which the Pythagoreans laid so much stress, what is day but a process of waning, and waxing night, night save a process of waning and waxing day? What is hunger but satiety in process of passing away, satiety but hunger disappearing? How should we ever know justice if it were not for injustice?¹¹ And according to even the very Orphies of whom the Pythagoreans were the disciples, what were the winter of nature and the death of man but life transformed and sleeping? What were summer-time and life but death and winter reawakened and risen from their sleep? "It is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former."¹² "Hades is the same as Dionysus."¹³ "Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, one living the others' death and dying the others' life."¹⁴ God really is both "day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger."¹⁵ He really can "take various shapes,"¹⁶ for he is a "Going on" and a Becoming, not a permanent state of Being.

The fragments which we have been considering also suggest another remarkable characteristic of the Flux of the ever-living Fire. Change may bring novelty, but it also brings repetition. The number of pieces, colors, shapes, and combinations in its kaleidoscope is limited. The transformation of opposites works either way. Day becomes night and night becomes day again, summer winter and winter summer, life death and death life. Underlying the reciprocal conversions of these lesser cycles there is the great wheel of the elemental transformation of Fire down through fiery storm-cloud to water and thence to earth, and back through water to itself again.

At this point, perhaps, an objection might be made. Have we not fallen into a difficulty similar to that which beset the Milesian School? If Reality is Becom ing, and there is really nothing but a Flux and melting of things into their opposites so swift that the mind can photograph in any given instant only a mere blurred trajectory, how do we come by the experience of permanent objects at all? Stability, permanence, rest are just as apparent in the world as flux and change and motion. But how account for them, if the latter alone are real?

Heracleitus has his answer ready. In the first place there is the fact that of the ever-living Fire fixed measures are ever kindling and fixed measures going out,¹⁷ and that Change is a reciprocal exchange of Fire for all things, and all things for Fire. The "measures" sufficiently counterbalance each other and the exchange is sufficiently fair to assure no robbery of the other elements, but rather the presence of an approximately constant quantity of water and earth and the other variations of Fire.¹⁸

But his explanation does not stop here. Take the great fundamental cycle of the transformation of Fire through water to earth and back to Fire again. This cycle, since it is a process of circulation, has a downward and an upward sweep which Heracleitus calls the Upward and the Downward Ways. In water, for example, there is at once a "downward" tendency to change into earth, and an "upward" tendency to change into fire. And fire and earth, which are at the top and bottom of the process of circulation, are moments and states of hesitation, pulled both backwards and forewards, as it were, when the upward swing of the cycle from water is on the point of bending over and becoming the downward swing towards water again, or when the downward plunge from water is turning into the upward return arc towards water. It follows that since the two ways are simply the prolongation of each other, they are one and the same, and afford a fundamental example of the identity of opposites.¹⁹ But it also follows—and this more immediately concerns us—that each one of the three elements is pulled at one and the same time in opposite directions. It is a component of two conflicting forces, a friction of two antagonistic movements dragging against and retarding each other.

It is this pull of the Upward and Downward Way against each other which keeps fire, water, and earth all in existence, with their specific characters, at the same time. Abolish the Downward Way, for instance, and all water released from the downward drag in its nature would evaporate and shimmer away into fire. Abolish the Upward Way, and all fire would precipitate itself into water, and water turn to solid earth. But each drop of water because it is an equilibrium due to a tension of forces pulling in opposite directions, is held rigid and remains itself. When the sun is "drawing water" or water rises in mist, the "Upward Way" has for a time partially mastered the Downward; when it rains or freezes the Downward tendency has for the moment overcome the Upward. "Men do not know," says Heracleitus, "how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre."²⁰

Obviously permanence and stability of this sort are not mere illusions due to the deception of our senses. The Flux will really bear our weight here and there, and has characteristics which are frozen and firm and definable. But this fixed and structural character of the world is, as we see, not due to any restful and sedentary habit on its part. The immobility of any thing and all things is rather the immobility of a pair of wrestlers putting forth all their strength against each other and held rigid in a deadlock in which neither is able to down the other. The cycles in nature and history are but the slow swaying and bending back and forth of these antagonists in their struggle. And the adversaries, like the Siamese twins, are one at heart. A common Life and Fire circulating from one tv, the other animates their struggle with each other. Could either slay or even really down the other, he would also have downed or slain himself. "War" in very truth "is the father of all and the king of all."²¹ "Homer was wrong in saying: 'Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away."²²

Later commentators, to be sure, particularly those of the Stoic School, found in Heracleitus the belief that from time to time one of the wrestlers does fall and the whole universe "goes up like smoke," consumed by the ever-living Fire. Then again Fire makes all things new, and there is a new heaven and a new earth and a new sea. In the fullness of time these, too, go the way of their predecessors. And to this last and most tremendous cycle of world succeeding world there is no end. This interpretation, however, has been challenged on the ground that it is incompatible with the doctrine of the strife of opposites and the counterbalancing of the Upward by the Downward Way.²³ From this other point of view Heracleitus teaches indeed a periodic oscillation in the proportional strength of the wrestlers and in the amount of the basic elements into which Fire transforms itself. But at no time does one of the Ways completely nullify the other or one of the wrestling opposites wholly down its opponent.

Heracleitus is also quick to recognize in the Universe another kind of permanence, invisible to the eye but readily apprehended by the mind, which does not depend for a ticklish existence upon the unstable equilibrium of conflicting activities and cross currents of change. If, for instance, the Heracleitan philosophy be true, it is a fact that all things are in perpetual and uninterrupted flux. But this fact does not itself change, any more than the fact, say, that there is a constant movement of traffic on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly moves along with the traffic on top of a 'bus. For if the fact that all things are constantly "on the go" were itself to go, then some things at least would stop, and the Heracleitan theory would no longer be a true description of the nature of Reality. The real constitution of the Universe might now be such that at times all things move on, and at times stand still, just as the traffic on Fifth Avenue is as a matter of fact periodically checked and allowed to proceed by the policemen at the cross-streets. But again, if this be the real way in which things behave, this manner of behavior does not itself now stand and now change, any more than the fact that the traffic on Fifth Avenue is halted from time to time by a policeman is itself arrested and interrupted by him.

The same considerations hold good of those things which are stated as true about the nature of Change. If it be the nature of Becoming to involve a differentiation and at the same time an identification of opposites, this fact does not itself become different or turn into its opposite. If it be a rule of the wrestling match that the relative strength of the two opponents shall vary but that neither shall ever wholly fail, this rule is not itself now more, now less, in force. If it be a law of change that the ever-living Fire shall pursue a cycle of transformations in which its Downward Way through water to earth is checked and balanced by its Upward Way from earth through water to fire again, it is as absurd to say that this law circulates or offsets itself as it would be to maintain that the rules which govern the uptown and downtown movement of the traffic on Fifth Avenue are themselves moving in either direction.

In a word, the truth about the Universe, whatever it may be, is changeless, not with the permanence of something lasting or even everlasting in Time, but with the validity of something whose existence is altogether outside of and independent of the Flux of Change and Becoming and Time. The fact that all things change and that their change takes place in certain definite ways and along certain well-drawn lines is an eternal thing.

Now it is the method which the thinker may descry in the apparent madness of Becoming, the orderliness which he may discover in the restless flaming of the ever-living Fire, that Heracleitus calls the "Logos." Literally the term means "word" or "thought," but we might translate it in a way more comprehensible to ourselves and at the same time not untrue to what Heracleitus has in mind, if we call it the "Law" or "Order" or "Constitution" of the world.

The "Logos" has, however, much more behind it than we express by the phrase "natural law" or "natural order." It expresses in the first place not the mere fact of how things do behave. It is prescriptive as well as de scriptive, determining things to behave as they do. "Nature is constrained by the rational order of her law which lives infused in her." This fragment from Leonardo da Vinci might be a fragment from Heracleitus. The Logos enforces itself. It is a "Destiny," allotting to all things their places.²⁴

Again, it includes the idea of a Reason or Wisdom immanent in the world. We must not understand by this, however, that Heracleitus regards the Logos as a personal God or a Divine Mind. He feels simply that in the Flux and the Fire there is something which responds to man's desire to know and justifies his claim to knowledge. Experience is not delirium. The world is a rational world. Its ways can be understood. And this responsive, systematic, and intelligible character of things corresponds to thought and reason in man, and is, as it were, the objective and external counter-part of his wisdom and philosophy.

Furthermore, the Logos carries with it the notion of Justice and Right. In this respect Heracleitus, like Anaximander, is an interesting witness on the philosophical side to that very late distinction by the Greek mind between natural and moral law and order which we discussed in connection with Greek religion. We to-day should not seek to explain the fixed size of the sun on grounds of ethical propriety, nor should we, if some irregularity in its size took place, indignantly feel that the sun had "gone wrong" and violated the moral law, and upbraid the inefficiency of nature for not preventing or at least immediately detecting and setting right the aberration. But this is precisely what Heracleitus does feel. "The sun," he tells us, "will not overstep his measures: if he does the Erinyes, the handn aids of Justice, will find hin out."²⁵ The size of the sun, that is, is the right, the moral size for it to be, if the law of measure for measure is to hold. Any alteration in it would be not merely puzzling to the intellect but shocking to the moral sense. Astronomical conditions and ethical considerations are not as yet disentangled.

The same is true of all natural phenomena. Their behavior is not to be judged or explained differently from that of human beings. The World-Order is cut out of the same cloth as the moral order. The Law apparent in the World Process, a Law of compensating movement holding all things to their natures, their places, and their courses, is the same Law as forbids and checks the excess of insolence or "hybris" among men, and counsels and enforces restraint and temperance as the fundamental virtue. The resultant stable equilibrium which is the marrow of the frame of the world is all of one piece with moral stability. There is justness as well as intelligibility in the systematic character of the transformations of the ever-living and ever-changing Fire. The "Logos" is not only the Law, the Order, the allotting Destiny, it is also the Justice which flames, world without end, at the heart of things.

Indeed, Heracleitus seems to have had a scarcely less vivid conviction of this eternal Justice at work in the World-Process than had the poet Æschylus, in the next generation, of its presence as the controlling force in human history. Both men alike saw it where it was least evident to the common eye, and wrung a reluctant testimony to its presence from the apparently most hostile evidence. As Æsschylus in his tragedies found it attained and exemplified amid all the intricacies of the strife of counterbalancing motives and the balance of conflicting moral obligations, so Heracleitus saw it clearly manifest in the inextinguishable warfare which Fire, in the strife of opposites and the counterpoising of the Upward and Downward Ways, is forever waging with itself. "Strife is justice,"²⁶ he tells us. Nay, the very evil in the world in reality contributes to this "hidden attunement" which is, he tells us, "better than the open."²⁷ Human laws and arrangements are full of ignorance and often wrong, but the divine arrangements of things "are fair and good and right."²⁸

It would be going too far, perhaps, to say that Heracleitus is here deliberately facing and struggling with the so-called "problem of evil," which later was to assume an important place in philosophy. All the difficulties connected with the presence of evil in a world wholly subservient to justice and goodness had not yet become articulate. But undoubtedly he is once more a witness to the Greek lack of distinction between natural and moral phenomena, and thinks that the opposition of good and evil is as easily harmonized as that of day and night in the general identification of opposites.

Finally we may perhaps find in the Logos fresh evidence of the tendency of the Greek mind to think of the constitution of the Universe in political and social terms. In discussing Greek religion we contrasted this analogy, so unfamiliar to us, with our own habit of likening the World-Process to the running of a machine, the functioning of an organism, or even the development of a personal career. By Heracleitus the political analogy is given a philosophic application. The Logos or Wisdom which is common to all things and all minds, and comprehensible by all who do not "sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own,"²⁹ and "live as if they had a wisdom of their own,"³⁰ is like the laws of a city by which all the citizens are bound and to which if they are wise they must hold fast. Nay, more, all man-made laws and constitutions are derived from and part of the divine Law which "prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare."³¹ If a man then wishes to know what the Logos is like, he has only to turn to the constitution and statutes of his own city-state. Philosophy as yet knows no dividing the substance or distinguishing the persons in this trinity of social, moral, and physical law and order.³²

Let us fix firmly in our minds this concept of a Logos—of a Law and Order and Wisdom and Justice—in things, which it is the business and the reward of philosophy to discover amid the kaleidoscopic instability of the Flux by which our senses are bewildered and our thinking confused. It has a great and splendid part to play in the future development of Greek philosophy. We may make, for instance, one of the most interesting among the many approaches to Plato, if we regard his system as essentially an amplification of the Heracleitan philosophy in which the weight of real existence has been shifted from the Flux of phenomena to a more deeply pondered Logos analyzed and enriched by the inclusion within it, not only of cosmic laws such as Heracleitus had discovered, but also of the fixed species and forms of things by which the senses are steadied and the foundations of thinking laid, and of the moral and æsthetic values by which human happiness is given content and definition, and human conduct is regulated. In Stoicism, too, we shall find the Logos in the concept of a rational and providential World-Order assigning to all things and men their places and rôles in the play of events, and in the idea of the universe as a commonwealth of Gods and men constituting the "dear city of Zeus." Finally, it enters Christian theology, and becomes part of the "faith once for all delivered unto the saints" in the opening lines of the Fourth Gospel. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."³³

Some account of Heracleitus' astronomical and meteorological views has come down to us in a passage, generally considered trustworthy, of Diogenes Laertius.

He held, too, that exhalations arose both from the sea and the land; some bright and pure, others dark. Fire was nourished by the bright ones, and moisture by the others.

He does not make it clear what is the nature of that which surrounds the world. He held, however, that there were bowls in it with the concave sides turned towards us, in which the bright exhalations were collected and produced flames. These were the heavenly bodies.

The flame of the sun was the brightest and warmest; for the other heavenly bodies were more distant from the earth; and for that reason gave less light and heat. The moon, on the other hand, was nearer the earth; but it moved through an impure region. The sun moved in a bright and unmixed region and at the same time was at just the right distance from us. That is why it gives more heat and light. The eclipses of the sun and moon were due to the turning of the bowls upwards, while the monthly phases of the moon were produced by a slight turning of its bowl.

Day and night, months and seasons and years, rains and winds, and things like these were due to the different exhalations. The bright exhalation, when ignited in the circle of the sun, produced day, and the preponderance of the opposite exhalations produced night. The increase of warmth proceeding from the bright exhalations produced summer, and the multiplication of moisture from the dark exhalation produced winter. He assigns the causes of other things in conformity with this.

As to the earth he makes no clear statement about its nature, any more than he does about that of the bowls.³⁴

There are also fragments which evince a considerable interest on Heracleitus' part in the problems of human conduct and happiness. It may be, indeed, that could we recover his works in their entirety, we should find among them something like a treatise on ethics. The fragments show an aristocratic disdain of the common people, their standards, and their ways. Moral as well as intellectual enlightenment comes from a perception of the Logos, or order in things, and through conformity with it. The means for such conformity is present in the shape of reason in all men, but the ordinary people make no use of it. "We must follow the common, yet … the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse."³⁵ As a result "they follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher," and "even the best of them choose one thing above all others, immortal glory among mortals, while most of them are glutted like beasts."³⁶

But this "wantonness needs putting out even more than a house on fire. It is not good for men to get all they wish to get. It is sickness that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, plenty; weariness, rest."³⁷ This last truth is just what the truly wise man perceives by virtue of his acquaintance with the law of contradiction inherent in the ever-living and ever-changing Fire. Hence, where the common herd complain, he will cheerfully accept, where they seek to avoid hardship he will welcome it, where they flinch at pain he will bear it, knowing that by so doing he is conforming his nature to the nature of the Universe, and that "the way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has."³⁸

"It is hard," however, "to fight with one's heart's desire."³⁹ For the conflict of desire with reason is part of the cosmic struggle of opposites. Wisdom and reason are dryness and fire in the soul. "The dry soul is the wisest and best."⁴⁰ It deteriorates when it gets wet; witness the man who "when he gets drunk is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he steps, having his soul moist."⁴¹ But it is "pleasure to souls to become moist,"⁴² as almost every one can testify. The seduction, then, of the rational will by pleasure is incidental to the cyclical transformation of the World-Fire, and the difficult questions of conduct and morality are the inevitable problems of a life torn literally between the Upward and the Downward Ways.

Psychology, also, as well as ethics, is beginning in Heracleitus to "bud off" from the parent organism of general, undifferentiated philosophic speculation. We have noted how naturally reflection upon the fact and behavior of the living, moving, streaming consciousness within one's own heart might inspire the idea that perhaps the inner Nature of Things in general was also a living Activity, one and many, different and identical, all at the same time. Mr. Burnet, indeed, considers Heracleitus' emphasis on the Soul as of first importance to an understanding of his system, and carries the interpretation of the phenomena of the outer world in terms of the inner states and experiences of consciousness so far as to say that "Life, Sleep, Death correspond to Fire, Water, Earth, and the latter are to be understood from the former."⁴³ Both he and Mr. Cornford⁴⁴ suggest that this stress upon the animate aspects of the world is due to the influence of the Mysteries, with their insistence upon the Soul as an inexhaustible principle of Life in Man and Nature, of whose activity death is but a momentary phase.⁴⁵ However that may be, there can be no doubt of Heracleitus' persistent use of the term "Soul" and his interest in what we should call "psychological" phenomena. "You will not find the boundaries of the soul by traveling in any direction."⁴⁶ And, as we saw in connection with his ethical views, he regarded wisdom and virtue as a state of dryness and fire in the soul, folly as a state of moisture.

Again, he distinguishes fairly clearly within the soul between the senses and reason. The senses, he implies, present us only with the Flux, with a confused, inevitably rapid kaleidoscope of experience. It is another faculty which discovers the real method of Logos in the apparent madness of the Flux. To put it in modern terms: we perceive with our senses falling apples only, not the law of gravitation. It is reflection and reasoning which give us the mathematical formula that bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of their distances, to which the perceived movements of bodies always conform.

We may, then, discover in Heracleitus a sufficient preoccupation with the fact and phenomena of consciousness to impute to him a rudimentary psychology. But we must accompany even this statement with a reservation. Psychology has been defined as the "description and explanation of states of consciousness as such."⁴⁷ Certainly it denotes a clear demarcation of conscious from other phenomena. But we may very much doubt whether Heracleitus ever cornered "consciousness as such," or distinguished sharply between the conscious and living and the other aspects of the world. It was rather that the other aspects tended in his mind to become blurred and confused in the ceaseless flowing and sparkling of things, which was to be seen at its best in the restless brilliancy of both the flaming Fire and the life and experiences going on within us. He no more than the Milesians really extricated the conscious and living properties from the spatial and solid and substantial qualities of the world-mass in which they lay infused and imbedded, or erected them into a separate principle or even a really distinct aspect of Reality. There is nowhere in the fragments any direct opposition of soul to body or of mind to matter, excellent illustration as he might have made it of his theory of the conflict and identity of opposites. Nor can we claim with any more right that he had distinguished the concepts of matter and motion, energy and substance, from one another.

The truth would seem to be that he had not reached the point of drawing and sorting the separate threads which enter into the intricate spinning of the world. The Universe struck him, as it had struck the Milesians, as all cut of the same cloth, though the cloth to his eye was not solid and substantial but a changeable silk all sheen and shimmer. He simply accented the dynamic—the living and the moving—rather than the spatial and solid properties of Reality, and resolved without having previously clearly differentiated them the solid and rigid into terms of the fluid, as when he found in Rest the tension of conflicting and compensating Motions.

In somewhat the same way, more than two thousand years later, the philosopher Leibnitz was to see in the extended and impenetrable qualities of matter mere secondary phases of energy, and was to find in a carefully reasoned idea of Force a least common denominator for the external world and the inner life, such as Heracleitus had found in Fire. But whereas Heracleitus had started with the whole cloth, caught the general effect, and outlined the pattern, without really unraveling and separating the interwoven principles and concepts, Leibnitz began with the notions of force, life, mind, extension, solidity and the like, all clear and distinct, carefully disentangled and sorted in his mind, and then proceeded to weave them into a system.

There is another point also with reference to which we should be on our guard. A long and imposing development in the history of philosophy has predisposed us to contrast the presentations of the senses with the results of reflection and reasoning in terms of Appearance and Reality. The senses we feel, if they do not deceive us out and out, at least present us with a very distorted and unreal view of the Nature of Things. It is the business of thought and reflection to correct this false view of things, and to tell us what the Universe is really like. Now when Heracleitus distinguishes within the mind between wisdom and sensation, and in the objective world between the Logos and the Flux, it is not unnatural to hail him as the prophet of this dif ferentiation of Appearance from Reality. But the contrast of the Logos to the Flux carries no such implication in his mind. The Flux is no less real than the Logos. It is not an illusion. It is not "false opinion." It is not "mere" appearance. The senses in recording it do not falsify the real Nature of Things, but present it as it is. They see face to face—not as through a glass darkly—the ever-living Fire and the ceaseless transformation which is its essence and the essence of all things. Wisdom, Reason, merely beholds in addition the systematic character of the World-Process.

It is equally dubious to run to the other extreme, and classify Heracleitus as an "empiricist." For by empiricism we habitually understand not simply the teaching that the senses present us with the Nature of Things as it really is, but also the doctrine that no amount of hard thinking can find out anything more about the world than the senses already have revealed, and that the so-called "real worlds" which science and philosophy think they can read between the lines of the world of phenomena are nothing but rather arid though useful synopses of the rich and vivid text of the book of immediate life. Heracleitus may be called an empiricist in one sense of the term, but not in the other. He has confidence in the senses, but he has no distrust of reason. Reason for him was not a mere extension of the process of sensation. It discovered more in Reality than the senses revealed. It spied the Logos, to which the senses were congenitally blind. Nor was this Logos a mere abstraction. It was something as real, as vital, as the process and movement itself.

But though Heracleitus' distinction between the Logos and the Flux probably does not imply any invidious distinction on his part between the senses and reason in point of trustworthiness, or justify us in classifying him as either an empiricist or a rationalist or, for that matter, in even imputing to him the common philosophic differentiation of Appearance from Reality, it perhaps does permit us to see in his doctrine a further development of concept of "Form" and "Matter." These notions, we found, were distinguished by the Pythagoreans in their doctrine of a Principle of Limit demarcating within the Field of the Unlimited the allotments and boundaries of the specific plots which we call individual things. The Form was the actual outline or figure of the object and the measure of the amount of ground or stuff or "matter" enclosed by it. And we saw how susceptible these concepts were of a much wider and more profound application.

In this application the concept of the Logos marks an important step. Form is no longer merely an outline and external figure or an enumeration of the visible measure of a thing, as it was for the Pythagoreans. The doctrine of the Logos adds to it as constituents, the ideas of Law and Order and System, enlarges it so as to cover the whole Universe with one comprehensive Constitution or Law or Form of Existence, and deepens it by asserting that Law and Order are not superficial but rather sink so much more profoundly into the fiery essence of things than the unaided eye can reach as to require the assistance of reason to perceive them. In a word, the idea of the principle of Form is passing in the system of Heracleitus from the realm of the picturesque into that of the abstract and the logical. It is no longer a representation of the shape, it is the definition of the nature, of an object. Beneath the panorama of existence a map has been once and for all discerned.

In the same way, Heracleitus, though he does not follow the Pythagoreans in their metaphysical separation of the principle of Matter from that of Form, nevertheless contributes largely to the growth in later philosophy of the concept of such a separate principle. The Pythagoreans, with their doctrine of the Unlimited, had already suggested indefmiteness and lack of determination as characteristic of "Matter" in contradistinction to "Form." And Heracleitus in contrasting the liquid and impermanent stuff of a world dissolved in Time and Change with the rigidity and unchangeableness of the Law regulating the Flux, added the transitoriness and the restlessness, the ceaseless growth and decay, which in the systems of Plato and Aristotle are such essential marks of Matter as opposed to Form or Idea.

With the death of Heracleitus, the philosophic preëminence of Ionia came to an end. The cities which for a brilliant and fertile century had been the mother and nurse of the speculative genius ceased to bear and foster. The spirit of philosophy passed westwards to Southern Italy and Sicily, to a home already in part prepared for it by the Pythagoreans. Nor was it to return to the coasts and islands of Asia Minor for well-nigh a hundred and fifty years; and then to find a cradle only and not a home. Melissus, to be sure, was a Samian, but he is identified with the Eleatic School. Leucippus, born perhaps at Miletus, is a shadowy figure whose whole substance lies in Democritus. And though Anaxagoras came from Clazomenas, and Epicurus and the founder of the Stoic School, Zeno, were born in Samos and in Cyprus, they lived and taught in Athens, and their fame redounded to the glory of their adopted rather than of their native country. So, too, later leaders of the Stoic School, Asiatic by birth, settled in Athens, or passed on to Rome. We are, then, taking our last look at Ionia.

But before embarking on the next chapter, let us review for a moment such restoration of the system of Heracleitus as we were able to make from the fragments and ruins of his writings.

Reality is something whose essence is Becoming, not mere Being. It is ever-changing Fire, not ever-the-same Water or Air as the Milesians thought.

Change and Activity, however, involve a startling paradox. The changing object is both the same and not the same. It is not the same, since it is forever passing on into a new moment of time, a new state of being, a new self, different from and opposed to the old. It remains the same, nevertheless, for otherwise we should be dealing, not with the successive transformations of a single object, but simply with a succession of different objects created and annihilated one after the other. Change, then, somehow joins together the moments and states and selves which it puts asunder. It is a unity of differences, an identity of opposites, paradoxical though such a statement may seem.

But Change also involves tension and conflict. It holds both together and apart pairs of moments, conditions, selves, which are struggling away from each other to be different, and towards each other in order to be the same. Locked in one another's embrace, these opposites wrestle against each other. And the pitting of effort against effort, motion against motion, gives the world its stability and permanence. Hence, instead of all things being each moment wholly changed and rechanged in the twinkling of an eye, we have the prolongations and slow regularities characteristic of the Flux. There is a Law to which the World-Process conforms. And this Order which change always follows itself never changes. The nature of the World-Fire is a Process of Transformation taking place in a fixed and definite way. This nature is equally present and exemplified in any and every mood and moment of the restless Fire. It is unaltered by Time, the passage of which makes no difference to it. Its permanence, then, is not like the duration of a thing floating on and on, it may be forever, on the surface of the Flux. It is not everlasting in Time. It is lifted clear of Time and Becoming altogether. It is eternal.

This Nature or Law or Order Heracleitus calls the Logos. It is the object and counterpart of reason within us. Since it is a law of balance and compensation, building up harmony and stability out of conflict, it also appeals to our sense of justice. Indeed to understand and accept it, we have only to reflect upon the social and political order which is the expression both of the Logos and of the rational will of man. To resolve the Universe, then, into the fitful flaming of Fire, to analyze all rest into motion and all stability into change, is not to reduce all things to chaos. For the Universe still has an eternal Form and Constitution, which guarantees that everything which happens is in conformity with a law which is comprehensible and just.

Both the concepts of the Logos and the Flux, as we have seen, are great steps forward in the development of the important distinction in Greek Philosophy between the Form of a thing, which defines its Nature, and the Material Principle which stuffs the Form with concrete existence and enacts it temporarily and incompletely in a specific object.

We also detected in the Heracleitan system signs that ethics and psychology were already beginning to differentiate and specify themselves, and to bud off from the parent organism of general speculative interest.

Notes

¹ Diogenes Laertius.

² Fragment 114. (The translations of Heracleitus are all taken from Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd éd., pp. 132-141.)

³ Fr. 125.

⁴ Fr. 119.

⁵ Fr. 98, 99.

⁶ Fr. 36.

⁷ Fr. 16.

⁸ Fr. 20.

⁹ Fr. 22.

¹⁰ Fr. 41.

¹¹ Fr. 60.

¹² Fr. 78.

¹³ Fr. 127.

¹⁴ Fr. 67.

¹⁵ Fr. 36.

¹⁶ Fr. 36.

¹⁷ Fr. 20.

¹⁸Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd éd., pp. 150-151; also Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato, pp. 61-62.

¹⁹ Fr. 69, 70,

²⁰ Fr. 45.

²¹ Fr. 44.

²² Fr. 43.

²³ Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thaïes to Plato, pp. 178 et seq.

²⁴ Fr. 137 (Diels, Fragmenta der Vorsokratiker), Cf. Frs. 19, 28 (Burnet), Döring, Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie, p. 95.

²⁵ Fr. 29.

²⁶ Fr. 62.

²⁷ Fr. 47.

²⁸ Fr. 61.

²⁹ Fr. 95.

³⁰ Fr. 92.

³¹ Fr. 91b.

³²Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd éd., pp. 131-132, 3rd éd., p. 168, and Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 191-192.

³³ But cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd éd., p. 133, note 1, for the view that Heracleitus meant by the Logos merely his own teaching, and that the Christian Logos is of Hebrew, not Greek origin.

³⁴ Diogenes Laertius (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd éd., pp. 147-148).

³⁵ Fr. 92, 93.

³⁶ Fr. 111.

³⁷ Fr. 103, 104.

³⁸ Fr. 96.

³⁹ Fr. 105-107.

⁴⁰ Fr. 74-76.

⁴¹ Fr. 73.

⁴² Fr. 72.

⁴³ Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thaïes to Plato, p. 60.

⁴⁴From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 187 et seq.

⁴⁵ It has even been argued that the whole system of Heracleitus is merely the Orphic theology, and particularly the doctrine of rebirth, cast into philosophic form. Cf. Macchioro, Zagreus, pp. 247 et seq., and his Eraclito Efesio.

⁴⁶ Fr. 71.

⁴⁷ Ladd, quoted by James, "Psychology" (Briefer Course), p. 1.