CHAPTER V

HERACLEITUS

Heracleitus was born about 535 B.C., and is believed to have lived to the age of sixty. This places his death at 475 B.C. He was thus subsequent to Xenophanes, contemporary with Parmenides, and older than Zeno. In historical order of time, therefore, he runs parallel to the Eleatics. Heracleitus was a man of Ephesus in Asia Minor. He was an aristocrat, descendant of a noble Ephesian family, and occupied in Ephesus the nominal position of basileus, or King. This, however, merely meant that he was the Chief Priest of the local branch of the Eleusinian mysteries, and this position he resigned in favour of his brother. He appears to have been a man of a somewhat aloof, solitary, and scornful nature. He looked down, not only upon the common herd, but even upon the great men of his own race. He mentions Xenophanes and Pythagoras in terms of obloquy. Homer, he thinks, should be taken out and whipped. Hesiod he considers to be the teacher of the common herd, one with them, "a man," he says, "who does not even know day and night." Upon the common herd of mortals he looks down with infinite scorn. Some of his sayings remind us not a little of Schopenhauer in their pungency and sharpness. "Asses prefer straw to {73} gold." "Dogs bark at everyone they do not know." Many of his sayings, however, are memorable and trenchant epitomes of practical wisdom. "Man's character is his fate." "Physicians who cut, burn, stab and rack the sick, demand a fee for doing it, which they do not deserve to get." From his aloof and aristocratic standpoint he launched forth denunciations against the democracy of Ephesus.

Heracleitus embodied his philosophical thoughts in a prose treatise, which was well-known at the time of Socrates, but of which only fragments have come down to us. His style soon became proverbial for its difficulty and obscurity, and he gained the nickname of Heracleitus the "Dark," or the "Obscure." Socrates said of his work that what he understood of it was excellent, what not, he believed was equally so, but that the book required a tough swimmer. He has even been accused of intentional obscurity. But there does not seem to be any foundation for this charge. The fact is that if he takes no great trouble to explain his thoughts, neither does he take any trouble to conceal them. He does not write for fools. His attitude appears to be that if his readers understand him, well; if not, so much the worse for his readers. He wastes no time in elaborating and explaining his thought, but embodies it in short, terse, pithy, and pregnant sayings.

His philosophical principle is the direct antithesis of Eleaticism. The Eleatics had taught that only Being is, and Becoming is not at all. All change, all Becoming is mere illusion. For Heracleitus, on the contrary, only Becoming is, and Being, permanence, identity, these are nothing but illusion. All things sublunary are {74} perpetually changing, passing over into new forms and new shapes. Nothing stands, nothing holds fast, nothing remains what it is. "Into the same river," he says, "we go down, and we do not go down; for into the same river no man can enter twice; ever it flows in and flows out." Not only does he deny all absolute permanence, but even a relative permanence of things is declared to be illusory. We all know that everything has its term, that all things arise and pass away, from the insects who live an hour to the "eternal" hills. Yet we commonly attribute to these things at least a relative permanence, a shorter or longer continuance in the same state. But even this Heracleitus will not allow. Nothing is ever the same, nothing remains identical from one consecutive moment to another. The appearance of relative permanence is an illusion, like that which makes us think that a wave passing over the surface of the water remains all the time the same identical wave. Here, as we know, the water of which the wave is composed changes from moment to moment, only the form remaining the same. Precisely so, for Heracleitus, the permanent appearance of things results from the inflow and outflow in them of equivalent quantities of substance. "All is flux." It is not, for example, the same sun which sets to-day and rises to-morrow. It is a new sun. For the fire of the sun burns itself out and is replenished from the vapours of the sea.

Not only do things change from moment to moment. Even in one and the same moment they are and are not the same. It is not merely that a thing first is, and then a moment afterwards, is not. It both is and is not at the same time. The at-onceness of "is" and "is not" {75} is the meaning of Becoming. We shall understand this better if we contrast it with the Eleatic principle. The Eleatics described all things under two concepts, Being and not-being. Being has, for them, all truth, all reality. Not-being is wholly false and illusory. For Heracleitus both Being and not-being are equally real. The one is as true as the other. Both are true, for both are identical. Becoming is the identity of Being and not-being. For Becoming has only two forms, namely, the arising of things and their passing away, their beginning and their end, their origination and their decease. Perhaps you may think that this is not correct, that there are other forms of change besides origination and decease. A man is born. That is his origination. He dies. That is his decease. Between his birth and his death there are intermediate changes. He grows larger, grows older, grows wiser or more foolish, his hair turns grey. So also the leaf of a tree does not merely come into being and pass out of being. It changes in shape, form, colour. From light green it becomes dark green, and from dark green, yellow. But there is after all nothing in all this except origination and decease, not of the thing itself, but of its qualities. The change from green to yellow is the decease of green colour, the origination of yellow colour. Origination is the passage of not-being into Being. Decease is the passage of Being into not-being. Becoming, then, has in it only the two factors of Being and not-being, and it means the passing of one into the other. But this passage does not mean, for Heracleitus, that at one moment there is Being, and at the next moment not-being. It means that Being and not-being are in everything at one and the same time. Being is {76} not-being. Being has not-being in it. Take as an example the problem of life and death. Ordinarily we think that death is due to external causes, such as accident or disease. We consider that while life lasts, it is what it is, and remains what it is, namely life, unmixed with death, and that it goes on being life until something comes from outside, as it were, in the shape of external causes, and puts an end to it. You may have read Metchnikoff's book "The Nature of Man." In the course of that book he develops this idea. Death, he says, is always due to external causes. Therefore, if we could remove the causes, we could conquer death. The causes of death are mostly disease and accident, for even old age is disease. There is no reason why science should not advance so far as to eliminate disease and accident from life. In that case life might be made immortal, or at any rate, indefinitely prolonged. Now this is founded upon a confusion of ideas. No doubt death is always due to external causes. Every event in the world is determined, and wholly determined, by causes. The law of causation admits of no exception whatever. Therefore it is perfectly true that in every case of death causes precede it. But, as I explained in the last chapter, [Footnote 6] to give the cause is not to give any reason for an event. Causation is never a principle of explanation of anything. It tells us that the phenomenon A is invariably and unconditionally followed by the phenomenon B, and we call A the cause of B. But this only means that whenever B happens, it happens in a certain regular order and succession of events. But it does not tell us why B happens at all. The reason of a thing is to be {77} distinguished from its cause. The reason why a man dies is not to be found in the causes which bring about his death. The reason rather is that life has the germ of death already in it, that life is already death potentially, that Being has not-being in it. The causation of death is merely the mechanism, by the instrumentality of which, through one set of causes or another, the inevitable end is brought about.

[Footnote 6: Page 64.]

Not only is Being, for Heracleitus, identical with not-being, but everything in the universe has in it its own opposite. Every existent thing is a "harmony of opposite tensions." A harmony contains necessarily two opposite principles which, in spite of their opposition, reveal an underlying unity. That it is by virtue of this principle that everything in the universe exists, is the teaching of Heracleitus. All things contain their own opposites within them. In the struggle and antagonism between hostile principles consists their life, their being, their very existence. At the heart of things is conflict. If there were no conflict in a thing, it would cease to exist. This idea is expressed by Heracleitus in a variety of ways. "Strife," he says, "is the father of all things." "The one, sundering from itself, coalesces with itself, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre." "God is day and night, summer and winter, war and peace, satiety and hunger." "Join together whole and unwhole, congruous and incongruous, accordant and discordant, then comes from one all and from all one." In this sense, too, he censures Homer for having prayed that strife might cease from among gods and men. If such a prayer were granted, the universe itself would pass away.

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Side by side with this metaphysic, Heracleitus lays down a theory of physics. All things are composed of fire. "This world," he says, "neither one of the gods nor of the human race has made; but it is, it was, and ever shall be, an eternally living fire." All comes from fire, and to fire all returns. "All things are exchanged for fire and fire for all, as wares for gold and gold for wares." Thus there is only one ultimate kind of matter, fire, and all other forms of matter are merely modifications and variations of fire. It is clear for what reason Heracleitus enunciated this principle. It is an exact physical parallel to the metaphysical principle of Becoming. Fire is the most mutable of the elements. It does not remain the same from one moment to another. It is continually taking up matter in the form of fuel, and giving off equivalent matter in the form of smoke and vapour. The primal fire, according to Heracleitus, transmutes itself into air, air into water, and water into earth. This he calls "the downward path." To it corresponds "the upward path," the transmutation of earth into water, water to air, and air to fire. All transformation takes place in this regular order, and therefore, says Heracleitus, "the upward and the downward path are one."

Fire is further specially identified with life and reason. It is the rational element in things. The more fire there is, the more life, the more movement. The more dark and heavy materials there are, the more death, cold, and not-being. The soul, accordingly, is fire, and like all other fires it continually burns itself out and needs replenishment. This it obtains, through the senses and the breath, from the common life and reason of the {79} world, that is, from the surrounding and all-pervading fire. In this we live and move and have our being. No man has a separate soul of his own. It is merely part of the one universal soul-fire. Hence if communication with this is cut off, man becomes irrational and finally dies. Sleep is the half-way house to death. In sleep the passages of the senses are stopped up, and the outer fire reaches us only through breath. Hence in sleep we become irrational and senseless, turning aside from the common life of the world, each to a private world of his own. Heracleitus taught also the doctrine of periodic world-cycles. The world forms itself out of fire, and by conflagration passes back to the primitive fire.

In his religious opinions Heracleitus was sceptical. But he does not, like Xenophanes, direct his attacks against the central ideas of religion, and the doctrine of the gods. He attacks mostly the outward observances and forms in which the religious spirit manifests itself. He inveighs against the worship of images, and urges the uselessness of blood sacrifice.

With the Eleatics he distinguishes between sense and reason, and places truth in rational cognition. The illusion of permanence he ascribes to the senses. It is by reason that we rise to the knowledge of the law of Becoming. In the comprehension of this law lies the duty of man, and the only road to happiness. Understanding this, man becomes resigned and contented. He sees that evil is the necessary counterpart of good, and pain the necessary counterpart of pleasure, and that both together are necessary to form the harmony of the world. Good and evil are principles on the struggle {80} between which the very existence of things depends. Evil, too, is necessary, has its place in the world. To see this is to put oneself above pitiful and futile struggles against the supreme law of the universe.