LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 00017^705^1 ***■ V** -Sfc X/ M- .% * jP** 4 o > 4y v ^ IV of V * T * ° V* 1 °^ 'in' A. v* .•; v- » u v THE FRAGMENTS OF THE WORK OF HEEACLITUS OF EPHESUS ON NATURE TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK TEXT OF RYWATER. WITH AN INTRODUCTION HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL G. T. W. PATRICK, Ph.D. PBOFE3SOK OF PHILOSOPHY IN" THE STATE I T NIVEBSITY OF IOWA BALTIMORE X. MURRAY 1889 THE FRAGMENTS OF THE WOKK OF HEEACLITUS OF EPHESUS ON NATURE WITH AN INTRODUCTION HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL G. T. W. PATRICK, Ph.D. PEOFES30R OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA BALTIMORE \ . MURRAY 1889 N c t>°r - [Eeprinted from the American Journal of Psychology, 1888.] A Thesis Accepted for the Degree op Doctor of Philosophy in the Johns Hopkins University, 1888. press of Isaac Friedenwald, BALTIMORE. 01 (JSOlsZSZ. All thoughts, all creeds, all dreams are true, All visions wild and strange ; Man is the measure of all truth Unto himself. All truth is change, All men do walk in sleep, and all Have faith in that they dream : For all things are as they seem to all, And all things now like a stream. II. There is no rest, no calm, no pause, Xor good nor ill, nor light nor shade, Nor ess*, ice nor eternal laws : For nothing is, but all is made. But if I dream that all these are, They are to me for that I dream ; For all things are as they seem to all, And all things flow like a stream. Argal — this very opinion is only true relatively to the flowing philosophers. Tennyson. PREFACE. The latest writers on Heraclitus, namely, Gustav Teichmuller and Edmund Pfleiderer, have thought it necessary to preface their works with an apology for adding other monographs to the Heraclitic literature, already enriched by treatises from such distinguished men as Schleiermacher, Lassalle, Zeller, and Schuster. That still other study of Heraclitus, however, needs no apology, will be admitted when it is seen that these scholarly critics, instead of determining the place of Heraclitus in the history of philosophy, have so far disagreed, that while Schuster makes him out to be a sensationalist and empiricist, Lassalle finds that he is a rationalist and idealist. While to Teichmuller, his starting point and the key to his whole system is found in his physics, to Zeller it is found in his metaphysics, and to Pfleiderer in his religion. Heraclitus' theology was derived, according to Teichmuller, from Egypt ; according to Lassalle, from India ; according to Pfleid- erer, from the Greek Mysteries. The Heraclitic flux, according to Pfleiderer, was consequent on his abstract theories ; according to Teichmuller, his abstract theo- ries resulted from his observation of the flux. Pfleid- fr^r says that Heraclitus was an optimist ; Gottlob VI PREFACE. Mayer says that he was a pessimist. According to Schuster he was a hylozoist, according to Zeller a pan- theist, according to Pfleiderer a panzoist, according to Lassalle a panlogist. Naturally, therefore, in the hands of these critics, with their various theories to support, the remains of Heraclitus' work have suffered a violence of interpretation only partially excused by his known obscurity. No small proportion of the fragments, as will be seen in my introduction, have been taken in a diametrically opposite sense. Recently a contribution towards the disentanglement of this maze has been made by Mr. Bywater, an acute English scholar. His work (Heracliti Ephesii Reli- quiae, Oxford, 1877) is simply a complete edition of the now existing fragments of Heraclitus' work, together with the sources from which they are drawn, with so much of the context as to make them intelligible. Under these circumstances I have thought that a translation of the fragments into English, that every man may read and judge for himself, would be the best contribution that could be made. The increasing interest in early Greek philosophy, and particularly in Heraclitus, who is the one Greek thinker most in accord with the thought of our century, makes such a translation justifiable, and the excellent and timely edition of the Greek text by Mr. Bywater makes it practicable. The translations both of the fragments and of the context are made from the original sources, though I PREFACE. VII have followed the text of Bywater except in a very few cases, designated in the critical notes. As a number of the fragments are ambiguous, and several of them contain a play upon words, I have appended the entire Greek text. The collection of sources is wholly that of Mr. Bywater. In these I have made a translation, not of all the references, but only of those from which the fragment is immediately taken, adding others only in cases of especial interest. My acknowledgments are due to Dr. Basil L. Gil- dersleeve, of the Johns Hopkins University, for kind suggestions concerning the translation, and to Dr. G. Stanley Hall for valuable assistance in relation to the plan of the work. Baltimore, September 1, 1888. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. Section I. — Historical and Critical. PAGE Literature 1 Over-systemization in Philosophj*- 2 Over-interpretation in Historical Criticism 3 Exposition of Lassalle - 4 Hegel's Conception of Heraclitus 5 Criticism of Hegel's Conception : 6 Criticism of Lassalle 9 Exposition of Schuster 11 Criticism of Schuster 17 Exposition of Teichmiiller 23 Criticism of Teichmiiller 31 Exposition of Pfleiderer 39 Criticism of Pfleiderer . . . . 46 Section II. — Reconstructive. I. Can the Positions of the Critics be harmonized? 56 Heraclitus' Starting-point 57 Heraclitus as a Preacher and Prophet 57 The Content of his Message 58 The Universal Order 60 Strife 62 The Unity of Opposites 63 The Flux 65 Cosmogony 68 Ethics 69 Optimism 71 CONTENTS. II. Cause of the Present Interest in Heraclitus 72 Passion for Origins 72 Greek Objectivity 73 Heraclitic Ideas 74 Relation to Socrates and Plato 75 Socrates • 76 Birth of Self-consciousness 77 Loss of Love of Beauty 78 Rise of Transcendentalism 79 Platonic Dualism ■ 80 Return to Heraclitus 82 Defeat of Heraclitus 83 Translation of the Fragments 84-114 Critical Notes 115-123 Greek Text 124-131 INTRODUCTION. Section I. — Historical and Critical. Modern Heraclitic literature belongs wholly to the present century. The most important works are the following : — Schleiermacher : Herakleitos, der Dunkle von Ephesos, in Wolf and Buttmann's Museum der Alterthuinswissenschaft, Vol. I, 1807, pp. 313-533, and in Schleiermachers Sammt. Werke, Abth. Ill, Vol. 2, Berlin, 1838, pp. 1-146 ; — Jak. Bernays : Heraclitea, Bonn, 1848 ; Heraklitisehe Studien, in the Rhein. Mus., new series, VII, pp. 90-116, 1850 ; Neue Bruchstucke des Heraklit, ibid. IX, pp. 241-269, 1854 ; Die Hera- klitischen Briefe, Berlin, 1869 ; — Ferd. Lassalle : Die Philosopkie Herakleitos des Dunkeln von Ephesos, 2 vols., Berlin, 1858; — Paul Schuster: Heraklit von Ephesus. in Actis soc. phil. Lips. ed. Fr. Ritschelius, 1873, III, 1-397 ;— Teichmuller, Xeue Stud. z. Gesch. der Begriffe, Heft I, Gotha, 1876, and II, 1878 ;— Bywater : Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae, Oxford, 1877 ; — Edmund Pfleiderer : Die Philosophic des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin, 1886 ; — Eduard Zeller : Die Philosophic der Griechen, Bd. I, pp. 566-677. There may be mentioned also the following addi- tional writings which have been consulted in the preparation of these pages : — Gottlob Mayer : Heraklit von Ephesus und Arthur Schopenhauer, Heidelberg, : Campbell : Theaetetus of Plato, Appendix A, Oxford. L883 ; A. W. Benn : The Greek Philosophers, London, 1882. Z HERACLITUS. After the introductory collection and arrangement of the Heraclitic fragments by Schleiermacher, and the scholarly discriminative work and additions of Bernays, four attempts have been made successively by Lassalle, Schuster, Teichmuller, and Pfleiderer, to reconstruct or interpret the philosophical system of Heraclitus. The positions taken and the results arrived at by these eminent scholars and critics are largely, if not wholly, different and discordant. A brief statement of their several positions will be our best introduction to the study of Heraclitus at first hand, and at the same time will offer us incidentally some striking examples of prevalent methods of his- toric criticism. One of the greatest evils in circles of philosophical and religious thought has always been the evil of over- systemization. It is classification, or the scientific method, carried too far. It is the tendency to arrange under any outlined system or theory, more facts than it will properly include. It is the temptation, in a word, to classify according to resemblances which are too faint or fanciful. In the field of historic criticism this evil takes the form of over-interpretation. Just as in daily life we interpret every sense perception according to our own mental forms, so we tend to read our own thoughts into every saying of the ancients, and then proceed to use these, often without dis- honesty, to support our favorite modern systems. The use of sacred writings will naturally occur to every one as the most striking illustration of this over-interpre- tation. Especially in the exegesis of the Bible has this prostitution of ancient writings to every man's religious views been long since recognized and condemned, and if most recently this tendency has been largely cor- HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 3 rected in religious circles, it is all the more deplorable, in philosophical criticism, to find it still flourishing. Unfortunately, this vice continues, and it appears nowhere more plainly than in the interpretation of Greek philosophy. There is a great temptation to modern writers to use the Greek philosophers as props to support their own systems — a temptation to inter- pret them arbitrarily, to look down upon them patron- izingly, as it were, showing that what they meant was this or that modern thought, having only not learned to express themselves as well as we have. Among his- torians of philosophy this appears as a one-sidedness, so that it is commonly necessary in reading a history of philosophy to make a correction for the author's " personal equation." The histories of Schwegler and of Lewes are examples — the one biased by Hegel- ianism, the other by Positivism. Undoubtedly, a cer- tain personal equation is unavoidable, and it is as impossible for an interpreter of Greek philosophy to make himself wholly Greek as it is unfair to represent the ancient thinker as wholly German or English. But when this becomes complete one-sidedness, or blindness to all but one series of an author's thoughts, or a willful or even unintentional perversion of his words, vigorous remonstrance is called for. This attempt to fully understand the ancients, to make them speak in the phraseology of some modern school, must be distinguished from the recent move- ment, represented by Prof. Lagarde and others, in interpreting historic thought and historic events psychologically. This movement is certainly legiti- mate, based as it is on the truth of the similarity of constitution of all human minds, and the probability that underlying all representative historic creeds are great related if not identical thoughts. Even here, of 4 HERACLITUS. course, the attempt to express these thoughts in the set phrases of any one people is inadequate. We proceed, then, to look at some of the work done upon the philosophy of Heraclitus. Here we shall not attempt any examination of Zeller's exposition, since his work, though it is perhaps the very best that has been done in this field, is critical rather than recon- structive, and like his whole history of Greek philos- ophy, is a marvel of candor as well as of immense research. Even Zeller, however, has not wholly escaped the charge of one-sidedness, since Benn, in the preface to his work on the Greek philosophers, has accused him of never having outgrown the semi-Hege- lian prejudice of his youth. Lassalle. Lassalle, in two ponderous volumes noted above (page 1), made the first and most elaborate attempt to reconstruct the system of the Ephesian philosopher. His work exhibits immense labor and study, and extended research in the discovery of new fragments and of ancient testimony, together with some acuteness in their use. Lassalle has a very distinct view of the philosophy of Heraclitus. But it is not an original view. It is, in fact, nothing but an expansion of the short account of Heraclitus in Hegel's History of Phil- osophy, although Lassalle makes no mention of him, except to quote upon his title-page Hegel's well-known motto, " Es ist kein Satz des Heraklit, den ich nicht in meine Logik aufgenommen." Hegel's conception of Heraclitus is, in a word, as follows : Heraclitus' Absolute was the unity of being and non-being. His whole system was an expansion of the speculative thought of the principle of pure becoming. He appre- hended, and was the first to apprehend, the Absolute HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 5 as a process, as the unity of opposites, as dialectic itself. His great contribution was the speculative transition from the being of the Eleatics to the idea of becoming. Now how does Hegel support this position ? There is in his Logic but one passage referring to Hera- clitus. There he says, " Glancing at the principle of the Eleatics. Heraclitus then goes on to say, ' Being no more is than non-being'' (oijohiy ud/lov to ov tou tirj ovroc iart), a statement expressing the negative nature of abstract being and its identity with non-being" (Wallace, The Logic of Hegel, p. 144 ; cp. Science of Logic, Hegel's Werke, Vol. 3, p. 80). Hegel omits, in the Logic, to give the reference to the above quotation, but in his History of Philosophy (Werke, Vol. 13, p. 332) he quotes the same passage with the reference. It is to Aristotle, Metaph. i. 4. We turn to the same and find that it is a passage which Aristotle quotes from the Atomists, Democritus and Leucippus, and that it has not the slightest reference to Heraclitus, who, indeed, is not mentioned in the same chapter. This is rather discouraging, but the account in the History of Philosophy, to which we now turn, is scarcely less so. There Hegel begins his exposition of Heraclitus as follows : "1. Das allgemeine Princip. Dieser kiihne Geist (Heraclitus) hat zuerst das tiefe Wort gesagt, ' Das Seyn ist nicht mehr als das Nichtseyn,' es ist ebenso wenig, oder, ' Seyn und Nichts sey dasselbe,' das W. sen sey die Veranderung" (Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. 13, p. :;. Now it happens that Heraclitus said nothing of the kind. As references Hegel gives Aristotle, Meta- phys. i. 4: iv. 7; iv. 3. The first passage, as we have already seen, is from the Atomists. The second turns out upon examination to be simply the expression, 6 HERACLITUS. " All things are and are not" (ndura elvac xac firj ehcu), and the third is a statement of Aristotle that some people supposed Heraclitus to have said that the same thing could both be and not be the same. Moreover, neither of these passages is Heraclitic in form, and they are not even mentioned in By water's edition. The only expression of Heraclitus that resembles in form the above passage from Aristotle is that of frag. 81, " Into the same river we step and we do not step. We are and we are not." The over-interpretation by which this simple passage, expressing incessant phys- ical change, is transformed into the logical principle of Hegel, " Das Seyn ist nicht mehr als das ISTicht- seyn," " Seyn und Mchts sey dasselbe," is audacious at least. Furthermore, we may say here in passing, that neither the expressions to ov, /itj ov, nor even to jqvofievov, occur in any genuine saying of Heraclitus ; although if they did occur, it would be easy to show that they could not mean at all what Hegel meant by being, non-being, and becoming. Even the Eleatic Being was not .at all the same with that of Hegel, but was finite, spherical, and something very much like that which we should call material. But Heraclitus, who indeed preceded Parmenides, said nothing of being nor of non-being, nor did he speak of becoming in the abstract, although the trustful reader of Hegel, Lassalle, or Ferrier, might well suppose he spoke of nothing else. That which these writers mistook for becoming was, as we shall see later, only physical change. With the loss of this corner-stone, the Hera- clitic support of the Hegelian Logic fails, and Hegel's boast that there was no sentence of Heraclitus that his Logic had not taken up becomes rather ludicrous, especially if one will read through the remains of HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 7 Heraclitus' work on Nature and search for his rich and varied thoughts in the Logic of Hegel. Returning now to Lassalle, the above principles are carried out more in detail as follows : The chief point hi the philosophy of Heraclitus is that here first the formal notion of the speculative idea in general was grasped. With him first emerged the conception of pure thought defecated of the sensuous. His ground principle was the dialectical opposition of being and non-being. The kernel and whole depth of his phil- osophy may be expressed in the one sentence, " Only non-being is" (Lassalle, Vol. 1, p. 35). The unity of being and non-being is a unity of process (processi- rende Einheit). It is the unity of opposites, the idea of becoming, the divine law, the yvcoftq of the determining God (Id. Vol. 1, p. 24). Fire, strife, peace, time, neces- sity, harmony, the way up and down, the flux, justice, fate, Logos, are all different terms for this one idea (Id. Vol. 1, p. 57). Hence arises Heraclitus' obscurity. It is not a mere grammatical obscurity, as Schleier- macher, following Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 5, p. 1407, b. 14) thought ; nor is it a willful obscurity, but it arises from the very nature of his great thought, which could not be enunciated in exact terms, but could only be suggested by such words as fire, time, etc., and so he labored on with one new symbol after another, vainly trying to express himself. The Heraclitic fire is a " metaphysical abstraction " -a pure process, " whose existence is pure self -annull- ing (sich aufheben), whose being is pure self-consump- tion (sich selbst verzehren) " (Lassalle, Vol. 1, p. 18). Most clearly, however, is the great thought of Hera- clitus shown in "the way up and down," which does not involve change of place, but only a logical process. 8 HERACLITUS. It is " nothing else " than the change from being into non-being and the reverse. The way down is transi- tion into being ; the way up is the return into the pure and free negativity of non-being, motion in the undis- turbed ideal harmony (Id. Vol. 2, p. 241 ff.). God, in his adequate form, is " nothing else " than pure negativity, the pure unity of process of opposites. Nature is only the corporeal manifestation of the law of the identity of opposites. It owes its existence to privation (ddixea), that is, to the injustice which pure becoming suffers when it becomes being (Id. Vol. 1, p. 138). The dvadofuaacQ of Heraclitus is not any vapor or sen- sible exhalation, but is " nothing else " than the way up, or the ixrrupcoa^, that is, the cessation of the sen- sible and the particular and the assumption of the real universal becoming. ' 'Avadopcwpevat, Lassalle says, should be translated " processirend " (Id. Vol. 1, p. 144). The Heraclitic flux is the same as the way up and down. It is the dialectic of spacial being ; it is the unity of being and non-being as spacial ; it is the here which is not here. The nepdyov of Heraclitus is not anything physical or spacial, but "the universal real process of becoming," which works through the Logos or law of thought (Id. Vol. 1, p. 306). The Heraclitic Logos is the pure intelligible logical law of the identity in process (die processirende Iden- titat) of being and non-being. It is "nothing else" than the law of opposites and the change into the same (Id. Vol. 1, p. 327 ; Vol. 2, p. 265). The substance of the soul is identical with the sub- stance of nature. It is pure becoming which has in- corporated itself, embraced the way down. The dry or fiery soul is better than the moist because moisture HISTORICAL AXD CRITICAL. 9 is "nothing else'' than a symbol of the downward way. The soul that is moist has descended out of its pure self-annulling movement or negativity in process, into the sphere of the particular and determinate (Id. Vol. 1. pp. ISO,. 192). Heraclitus. in his desperate labor to express this idea, enters the sphere of religion. Dionysus and Hades are the same, he says (see frag. 127). That is, says Lassalle, Dionysus, the god of generation which repre- sents the descent of pure non-being into being, is iden- tical with Hades, the god of death ; and this fragment, which is a polemic against Dionysus, is really a polemic against being, which is inferior to non-being (Id. Vol. 1, p. 208). Knowledge consists in the recognition in each parti- cular thing of the two opposites which constitute its nature (Id. Vol. 2, p. 272). Of ethics, the formal prin- ciple is self-realization or self-representation. It is the realization of what we are in ourselves or according to our inner nature. The ideal is separation from the sensible and particular and the realization of the uni- versal (Id. Vol. 2, p. 428 ft.). Such in brief outline is what Ferdinand Lassalle finds in Heraclitus' book On Nature. As an exposition of Heraclitus it is not worth the space we have given it, or any space, in fact ; but as one of the most beau- tiful illustrations of over-systemization, it is extremely valuable. Any formal refutation of his conception of Heraclitus is unnecessary, for almost the whole of it is without any foundation whatever. The expositions which are to follow, or even a slight reading of the fragments themselves, will sufficiently show how thor- oughly fantastic and arbitrary are his interpretations. salle seems to have been misled partly by Hegel's 10 HERACLITUS. misinterpretation of the passages from Aristotle not- iced above, and partly by the principle of opposition which runs through a number of the sayings of Hera- clitus — an opposition which, as we shall see later, was wholly physical, and far more simple than the abstruse logical meaning given it by Lassalle. This German scholar had no power or no wish to put himself in the attitude of the Greek mind, which was as widely dif- ferent from his as possible. It was a mistake for this disciple of pure thought, bred in the stifling atmosphere of a nineteenth century Hegelian lecture-room, and powerless to transport himself out of it even in thought, to attempt to interpret the sentences of an ingenuous lover of Nature, who, five centuries before the Chris- tian era, lived and moved in the free air of Ephesus. In this we do not mean to say that the philosophy of Heraclitus was purely physical rather than metaphys- ical, for we shall see that such was not the case, but primitive pre-Socratic metaphysics and the panlogism of Lassalle are as wide asunder as the poles. On this point, Benn, in the work already referred to, well says, " The Greek philosophers from Thales to Democritus did not even suspect the existence of those ethical and dialectical problems which long constituted the sole object of philosophical discussion " (Vol. 1, p. 4). Those who wish to trace Lassalle' s errors further may compare, on his mistaken conception of the Hera- clitic fire, Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 591, 3 1 ; Grote : Plato, Vol. 1, p. 33, note. On " the way up and down," com- pare Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 619, 1. On the flux, compare Schuster, p. 201 ; Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 577, 1. The characterization of Lassalle' s book as a whole 2 The references to Zeller in the following pages are to the fourth German edition of Die Philosophie der Grieehen. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 11 is. that it is a striking example of great philosophic waste, turning as he does the rich and suggestive phil- osophy of the Ephesian into a wretched mouthful of Hegelian phrases. His citation of so many diverse sentences of Heraclitus, drawn from theology, ethics, nature, and man. and his discovery in all of them of his single ever-recurring notion of " die reine umschlag- ende Identitat von Sein und Nichtsein, impresses us with the power which the tyranny of a single idea may have to so blur one's vision as to cause him to see that idea reflected in everything that is presented. It is not true, as Lassalle's motto goes, that there is no sen- tence of Heraclitus that Hegel has not incorporated in his Logic, but it is not far from the truth that there is no sentence of Heraclitus which Hegel and Lassalle have not either willfully or ignorantly perverted. Schuster. We will mention now the work of Paul Schuster (see above, p. 1). Schuster approaches the problem of the interpretation of Heraclitus with the advantage of a rich philological and historical knowledge. He suf- fers a disadvantage, however, in the magnitude of the task he undertakes, which is nothing less than the reconstruction of the order and plan of the book of Heraclitus itself. The interpretation of the f ragments^ he justly observes, depends upon the connection in which they occurred. It will be necessary, therefore, if we will grasp their true sense, to recover the plan of the original writing. Such a reconstruction Schuster holds to be possible, since by the law of selection, the fragments which have been preserved to us must have been the central thoughts of the original work. Con- trary to Schleiermacher, he accepts as trustworthy the 12 HERACLITUS. statement of Diogenes (Diog. Laert. ix. 5) that the book of Heraclitus was divided into three parts or Logoi, the first concerning "the all," the second poli- tical, the third theological. On this basis Schuster arranges the fragments, freely translated or rather paraphrased, and interspaced with the restored pro- gress of thought. The well known obscurity of our philosopher, Schuster, contrary to all other critics ex- cept Teichmuller, supposes to have been partly, at least, intentional, as a precaution against persecution for atheism. 1 The distinctive feature of Schuster's conception of Heraclitus is that he was not a distruster of the senses, but on the contrary the first philosopher who dared to base all knowledge upon sense experience. He was therefore the first of experimental philosophers. To this idea the introduction of Heraclitus' book was devoted. The majority of people, says the Ephesian, have little interest in that which immediately sur- rounds them, nor do they think to seek for knowledge by investigation of that with which they daily come in contact (Clement of Alex. Strom, ii. 2, p. 432 ; M. Aurelius iv. 46 ; cp. frags. 5, 93). Nevertheless, that which surrounds us is the source of knowledge. Nature is not irrational and dumb, but is an ever living Voice plainly revealing the law of the world. This Voice of Nature is the Heraclitic Logos. The thought which Heraclitus utters in the passage stand- ing at the beginning of his book (frag. 2, Hippolytus, Ref . haer. ix. 9 ; cp. Aristotle, Rhet. iii. 5, p. 1407, b. 14) is no other than that which since the Renaissance has 1 Compare Plutarch. Pyth. orac. 21, p. 404 ; =: frag. 11 ; Clement of Alex. Strom, v. 13, p. 699 ; r= frag. 116. The numbers refer not to Schuster's numbering of the fragments, but to that of the present work, which is the numeration of Bywater. HISTORICAL AXD CRITICAL. 13 inspired natural science and its accompanying specu- lation, namely, that truth is to be won by observation of the visible world. But the people, he complains, despise the revelation which Nature offers us with audible voice. Why, asks Heraclitus (Hippolytus, Ref . haer. ix. 9 : cp. frag. 47), should an invisible harmony be better than a visible ? It is not better, but, on the contrary, whatever is the object of seeing, hearing, or investigation, that I particularly honor (idem ix. 10 ; cp. frag. 13). Men, therefore, must trust their eyes (Polybius, xii. 27 ; cp. frag. 15) and not make reckless guesses concerning the weightiest things (Diog. Laert. ix. 73 ; cp. frag. -18). That Heraclitus' theory of knowl- edge, therefore, based it upon sense perception and reflection thereupon, is shown, continues Schuster, not only by the above passages, but also by the fact that the exaggerated form of the theory held by Protagoras (cp. Plato's Theaetetus) must necessarily have had its source in Heraclitus, his master. None the less is this shown also by Parmenides' attack on the empirical theory of knowledge (Sextus Empir. vii. 3), which could have been aimed only at the philoso- pher of Ephesus (Schuster, pp. 7 and 13-42). Turning now from the theory of knowledge to its results, the first law which the observation of Nature teaches us is the law of eternal and recurrent mo- tion {izdvca yiooil xal obdhv fievet, Plato, Crat. p. 402 A). The starting point and central position of our philoso- pher we must find in this recurrent motion, rather than in the primitive fire which itself held a subordi- nate place in the system. But the Heraclitic motion was not conceived as any absolute molecular change in the modern sense, nor yet as that absolute insta- bility which appeared in the nihilism of the later 14 HERACLITUS. Heracliteans. It was rather conceived in a simpler way, as a general law that everything comes to an end and there is nothing permanent. Under this was included : 1) spacial motion, as of the flowing river ; 2) qualitative change, as in the human body; 3) a kind of periodicity which brings everything under its dominion. The last was the most emphasized. Birth and death are universal; nothing escapes this fate. There is no fixed or unmoved being above or outside the shifting world, no divine heavenly existence that does not change, but all is involved in the same perpetual ebb and flow, rise and fall, life and death (Schuster, p. 81 ff.). But this life and death of the universe is literal, not figurative. The world itself is a great living organism subject to the same alternation of elemental fire, air, and water. This thoroughgoing hylozoism which Schuster attributes to Heraclitus, he bases principally on the writing de diaeta of Pseudo-Hippocrates, who, he believes, made a free use of the work of Heraclitus, if he did not directly plagiarize from him. Comparing this writing (particularly the passage, c. 10, p. 638) with Plato's Timaeus (p. 40 A, also drawn from Hera- clitus), he ventures to reconstruct the original as follows : " Everything passes away and nothing per- sists. So it is with the river, and so with mortal beings ; in whom continually fire dies in the birth of air, and air in the birth of water. So also with the divine heavenly existence, which is subject to the same process, for wp are in reality only an imitation of that and of the whole world ; as it happens with that so it must happen with us, and inversely we may judge of that by ourselves " (Schuster, p. 118). The life principle of the universe, as of the human HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 15 organism, is fire. This fire is everywhere present, so that •'• : everything is full of gods and souls" (Diog. Laert. ix. 7). The life of the body is sustained by the breath which inhales the dry vapors kindred to fire. At night, when the sun is extinguished and the world becomes unconscious, we inhale the dark wet vapors and sink into death-like sleep (Schuster, p. 135). The sun, which is new every day, changes at night into the surrounding air and then into the water of the sea. The sea produces the daily sun, as it is the source of all earthly phenomena. On a large scale this three- fold change takes place with the universe, which will ultimately be consumed in fire, again to become sea and cosmos. This is " the way up and down " — not a circular movement of the elements within the cosmos (Zeller), but the periodicity of the world itself. The way up and the way down relate only to the cosmogony. The latter is the creation of the world by condensation of fire into water, then earth ; the former is the reverse process of vaporization (Id. p. 169). This law or order is not dependent upon any divine purposeful will, but all is ruled by an inherent neces- sary " fate." The elemental fire carries within itself the tendency toward change, and thus pursuing the way down, it enters the " strife " and war of opposites which condition the birth of the world (dtaxoofirjatc;), and experience that hunger (yj>r t o ftoobw}) which arises in a state where life is dependent upon nourishment, and where satiety (xopoe) is only again found when, in pursuit of the way up, opposites are annulled, and "unity" and "peace" again emerge in the pure original fire (ixTropwae^). This impulse of Nature towards change is conceived now as "destiny," "force," "necessity," "justice," or, when exhibited 16 HERACLITUS. in definite forms of time and matter, as "intelligence" (Id. p. 182, 194 ff.). The Heraclitic harmony of opposites, as of the bow and the lyre, is a purely physical harmony. It is simply the operation of the strife of opposite forces, by which motion within an organism, at the point where if further continued it would endanger the whole, is balanced and caused to return within the limits of a determined amplitude (Id. p. 230 ff.). The identity of opposites means only that very dif- ferent properties may unite in the same physical thing, either by simultaneous comparison with different things or successive comparison with a changeable thing (Id. pp. 236, 243). The second or political section of Heraclitus' work treated of arts, ethics, society, and politics. It aimed to show how human arts are imitations of Nature, and how organized life, as in the universe and the indi- vidual, so in the state, is the secret of unity in variety. The central thought was the analogy existing between man and the universe, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, from which it results that the true ethical principle lies in imitation of Nature, and that law is founded on early customs which sprang from Nature (Id. p. 310 ff.). The third or theological section was mainly devoted to showing that the names of things are designations of their essence. That Heraclitus himself, not merely his followers, held the (pvosi opdor/jQ ovofidztov, and used etymologies as proofs of the nature of things, Schuster believes is both consistent with his philosophy and conclusively proved by Plato's Cratylus. Primitive men named things from the language which Nature spoke to them ; names, therefore, give us the truth of HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 17 things. Etymologies of the names of the gods was the proof first brought forward, as in Plato's Cratylus ; hence the name of this section of the work. To show this connection of names and things was to prove the intimate connection of man with Nature, and so to lead to the conclusion that all knowledge is based on experience, which, indeed, was the end he had in view (Id. p. 317 ff.). It is not our purpose to criticize in detail Schuster's conception of Heraclitus. Much of it will commend itself to the careful student of the remains, particu- larly that which relates to the Heraclitic flux and its relation to the primitive fire. Suggestive, also, if not unimpeachable, is his conception of the relation of the microcosm to the macrocosm, and of the harmony and identity of opposites. In his exposition of these doctrines, Schuster has rendered valuable service. We can by no means, however, allow thus tentatively to pass, Schuster's conception of Heraclitus as a purely empirical philosopher. Before noticing this, a word needs to be said in regard to Schuster's method as a whole. As to the latter, the very extent of the task proposed made over-systemization inevitable. In criticism of Schuster's attempt, Zeller has well said that with the extant material of Heraclitus' book, the recovery of its plan is impossible (Vol. 1, p. 570, note). Such a plan of reconstruction as that which Schuster undertakes, demands the power not only to penetrate the sense of every fragment, but also so to read the mind of the author as to be able to restore that of the large absent portions. The small number and enigmatical character of the fragments which are extant, together with the contradictory character of ancient testimony to Heraclitus, makes such a task extremely hazardous. 18 HERACLITUS. It can be carried through only by the help of "unlim- ited conjecture." Such conjecture Schuster has used extensively. The necessity of carrying through his plan has led him to find in some passages more mean- ing than they will justly bear, while his apparently preconceived notion as to the wholly empirical charac- ter of the system has led him to distort the meaning of many sentences. We shall see examples of this presently. Incidentally, his method may be illustrated by his connection and use of the two passages : dvOpcoTiooq [isvec (Lnodavovzaz, cLaaa oux IhtovTai oudk doxeooac (Clement of Alex. Strom, iv. 22, p. 630 ; cp. frag. 122), and a!