ery
terrestrial movement, and the dispenser of light and life.

[Sidenote: Heraclitus asserts that fire is the first principle.]

[Sidenote: The fictitious permanence of successive forms.]

To Thales and Diogenes, whose primordial elements were water and air
respectively, we must add Heraclitus of Ephesus, who maintained that the
first principle is fire. He illustrated the tendency which Greek
philosophy had already assumed of opposition to Polytheism and the
idolatrous practices of the age. It is said that in his work, ethical,
political, physical, and theological subjects were so confused, and so
great was the difficulty of understanding his meaning, that he obtained
the surname of "the Obscure." In this respect he has had among modern
metaphysicians many successors. He founds his system, however, upon the
simple axiom that "all is convertible into fire, and fire into all."
Perhaps by the term fire he understood what is at present meant by heat,
for he expressly says that he does not mean flame, but something merely
dry and warm. He considered that this principle is in a state of
perpetual activity, forming and absorbing every individual thing. He
says, "All is, and is not; for though it does in truth come into being,
yet it forthwith ceases to be." "No one has ever been twice on the same
stream, for different waters are constantly flowing down. It dissipates
its waters and gathers them again; it approaches and recedes, overflows
and fails." And to teach us that we ourselves are changing and have
changed, he says, "On the same stream we embark and embark not, we are
and we are not." By such illustrations he implies that life is only an
unceasing motion, and we cannot fail to remark that the Greek turn of
thought is fast following that of the Hindu.

But Heraclitus totally fails to free himself from local conceptions. He
speaks of the motion of the primordial principle in the upward and
downward directions, in the higher and lower regions. He says that the
chief accumulation thereof is above, and the chief deficiency below: and
hence he regards the soul of a man as a portion of fire migrated from
heaven. He carries his ideas of the transitory nature of all phenomena
to their last consequences, and illustrates the noble doctrine that all
which appears to us to be permanent is only a regulated and
self-renewing concurrence of similar and opposite motions by such
extravagances as that the sun is daily destroyed and ren