ewed.

[Sidenote: Physical and physiological doctrines of Heraclitus.]

In the midst of many wild physical statements many true axioms are
delivered. "All is ordered by reason and intelligence, though all is
subject to Fate." Already he perceived what the metaphysicians of our
own times are illustrating, that "man's mind can produce no certain
knowledge from its own interior resources alone." He regarded the organs
of sense as being the channels through which the outer life of the
world, and therewith truth, enters into the mind, and that in sleep,
when the organs of sense are closed, we are shut out from all communion
with the surrounding universal spirit. In his view every thing is
animated and insouled, but to different degrees, organic objects being
most completely or perfectly so. His astronomy may be anticipated from
what has been said respecting the sun, which he moreover regarded as
being scarcely more than a foot in diameter, and, like all other
celestial objects, a mere meteor. His moral system was altogether based
upon the physical, the fundamental dogma being the excellence of fire.
Thus he accounted for the imbecility of the drunkard by his having a
moist soul, and drew the inference that a warm or dry soul is the wisest
and best; with justifiable patriotism asserting that the noblest souls
must belong to a climate that is dry, intending thereby to indicate that
Greece is man's fittest and truest country. There can be no doubt that
in Heraclitus there is a strong tendency to the doctrine of a soul of
the world. If the divinity is undistinguishable from heat, whither can
we go to escape its influences? And in the restless activity and
incessant changes it produces in every thing within our reach, do we not
recognize the tokens of the illimitable and unshackled?

[Sidenote: The puerility of Ionian philosophy.]

I have lingered on the chief features of the early Greek philosophy as
exhibited in the physical school of Ionia. They serve to impress upon
us its intrinsic imperfection. It is a mixture of the physical,
metaphysical, and mystical which, upon the whole, has no other value
than this, that it shows how feeble were the beginnings of our
knowledge--that we commenced with the importation of a few vulgar errors
from Egypt. In presence of the utilitarian philosophy of that country
and the theology of India, how vain and even childish are these germs of
science in Greece! Yet this very imperfection is not