ust be enumerated among the better
achievements of practical genius in antiquity, it arose from necessity,
and its properties were imperfectly investigated in theory.

When the Greeks began to reflect on the problems of society, they first
of all accepted things as they were, and did their best to explain and
defend them. Inquiry, which with us is stimulated by doubt, began with
them in wonder. The most illustrious of the early philosophers,
Pythagoras, promulgated a theory for the preservation of political power
in the educated class, and ennobled a form of government which was
generally founded on popular ignorance and on strong class interests. He
preached authority and subordination, and dwelt more on duties than on
rights, on religion than on policy; and his system perished in the
revolution by which oligarchies were swept away. The revolution
afterwards developed its own philosophy, whose excesses I have
described.

But between the two eras, between the rigid didactics of the early
Pythagoreans and the dissolving theories of Protagoras, a philosopher
arose who stood aloof from both extremes, and whose difficult sayings
were never really understood or valued until our time. Heraclitus, of
Ephesus, deposited his book in the temple of Diana. The book has
perished, like the temple and the worship, but its fragments have been
collected and interpreted with incredible ardour, by the scholars, the
divines, the philosophers, and politicians who have been engaged the
most intensely in the toil and stress of this century. The most renowned
logician of the last century adopted every one of his propositions; and
the most brilliant agitator among Continental Socialists composed a work
of eight hundred and forty pages to celebrate his memory.

Heraclitus complained that the masses were deaf to truth, and knew not
that one good man counts for more than thousands; but he held the
existing order in no superstitious reverence. Strife, he says, is the
source and the master of all things. Life is perpetual motion, and
repose is death. No man can plunge twice into the same current, for it
is always flowing and passing, and is never the same. The only thing
fixed and certain in the midst of change is the universal and sovereign
reason, which all men may not perceive, but which is common to all. Laws
are sustained by no human authority, but by virtue of their derivation
from the one law that is divine. These sayings, which recall the