ading freely, in early morning for the most
part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what
might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence,
which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.
And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to his
thoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder and
lightning of Lucretius--like thunder and lightning some distance off,
one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses--he had gone back to
[128] the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both,
Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book "Concerning Nature" was even
then rare, for people had long since satisfied themselves by the
quotation of certain brilliant, isolated, oracles only, out of what was
at best a taxing kind of lore. But the difficulty of the early Greek
prose did but spur the curiosity of Marius; the writer, the superior
clearness of whose intellectual view had so sequestered him from other
men, who had had so little joy of that superiority, being avowedly
exacting as to the amount of devout attention he required from the
student. "The many," he said, always thus emphasising the difference
between the many and the few, are "like people heavy with wine," "led
by children," "knowing not whither they go;" and yet, "much learning
doth not make wise;" and again, "the ass, after all, would have his
thistles rather than fine gold."

Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated the difficulty for "the many"
of the paradox with which his doctrine begins, and the due reception of
which must involve a denial of habitual impressions, as the necessary
first step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been developed in
conscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode of thought, as a
matter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its "dry
light." Men are subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding matters
apparent to sense. [129] What the uncorrected sense gives was a false
impression of permanence or fixity in things, which have really changed
their nature in the very moment in which we see and touch them. And
the radical flaw in the current mode of thinking would lie herein:
that, reflecting this false or uncorrected sensation, it attributes to
the phenomena of experience a durability which does not really belong
to them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmly
out-lined objects,