it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead
what is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire of
life--that eternal process of nature, of which at a later time Goethe
spoke as the "Living Garment," whereby God is seen of us, ever in
weaving at the "Loom of Time."

And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the first
instance, from confused to unconfused sensation; with a sort of
prophetic seriousness, a great claim and assumption, such as we may
understand, if we anticipate in this preliminary scepticism the
ulterior scope of his speculation, according to which the universal
movement of all natural things is but one particular stage, or measure,
of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists. The one
true being--that constant subject of all early thought--it was his
merit to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant inaction, but as a
perpetual energy, from the restless stream of which, [130] at certain
points, some elements detach themselves, and harden into non-entity and
death, corresponding, as outward objects, to man's inward condition of
ignorance: that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with this
paradox of a subtle, perpetual change in all visible things, that the
high speculation of Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expresses
for anything like a careless, half-conscious, "use-and-wont" reception
of our experience, which took so strong a hold on men's memories! Hence
those many precepts towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all we
think and do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, which makes
strict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and service.

The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our ordinary
experience, fixed as they seem, are really in perpetual change, had
been, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a large
positive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now, the
illuminated philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed a mass of
lifeless matter, the movement of that universal life, in which things,
and men's impressions of them, were ever "coming to be," alternately
consumed and renewed. That continual change, to be discovered by the
attentive understanding where common opinion found fixed objects, was
but the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion--the sleepless,
ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine [131] reason itself,
proceeding always by its own rhythmi