cal logic, and lending to all mind
and matter, in turn, what life they had. In this "perpetual flux" of
things and of souls, there was, as Heraclitus conceived, a continuance,
if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly
intelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought
out in and through the series of their mutations--ordinances of the
divine reason, maintained throughout the changes of the phenomenal
world; and this harmony in their mutation and opposition, was, after
all, a principle of sanity, of reality, there. But it happened, that,
of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative step, that easiest
step on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the
"doctrine of motion" seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make
all fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the still
swifter passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed to
reflect them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but what
was ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, or
like the race of water in the mid-stream--too swiftly for any real
knowledge of them to be attainable. Heracliteanism had grown to be
almost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras,
that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was the
only standard of what is or is [132] not, and each one the measure of
all things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had become
but an authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge.

And as it had been with his original followers in Greece, so it
happened now with the later Roman disciple. He, too, paused at the
apprehension of that constant motion of things--the drift of flowers,
of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around
him, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of
sight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mental
flight of the old Greek master from the fleeting, competing objects of
experience to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere of
physical change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation, remained
by him as hypothesis only--the hypothesis he actually preferred, as in
itself most credible, however scantily realisable even by the
imagination--yet still as but one unverified hypothesis, among many
others, concerning the first principle of things. He might reserve it
as a fine, high,