Concerning the cosmogony, it is worth while to re- call the suggestive thought contained in the '/^pTjafioaovrj and x6po(: of Heraclitus. In our examination of Schus- ter's work we found reason to believe that the word Y^pr^ajjioaijirfj^ which we may render " craving " or " long- ing," was used by the Ephesian to denote the charac-
Reconstructive. 69
ter of the impulse or motive force by which the primi- tive world matter or fire evolved itself into the world of individual things. The records are too meagre to warrant much enlargement upon this idea ; neverthe- less it is important historically and in itself interesting. It is the beginning of that line of thought which finds the analogy to the original motive or creative power of ^ the universe, not in man's intellectual but in his emo- tional nature, not in pure thought but in pure desire. It is opposed to the conception of Aristotle that the absolute first mover is pure intellect, the thought of thought (yb-qat<: vojyVeoic), and to the modern German enlargement of the same which began with the intel- lectual monads of Leibniz. On the other hand, it is in agreement with the idea brought out by Plato in his Symposium, the idea of Love as the source of devel- opment and immortality, and it reminds us later of Plotinus, who refuses to predicate thought or reason of the One but identifies it with the Good. The Hera- clitic-Platonic notion is no less anthropomorphic than the Aristotelian-Leibnizian ; but if the human mind must furnish forth some faculty to be singly hyposta- sized into God, we much prefer the richer emotional side to that of pure dry intellect or reason. lo ^ vWe come now to the Heraclitic ethics, the freshest CO^ and most vital part of his philosophy, but most misun- derstood by all the critics. The practical ethical rule with Heraclitus is to follow the law of the state, which again is dependent upon the Divine Law (frags. 91, 100). From his standpoint this agrees with his in- junction to live according to Nature (frag. 107). More broadly stated, men should follow the Universal as opposed to individual whims. " The Law of Reason is common, but the majority of people live as though
70 Heraclitus. '
they had an understanding of their own " (frag. 92). . This leads us directly to the theoretical ethical prin- J ciple which lay at the root of all Heraclitus' philosophy^ and which we have outlined above (p. 58) in defining his starting point as that of a preacher and prophet.
Q'he highest good was not contentmentVe^a/^i^Trjy^r^c), a
statement taken from a single indefinite passage in
Clement of Alexandria (Strom, ii. 21, p. 417 ; Clement
is followed by Theodoretus, iv. p. 984, ed. Halle), and
which, though adopted by Zeller, is as silly and impos-
sible as the better authenticated statement that Hera-
clitus wept over everything. Such an ethical principle
is at variance with every sentence of the Ephesian.
(He continually exhorts menAas we have seen /to arise, get out of their lethargy and wake up. His most pungent sarcasm is directed against the people who are in a state of indifference, sleepiness, contentment (frags. 2, 3, 5, 94, 95, etc.). The highest good with Hera- clitus, therefore, is the greatest intellectually activity, the* greatest receptivity to the divine reason around us, the greatest freedom from individual peculiarities and the greatest possession of that which is universal. ^* Human nature," he says, ^* does not possess under- standing, but the divine does " (frag. 96). We must look away from ourselves to Nature around us. We must follow the universal Reason therein expressed. Proximately for men this is best f oimd in the common, the normal, the customary, finally therefore in public law.
It will thus be noticed that we have in Heraclitus
an emphatic expression of the type of ethics peculiar
-i;o the Greeks. Of the individual he thought little.
*^ To me one is ten thousand if he be the b^st " (frag.
113). He blamed the Ephesians for their declaration
Reconstructive. 71
of democracy (frag. 114)^ He would not have been able to appreciate those modern systems of ethics which make a moral law out of individual conscience and justify actions by good intentions. Heraclitus, as well as psychologists of recent times, seemed to appre- ciate the dangers of self -in volution. Hlis whole sys- tem is a protest against individual intensification^ He , . ^ will not have men roll themselves into a cocoon of a V^^j single system, or revolve in the circle of a single set of ' ^^^ W i ideas. He will have them throw themselves open to "^^^ '^O the common light, keep every sense open and recep- tive to new impressions, and thereby attain truth, which is found in the universal alone.
The optimism which Pfleiderer justifies for Hera-
clitus does not stand in contradiction to the misan-
thropy that we have found to characterize him. His
optimism was thoroughly Leibnizian. It was reasoned
optimism, resulting in the strong conviction that the
world is good, rational and orderly. Most men, to be
sure, are fools, but it is their own fault, as they will
not put themselves in right relation to the world.
Gottlob Mayer, in a pamphlet entitled " Heraklit von
Ephesus und Arthur Schopenhauer," has been at pains
to prove that Heraclitus is a Schopenhauer pessimist.
We cannot regard his attempt as successful. Our
study of the Ephesian philosopher in the preceding
pages has shown nothing more clearly than that (the
logical result of his metaphysics is not^s this author
claims J pessimism, but quite the opposite^ None of the
passages' which he cites (cp. frags. 86, 55, 84, 66, 20,
111) can be made to yield any pessimism beyond mis-
anthropy, imless possibly the one from Lucian (Vit.
Auct. c. U,SNHTHI. ri r^p d accou iauu; HPA-
KAEITOS, ;ra«'c nai^wvy rceaaeuwi^, dcafepofievoc:^ cp. frag.
72 HERACLITUS.
79), where Time is compared to a child at play, now
arranging, now scattering the pebbles. And yet noth-
ing is conclusive from this. It refers evidently to
the periodic creation and destruction of the world.
Whether this world building is a pastime of Jove, or
the product of fate or of love, makes no difference in
this case, provided only the resulting world is one well
disposed and rational.
CWhat has given rise to the reviving interest in Hera-
clitu^ attested by the monographs which have lately
appeared ? (The modem world hardly hopes to get any
new light from his oracular sayings gathered in muti-
lated fragments from Philo and Plutarch, from Cle-
ment and Origen. J Such unhoped for light, however,
as our introductory study has shown, may for some
minds be found breaking in after all. (jBut the interest
in the philosopher of Ephesus is historical. The new
discovery of the present half century is that the way
to study philosophy is to study its history, and especi-
ally its genesis. The passion for origins has carried
the interest back to Greek philosophy, and finally back
to the beginnings of Greek philosophy. But there is
still another reason for going back?) In the confusion
arising from the fall of the idealistic philosophy in
Germany, it was first thought that it would be neces-
sary to return to Kant and secure a new footing ; not
that any new light was seen emanating from Kant,
but error having arisen, it was necessary to trace it to
its source.
(j'his movement has neither been successful nor does
it promise to be?^ In fact, there is a certain weariness
in philosophy of the whole modem subjective method.
Reconstructive. 73
The result has been that thinkers have turned away
from it to the one objective side of modern philosophy,
namely, the sciences. Those, however, who still retain
their love of philosophy in its larger sense, are going
back farther than Kant. They see that the whole
Hume-Kantian-Fichtean movement was a digression,
a sort of branch road, which to be sure had to be
explored before philosophy could go on in safety, but
which was found to lead nowhere in particular, and
that, having thanked these investigators for their ser-
vices rendered, we may decline to concern ourselves
further with this digression, but go on with our search
for objective results. . In this search our starting point
must be from that philosophy which is most free
from this whole subjective tendency. Such is the
philosophy of Greece. Considering therefore that the
introspective method has not proved so fruitful as
was hoped, and that it is at least more modest if not
more rational to regard man as a part of Nature, rather
than Nature as a part of man, students of philosophy
are turning their attention to the Greek philosophers
wjhere the freer and more ingenuous conception rules.
(^These two causes, therefore, the former, the passion
for studying the origin and development of thought and
the connection of different systems of thought, the
latter, the need of disinfecting our minds from all the
germs of a pathological introspective habit, and putting
ourselves as an experiment in the position of those
who took it for granted that Nature was larger than
man, have led us back to Greek philosophy and
especially to its sources.
In either of these aspects Heraclitus is important.
He is a perfect, by all means the most perfect,.illustra-
tion of those qualities which are usually supposed to
74 HERACLITUS.
characterize the Greek mind, namely, receptivity, un- prejudiced freedom of thought, love of order, and trust- ful confidence in the unity of man and Naturel) Of all the Greek schools these qualities were best represented by the Ionian thinkers who, coming before what has been called ** the fall of man in Socrates,'' were free from the later dialectical disturbances. And of the lonians, Heraclitus, the last, best incorporates them. But it is in the other aspect that the philosopher of Ephesus is most important, namely, in the origin and history of ideas. Let us notice simamarily what has CfmBjxQS^ him. j /<tiPo Heraclitus we trace the philosophy of change, ^/l^ • prominent in subsequent Greek philosophy as ^qri^oftewu, the indirect cause of the counter movement of Socrates and Plato with its powerful determining influences, central in modem times as motion in the philosophy of Hobbes and the ground principle in the important system of Trendelenburg, and finally in a logical trans- formation, prominent in both German and English thought as Werden or Becoming. //To Heraclitus we trace the notion of Relativity, the central point in the doctrine of the Sophists^j which by withdrawing every absolute standard of truth, threatened to destroy all knowledge and all faith, and which sent Socrates searching for something permanent and fixed in the concepts of the human mind, and so led to the finished results of Plato and AristotleiCiiro Heraclitus we trace some of the fundamental doctrines of the Stoics, namely, their abrogation of the antithesis of mind and matter and their return to pre-Socratic monism, their conception of Nature as larger than man and his com- plete subjection to it, and finally their doctrine of the future conflagration of the world, later an influential factor in Christianity^
Keconstructivb. 76
These were the thoughts which were most important in their determining influence upon subsequent philo- sophy. The following, while in themselves no less im- portant, were less directly involved in the history of opinion. <>pf these the first i^Ahe notion of JLaw and Order absolute and immanent in the world, an idea so large that no Greek follower could grasp it, and yet vital to Heraclitus' system,yfor without it his philo- sophy becomes the philosophy of desperation, the source among the ingenuous Greeks of the nihilism of Gor- gias or the universal doubt of the skeptics, and among the brooding modems the source of the pessimism of Schopenhauer. ^\To Heraclitus again we trace) as Teichmiiller has shown/the closely related doctrine of the immanence of God in the world, so that we have in him one source of the pantheistic systems. 6,To Hera- clitus, finally, we trace the physical law of opposites, > the thought that all order and harmony and apparent permanence are the result of opposite tension, the bal- ance of centrifugal and centripetal forces. (Less in- volved in the history of philosophy, though most im- portant to Heraclitus, and in themselves most interest- ing to us of modern times, are his great ethical thoughts ) Thich we have already outlined. The determinative ideas of the Ephesian may be summed up in ^ word by saying that they represent all that way of thinking against which Socrates and Plato raised the whole weight of their authority/ Without repeating here the facts, well enough known to everybody, of the Socratic reaction in Greek philo- sophy, we must sketch one or two phases of it in order to establish the influence and explain the final defeat of the Heraclitic philosophy. /^In Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, philosophy underwent a change more radical
76 HERACLITUS.
than any other in its history, a change that was ulti-
mately to revolutionize all thought, and through its
influence on Christian theology, to enter as a large
determining element into all western civilization.
Heraclitus is the representative of what philosophy
was before that change.^
Socrates said he couTd not understand the book of
Heraclitus. ^That was not strange. The Ephesian
could have told him the reason why. The man who
could learn nothing from the fields and trees (see
Plato's Phaedrus, p. 230), who spent all his time in
the Agora conversing with other men about virtue,
and who never seemed to realize that there was a
world above the heads and under the feet of men,
was not likely to understand the book of Heraclitus.
Could the Ephesian philosopher have taken the Atheni-
an logician out and given him a few lessons from Nature
at first hand, could he have induced him to desist for a
while from his boring into human intellects in search
of a definition, and got his gaze lifted up to the clouds
and stars, and put him in actual contact with the
nepci^oi^, he would have been an apter scholar with the
book. But it is quite impossible even in fancy to
think of these two men together. The conmiuner
with Nature, the stern misanthropic sage and prophet
of Ephesus had no points in conunon with the society-
loving Athenian sophist. They were radically differ-
ent, and on this difference hangs the secret of the
development of philosophy for two thousand years.
Socrates was not a Greek at all. He denied the most
characteristic traits of his nation. He was a modern
in many true senses. He was a curiosity at Athens,
and consequently very much in vogue.