to involve his {16} [23]
teaching. He wrote not for the vulgar, but for the gifted few. 'Much
learning makes not wise' was the motto of his work; the man of gift, of
insight, that man is better than ten thousand. He was savage in his
criticism of other writers, even the greatest. Homer, he said, and
Archilochus too, deserved to be hooted from the platform and thrashed.
Even the main purport of his writings was differently interpreted.
Some named his work 'The Muses,' as though it were chiefly a poetic
vision; others named it 'The sure Steersman to the Goal of Life';
others, more prosaically, 'A Treatise of Nature.'

[26]

The fundamental principle or fact of being Heraclitus formulated in the
famous dictum, 'All things pass.' In the eternal flux or flow of being
consisted its reality; even as in a river the water is ever changing,
and the river exists as a river only in virtue of this continual
change; or as in a living body, wherein while there is life there is no
stability or fixedness; stability and fixedness are the attributes of
the unreal image of life, not of life itself. Thus, as will be
observed, from the _material_ basis of being as conceived by Thales,
with only a very vague conception of the counter-principle of movement,
philosophy has wheeled round in Heraclitus to the other extreme; he
finds his permanent element in the negation of permanence; being or
reality consists in never 'being' but always 'becoming,' not in
stability but in change.

{17}

[27]

This eternal movement he pictures elsewhere as an eternal strife of
opposites, whose differences nevertheless consummate themselves in
finest harmony. Thus oneness emerges out of multiplicity, multiplicity
out of oneness; and the harmony of the universe is of contraries, as of
the lyre and the bow. _War_ is the father and king and lord of all
things. Neither god nor man presided at the creation of anything that
is; that which was, is that which is, and that which ever shall be;
even an ever-living Fire, ever kindling and ever being extinguished.

[28]

Thus in _Fire_, as an image or symbol of the underlying reality of
existence, Heraclitus advanced to the furthest limit attainable on
physical lines, for the expression of its essentially _motive_
character. That this Fire was no more than a symbol, suggested by the
special characteristics of fire in nature,--its subtlety, its mobility,
its power of penetrating all things and devouring all