loses its way, now in the origin of the being, now in its
destruction, and is unable to apprehend anything lasting or really
existing. For, as Heraclitus says, we cannot swim twice in the same
wave, neither can we lay hold of a mortal being twice in the same
state, for, through the violence and rapidity of movement, it is
destroyed and recomposed; it comes into being and again decays; it
comes and goes. Therefore, that which is becoming can neither attain
real existence, because growth neither ceases nor pauses. Change
begins in the germ, and forms an embryo; then there appears a child,
then a youth, a man, and an old man; the first beginnings and
successive ages are continually annulled by the ensuing ones. Hence it
is ridiculous to fear one death, when we have already died in so many
ways, and are still dying. For, as Heraclitus says, not only is the
death of fire the birth of air, and the death of air the birth of
water, but the same change may be still more plainly seen in man. The
strong man dies when he becomes old, the youth when he becomes a man,
the boy on becoming a youth, and the child on becoming a boy. What
existed yesterday dies to-day, what is here to-day will die to-morrow.
Nothing endures or is a unity, but we become many things, whilst
matter wanders around one image, one common form. For if we were
always the same, how could we take pleasure in things which formerly
did not please us, how could we love and hate, admire and blame
opposite things, how could we speak differently and give ourselves up
to different passions, unless we were endowed with a different shape,
form, and different senses? For no one can rightly come into a
different state without change, and one who is changed is no longer
the same; but if he is not the same, he no longer exists and is
changed from what he was, becoming something else. Sense-perception
only led us astray, because we do not know real being, and mistook for
it that which is only an appearance."[2]

Plutarch often describes himself as an initiate. What he portrays here
is a condition of the life of the Mystic. Man acquires a kind of
wisdom by means of which his spirit sees through the illusive
character of sense-life. What the senses regard as being, or reality,
is plunged into the stream of "becoming"; and man is subject to the
same conditions in this respect as all other things in the world.
Before the eyes of his spirit he himself dissolves, the sum-total of
hi