could understand him. (Edmund Pfleiderer has already
collected the historical evidence for the relation of Heraclitus to
the Mysteries. _Cf._ his book _Die Philosophie des Heraklit von
Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee_. Berlin, 1886.) Heraclitus was
called "The Obscure," because it was only through the Mysteries that
light could be thrown on his intuitive views.

Heraclitus comes before us as a man who took life with the greatest
earnestness. We see plainly from his features, if we know how to
reconstruct them, that he bore within him intimate knowledge which he
knew that words could only indicate, not express. Out of such a temper
of mind arose his celebrated utterance, "All things fleet away," which
Plutarch explains thus: "We do not dip twice into the same wave, nor
can we touch twice the same mortal being. For through abruptness and
speed it disperses and brings together, not in succession but
simultaneously."

A man who thus thinks has penetrated the nature of transitory things,
for he has felt compelled to characterise the essence of
transitoriness itself in the clearest terms. Such a description as
this could not be given, unless the transitory were being measured by
the eternal, and in particular it could not be extended to man without
having seen his inner nature. Heraclitus has extended his
characterisation to man. "Life and death, waking and sleeping, youth
and age are the same; this in changing is that, and that again this."
In this sentence there is expressed full knowledge of the illusionary
nature of the lower personality. He says still more forcibly, "Life
and death are found in our living even as in our dying." What does
this mean but that it is only a transient point of view when we value
life more than death? Dying is to perish, in order to make way for new
life, but the eternal is living in the new life, as in the old. The
same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When we grasp
this eternal, we look upon life and death with the same feeling. Life
only has a special value when we have not been able to awaken the
eternal within us. The saying, "All things fleet away," might be
repeated a thousand times, but unless said in this feeling, it is an
empty sound. The knowledge of eternal growth is valueless if it does
not detach us from temporal growth. It is the turning away from that
love of life which impels towards the transitory, which Heraclitus
indicates in his utterance, "How can we s