f
transitory things, would not exist. But what is revealed in this
antagonism, what is poured forth into it, is not strife but harmony.
Just because there is strife in all things, the spirit of the wise
should pass over them like a breath of fire, and change them into
harmony.

At this point there shines forth one of the great thoughts of
Heraclitean wisdom. What is man as a personal being? From the above
point of view Heraclitus is able to answer. Man is composed of the
conflicting elements into which divinity has poured itself. In this
state he finds himself, and beyond this becomes aware of the spirit
within him,--the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. But the spirit
itself is born, for man, out of the conflict of elements, and it is
the first which has to calm them. In man, Nature surpasses her natural
limits. It is indeed the same universal force which created antagonism
and the mixture of elements which is afterwards, by its wisdom, to do
away with the conflict. Here we arrive at the eternal dualism which
lives in man, the perpetual antagonism between the temporal and the
eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite definite,
and out of this, he is to create something higher. He is both
dependent and independent. He can only participate in the eternal
Spirit whom he contemplates, in the measure of the compound of
elements which that eternal Spirit has effected within him. And it is
just on this account that he is called upon to fashion the eternal
out of the temporal. The spirit works within him, but works in a
special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of
the human soul that a temporal thing should be able to work like an
eternal one, should grow and increase in power like an eternal thing.
This is why the soul is at once like a god and a worm. Man, owing to
this, stands in a mid-position between God and animals. The growing
and increasing force within him is his daimonic element,--that within
him which pushes out beyond himself.

"Man's daimon is his destiny." Thus strikingly does Heraclitus make
reference to this fact. He extends man's vital essence far beyond the
personal. The personality is the vehicle of the daimon, which is not
confined within the limit of the personality, and for which the birth
and death of the personality are of no importance. What is the
relation of the daimonic element to the personality which comes and
goes? The personality is only a form for