he key to the Fourth Gospel. That thought
and reflection also are a divine service is only too readily forgotten.
Repeated reading and reflection are necessary to make the first verse of
the Fourth Gospel accessible and intelligible in a general way; but one
cannot be a true Christian without thinking and reflecting.

An explanation of Logos in Greek philosophy is much simpler than is
commonly supposed. It is only needful not to forget that for the Greeks
thought and word were inseparable, and that the same term, namely, Logos,
expressed both, though they distinguished the inner from the outer Logos.
It is one of the most remarkable aberrations of the human mind, to imagine
that there could be a word without thought or a thought without word. The
two are inseparable: one cannot exist or be even conceived without the
other. I believe that I have clearly shown in my _Science of Thought_ that
thought without word and word without thought are impossible and
inconceivable, and why it is so. Here is the first key to a historical
solution of the riddle at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel. We know that
Greek philosophy after making every possible effort to explain the world
mechanically, had already in the school of Anaxagoras reached the view
that the hylozoic as well as the atomic theory leaves the human mind
unsatisfied; and that it is necessary to posit as the origin of all things
a thought or thinking mind that manifests itself in the universe. This was
the _nous_, the mind, of Anaxagoras. He could just as well have called it
_Logos_, for the word was in use even before the time of Anaxagoras, to
express that reason, the recognition of whose all-pervading presence in
the universe was the great step in advance made by the system of
Anaxagoras. Even Heraclitus had divined the existence of reason in the
universe, and had applied to it the name Logos. While the masses
recognised in _Moira_ or _Heimarmene_ only destiny, or fate, Heraclitus
declared, that the essence of this Heimarmene is the _Logos_, the Reason
that pervades the world. This is the oldest expression of Hegel's thought,
"What is, is rational." We must not suppose, however, that Heraclitus
considered this Logos as identical with his fire. He merely says that the
fire is subordinate to the Logos, that it operates {~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK