before it. Even these, however, since they are
parts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yet
zealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on
something invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or
enjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and
little joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal
mist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole no
pertinent direction.

[Sidenote: The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.]

In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients
led a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as
men might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped
at once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thus
giving that background to human life which shrewd observation would
always have descried, and which modern science has laboriously
rediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,
what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being.
Heraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant and
pervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could be
arrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was
instability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains
the empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division
which Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel
again the absolute aptness of Heraclitus's expressions. These were
thought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating
and direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and
reflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who
discloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but
innocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism,
scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried
to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous
enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to
its direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of
immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does
not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a
transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.

[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate.]