CHAPTER IV.

HERACLITUS AND DEMOCRITUS-ANAXAGORAS-EMPEDOCLES.

ALTHOUGH Heraclitus preceded Democritus by upwards of half a century, and their systems were utterly opposed, their names are mentioned together because their characters present such a curious contrast.

Heraclitus was called the "Weeping," Democritus the Laughing" Philosopher.

Heraclitus was more inclined to allow his mind to soar, endeavouring to grasp lofty ideas from which he reasoned down to appearances as they seemed to his senses. Democritus was a close, logical thinker.

Heraclitus was born at Ephesus some five hundred years before Christ. Some have believed him the pupil, or at least the follower, of Xenophanes, but he boasted that he" taught himself."

The speech indicates the man. He was one of those beings whose intense self-esteem is their mental ruin; who retire from the outside world which continually wounds their vanity until they, as it were, mentally turn upon themselves and tear themselves to pieces. For when Self is the last companion left, it is apt to behave and to be treated like the rest.

Before we inspect his philosophy, it is as well to glance at his life.

This seems to have been one long sneer. He sneered at the "follies and vices of mankind." In his own estimation, but one human being "did as he ought to have done," and that one was himself.

Yet his much-despised fellow-creatures treated him with consideration, and probably endured him patiently because of his mental gifts. For instance, his fellowcitizens tried to propitiate him by offering him the chief magistracy of the city-a high compliment, which, if not accepted, should at least have been received in a wellbred manner. But Heraclitus, though by his own profession a stern aristocrat, despising "the people,” hardly behaved on this occasion like the gentleman he wished himself to be considered. He refused the honour, because of the " dissolute morals" of those who offered it! And when ostentatiously playing with some children near the celebrated temple of Diana, he replied to some of his acquaintances who passed by and were naturally surprised to see the dignified sage stooping so far, "It is better to play with children than to share in the government with you."

A rude reply, which was, if possible, exceeded in his extraordinary letter to King Darius, written in answer to that monarch's invitation to him to spend some time at his court.

"All men," stated the pompous document, "depart from the paths of truth and justice. They have no attachment of any kind but avarice; they only aspire to a vainglory with the obstinacy of folly. As for me, I know not malice: I am the enemy of no one. I utterly despise the vanity of courts, and never will place my foot on Persian ground. Content with little, I live as I please.”

After such a letter to a king, it is perhaps as well that Heraclitus did not set foot in his territory, especially as Darius was of warlike tendencies, and scarcely disposed to encourage aggression. He certainly did better, for a man of so misanthropic a temperament. He retired to a mountainous district, where he is said to have lived on herbs and roots,-diet scarcely calculated to amend his severe views on the subject of human life.

This lonely existence served two ends.

Among the grand slopes of the Grecian hills, under a sky whose varied and ever-changing beauty would in itself furnish ideas for the lifetime of any meditative mind, Heraclitus doubtless developed his philosophical theories, and may possibly have written his work on Nature.

But it brought him to his death. His herbiverous diet. produced a dropsical complaint, which drove him back among the common herd he so much despised.

It must have been bitter to the man-hater to find himself subject to the same conditions as the rest of his kind. He condescended to seek medical advice, but gave such an unintelligible account of his disease that they could do nothing for him. A tradition runs that the essentially grandiloquent philosopher came to a strange end, an end that seemed as it were an irony upon that life whose conditions he had defied.

He expired on a dunghill, where he had taken refuge with some idea in his head that its warmth might dissolve the water that was rapidly accumulating in his illused body.

It was a strange spot for such a mind to depart from its frame. Heraclitus' ideas were lofty, although communicated so obscurely that Socrates remarked "it would require a Delian diver to explore his depths."

His peculiar character of shrinker from everything and every one, always retreating into his shell of contemptuous opposition as a snail into his shell, led, perhaps, to his rejection of ordinary phraseology, the simple mode of expression used by the million.

He, Heraclitus, the lofty and exceptional, must use lofty and exceptional means to communicate his thoughts. So his wonderful ideas lie hidden beneath a confused heap of parabolic images. Instead of boldly stating his opinions, he goes out of the way to hint at them. You have almost to make out what the opinion is from what it is not.

You will ask, why are the opinions of this morbid mind wonderful, and what are they?

They are wonderful because they in reality founded two great Philosophical Schools. From that source,—the mind of Heraclitus,-that lived hidden in the mountains like the mountain spring, issued two separate streams of thought, which, gathering as they went, are found in later ages powerful rivers of idea, overpowering obstacles, feeding and influencing the mental lands they pass through,— and these were Stoicism and Pantheism.

What are the opinions?

The system that contains the original ideas of Heraclitus is in brief this :

:

That the whole Universe is One eternal and almighty Unity, including everything. Thus, separated minds are mere sparks of the One, which for lack of a better term he called Fire.

This unity of the created and the Creator is Pantheism. The great modern Pantheists, Spinoza, Hegel, and others, are the followers of Heraclitus.

Heraclitus said that you exist, and do not exist. . . meaning, of course, that to yourself and others like yourself you appear to have a separate existence, but all the time you are merely a minute Atom of the Great Mind, therefore you can lay claim but to an existence in part.

Hegel assumed this idea in a developed form (which can merely be alluded to here).

He said, Being and Nothing, or Notbeing, were one and the same. At first sight, or rather, the first time these strange mystical sayings are presented to our minds, they appear almost absurdities. If we did not know that they were part of the only Science which dares treat of Eternity and its mysteries, many-especially practical peoplewould say, What nonsense!" and consider time spent reading "such stuff" so much time wasted.

These have scarcely allowed themselves time to apprehend the meaning of the strange words.

If they seem strange or absurd, you should hold them

in your mind, excluding all other thoughts, looking at them mentally as you would examine with your eyes something strange you had found and were holding in your hand, in which the longer you looked the more you would see. While your mind, dazed and half blinded as it always is by the millions of objects that claim its attention, holds and contemplates a new and puzzling thought, by degrees the Thought or mental object grows clearer and clearer. What was muddled and confused begins to separate and stand out in relief, till at last you see the object as quite another thing altogether to what you first took it for.

The greater your gift of abstraction,-which is the power to turn your mind with all its qualities upon whatever you please, treating it, in fact, as a bull's-eye lantern,-the more quickly will you apprehend or comprehend the wonderful truths the philosophers do their best to convey in words.

The plain fact is, that there are no words adapted to the science of Causes, therefore the difficulty.

When Heraclitus said that the human mind is and is not at the same time, he supplemented the idea by a sort of explanation. In sleep, he said, there is as it were a veil drawn between your Intelligence and the Divine,— not sufficient to separate you therefrom, which is impossible, but to interrupt the flow of Life, to which you owe reason, &c. "Man in himself," said he, "would be the

coal without the fire."

The work from whose fragments, pieced together, his ideas have been collected, was called " On Nature," and was in three parts. The first was the All." The second was devoted to political, the third to theological, subjects.

His physical doctrines anticipated those of the Stoics, the sect founded by Zeno,-which we shall consider later Lewes considers that Heraclitus stands " with one foot on the Ionian path, the other on the Italian." But he seemed more to have come in their way, and with his

on.