THE SECOND EPOCH.

CHAPTER I.

HERACLITUS.

"LIFE is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." This, Horace Walpole's epigram, may be applied to Democritus and Heraclitus, celebrated throughout antiquity as the laughing and the weeping philosophers.

"One pitied-one condemned the woful times;

One laugh'd at follies, and one wept o'er crimes."

Modern criticism has indeed pronounced both these characteristics to be fabulous; but fables themselves are only exaggerations of truth, and there must have been something in each of these philosophers which formed the nucleus round which the fables grew. Of Heraclitus it has been well said, "The vulgar notion of him as the crying philosopher must not be wholly discarded, as if it meant nothing, or had no connexion with the history of his speculations. The thoughts which came forth in his system are like fragments torn from his own personal being, and not torn from it without such an effort and violence as must needs have drawn a sigh from the sufferer.

"If Anaximenes discovered that he had within him a power and principle which ruled over all the

acts and functions of his bodily frame, Heraclitus found that there was a life within him which he could not call his own, and yet it was, in the very highest sense, himself, so that without it he would have been a poor, helpless, isolated creature; an universal life, which connected him with his fellowmen, with the absolute source and original fountain of life." *

Heraclitus was the son of Blyson, and was born at Ephesus, about the 69th Olymp. Of a haughty melancholy temper, he refused the supreme magistracy which his fellow-citizens offered him, on account of their dissolute morals, according to Diogenes Laertius; but, as he declined the offer in favour of his brother, we are disposed to think his rejection was grounded on some other cause. Is not his rejection of magistracy in perfect keeping with what else we know of him? For instance: Playing with some children near the temple of Diana, he answered those who expressed surprise at seeing him thus occupied, "Is it not better to play with children, than to share with you the administration of affairs?" The contempt which pierces through this reply, and which subsequently became confirmed misanthropy, is rather the result of morbid meditation, than of virtuous scorn. Was it because the citizens were corrupt that he refused to exert himself to make them virtuous? Was it because the citizens were corrupt that he retired to the mountains, and there lived on herbs and roots, like an ascetic? If Ephesus was dissolute, was there not the rest of Greece for him to make a home of? He fled to the mountains, that he might there, in secret, prey on his own heart. He was a misan* Ency. Metrop.'

thrope; but misanthropy is madness, not virtuous indignation; misanthropy is a morbid consciousness of self, not a sorrowful opinion formed of others. The aim of his life had been, as he says, to explore the depths of his own nature. This has been the aim of all ascetics, as of all philosophers: but in the former it is morbid anatomy; in the latter it is science.

The contemptuous letter in which he declined the courteous invitation of Darius to spend some time at his court, will best explain our view of his character:

"Heraclitus of Ephesus to the King Darius, son of Hystaspes, health!

"All men depart from the paths of truth and justice. They have no attachment of any kind but avarice; they only aspire to a vain-glory with the obstinacy of folly. As for me, I know not malice; I am the envy 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."

Misanthropy was the nucleus of the fable of Heraclitus as a weeping philosopher, who refused the magistracy because the citizens were corrupt. More than this we cannot ascertain. The story of his attempting to cure himself of a dropsy by throwing himself on a dunghill, hoping that the heat would cause the water within him to evaporate, is apocryphal.

The Philosophy of Heraclitus was, and is, the subject of dispute. He expressed himself in such enigmatical terms, that he was called "the Obscure." A few fragments have been handed down

to us.* From these it would be vain to hope that a consistent system could be evolved; but from them and from other sources we may gather the general tendency of his doctrines.

The tradition which assigns him Xenophanes as a teacher is borne out by the evident relation of their systems. Heraclitus is somewhat more Ionian than Xenophanes, that is to say, in him the physiological explanation of the universe is more prominent than the Eleatic explanation; at the same time, Heraclitus is neither frankly an Ionian, nor an Italian; he wavers between the two. The pupil of Xenophanes would naturally regard human knowledge as a mist of error, through which the sunlight only gleamed at intervals. But the inheritor of the Ionian doctrines would not adopt the conclusion of the Mathematical school, viz., that the cause of this uncertainty of knowledge, was the uncertainty of sensuous impressions; and that consequently Reason was the only fountain of truth. Heraclitus was not mathematician enough for such a doctrine. He was led to maintain a doctrine directly opposed to it. He maintained that the senses are the sources of all true knowledge, for they drink in the universal intelligence. The senses deceive only when they belong to barbarian souls; in other words, the ill-educated sense gives false impressions; the rightly-educated sense gives truth. Whatever is common is true; whatever is remote from the common, i. e. the exceptional, is false. The True is the Unhidden.† Those whose senses

*Schleiermacher has collected, and endeavoured to interpret them, in Wolf and Butmann's Museum der Alterthumswissenschaften,' vol. i. part iii.

† ἀληθὲς τὸ μὴ λῆθον. This play upon words is very characteristic of metaphysical thinkers, and is common to all ages.

are open to receive the Unhidden, the Universal, attain truth.

As if to mark the distinction between himself and Xenophanes more forcibly, he says: "Inhaling through the breath the Universal Ether, which is Divine Reason, we become conscious. In sleep we are unconscious; but on waking we again become intelligent: for, in sleep, when the organs of sense are closed, the mind within is shut out from all sympathy with the surrounding ether, the universal Reason; and the only connecting medium is the breath, as it were a root; and by this separation the mind loses the power of recollection it before possessed. Nevertheless, on awakening, the mind repairs its memory through the senses, as it were through inlets; and thus, coming into contact with the surrounding ether, it resumes its intelligence. As fuel when brought near the fire is altered and becomes fiery, but, on being removed, again becomes quickly extinguished: so too the portion of the all-embracing which sojourns in our body becomes more irrational when separated from it; but, on the restoration of this connexion, through its many pores or inlets, it again becomes similar to the whole."

Can anything be more opposed to the Eleatic doctrine? That system rests on the certitude of pure Reason; this declares that Reason left to itself, i. e. the mind when it is not nourished by the senses, can have no true knowledge. The one system is exclusively rational, the other exclusively material; but both are pantheistical, for in both it is the universal Intelligence which becomes conscious in man. A conception pushed to its ultimate limits by Hegel. Accordingly, Hegel declares that