Heraclitus

 (Excerpt from Heroes of History by Will Durant)

At Ephesus, whose temple to Artemis Diana was among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world, Heraclitus, three hundred years before Plato, expounded in enigmatic apothegms a philosophy of evolution which must have delighted Hegel, Darwin, Spencer and Nietzsche.

 

Two ideas fascinated him.

Change is universal, and energy is indestructible and everlasting.

Nothing is, everything becomes.

Everything is always ceasing to be what it is

and becoming what it will be.

"all things flow" (Panta rei),

and "you can never dip your foot in the same water in a flowing stream";

The universe is one vast, restless, ceaseless, "Becoming."

Here in a sentence or two, is half the philosophy that Hegel expounded in 1830 A.D.

 

But under the flux, 

Heraclitus saw a never-diminished reality which he called "Fire",

by which he seems to have meant "force" or "energy."

The individual soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life.

Man is a fitful moment in that flame. "Kindled and put out like a light in the dark."

God is the eternal Fire, the omnipresent energy of the fluent world. 

In the universal flux anything can in time change into its opposite; 

good can become evil, evil can become good,

life becomes death, death becomes life.

Opposites are two sides of the same thing;

Strength is the tension of opposites;

"Strife" (Competition) "is the father of all and the kin of all;

Some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men;

some he made slaves, and some free."

In the end, Heraclitus concluded, "strife is justice"; the competition of individuals, groups, institutions, states and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.