“Obscure.” Socrates said of his work that what he under-
stood of it was excellent, what not, he believed was equally
so, but that the book required a tough swimmer. He has
even been accused of intentional obscurity. But there does
not seem to be any foundation for this charge. The fact is
that if he takes no great trouble to explain his thoughts,
neither does he take any trouble to conceal them. He does
not write for fools. His attitude appears to be that if his
readers understand him, well; if not, so much the worse for
his readers. He wastes no time in elaborating and explain-
ing his thought, but embodies it in short, terse, pithy, and
pregnant sayings.
His philosophical principle is the direct antithesis of Eleati-
cism. The Eleatics had taught that only Being is, and
Becoming is not at all. All change, all Becoming is mere
illusion. For Heracleitus, on the contrary, only Becoming
is, and Being, permanence, identity, these are nothing but
illusion. All things sublunary are {74} perpetually chang-
ing, passing over into new forms and new shapes. Nothing
stands, nothing holds fast, nothing remains what it is. “Into
the same river,” he says, “we go down, and we do not go
down; for into the same river no man can enter twice; ever it
flows in and flows out.” Not only does he deny all absolute
permanence, but even a relative permanence of things is
declared to be illusory. We all know that everything has its
term, that all things arise and pass away, from the insects
who live an hour to the “eternal” hills. Yet we commonly
attribute to these things at least a relative permanence, a
shorter or longer continuance in the same state. But even
this Heracleitus will not allow. Nothing is ever the same,
nothing remains identical from one consecutive moment to
another. The appearance of relative permanence is an il-
lusion, like that which makes us think that a wave passing
over the surface of the water remains all the time the same
identical wave. Here, as we know, the water of which the
wave is composed changes from moment to moment, only
the form remaining the same. Precisely so, for Heracleitus,
the permanent appearance of things results from the inflow
and outflow in them of equivalent quantities of substance.
“All is flux.” It is not, for example, the same sun which
sets to-day and rises to-morrow. It is a new sun. For the
fire of the sun burns itself out and is replenished from the
vapours of the sea.Not only do things change from moment to moment. Even
in one and the same moment they are and are not the same.
It is not merely that a thing first is, and then a moment
afterwards, is not. It both is and is not at the same time.
The at-onceness of “is” and “is not” {75} is the meaning of
Becoming. We shall understand this better if we contrast
it with the Eleatic principle. The Eleatics described all
things under two concepts, Being and not-being. Being
has, for them, all truth, all reality. Not-being is wholly false
and illusory. For Heracleitus both Being and not-being are
equally real. The one is as true as the other. Both are
true, for both are identical. Becoming is the identity of
Being and not-being. For Becoming has only two forms,
namely, the arising of things and their passing away, their
beginning and their end, their origination and their decease.
Perhaps you may think that this is not correct, that there
are other forms of change besides origination and decease.