A man is born. That is his origination. He dies. That
is his decease. Between his birth and his death there are
intermediate changes. He grows larger, grows older, grows
wiser or more foolish, his hair turns grey. So also the leaf
of a tree does not merely come into being and pass out
of being. It changes in shape, form, colour. From light
green it becomes dark green, and from dark green, yellow.
But there is after all nothing in all this except origination
and decease, not of the thing itself, but of its qualities.
The change from green to yellow is the decease of green
colour, the origination of yellow colour. Origination is the
passage of not-being into Being. Decease is the passage
of Being into not-being. Becoming, then, has in it only
the two factors of Being and not-being, and it means the
passing of one into the other. But this passage does not
mean, for Heracleitus, that at one moment there is Being,
and at the next moment not-being. It means that Being
and not-being are in everything at one and the same time.
Being is {76} not-being. Being has not-being in it. Take as
an example the problem of life and death. Ordinarily we
think that death is due to external causes, such as accident
or disease. We consider that while life lasts, it is what
it is, and remains what it is, namely life, unmixed with
death, and that it goes on being life until something comes
from outside, as it were, in the shape of external causes,
and puts an end to it. You may have read Metchnikoff’s
book “The Nature of Man.” In the course of that book he
develops this idea. Death, he says, is always due to external
causes. Therefore, if we could remove the causes, we could
conquer death. The causes of death are mostly disease and
accident, for even old age is disease. There is no reason why
science should not advance so far as to eliminate disease
and accident from life. In that case life might be made
immortal, or at any rate, indefinitely prolonged. Now this
is founded upon a confusion of ideas. No doubt death is
always due to external causes. Every event in the world is
determined, and wholly determined, by causes. The law of
causation admits of no exception whatever. Therefore it is
perfectly true that in every case of death causes precede it.
But, as I explained in the last chapter, [Footnote 6] to give
the cause is not to give any reason for an event. Causation
is never a principle of explanation of anything. It tells us
that the phenomenon A is invariably and unconditionally
followed by the phenomenon B, and we call A the cause
of B. But this only means that whenever B happens, it
happens in a certain regular order and succession of events.
But it does not tell us why B happens at all. The reason
of a thing is to be {77} distinguished from its cause. The
reason why a man dies is not to be found in the causes
which bring about his death. The reason rather is that life
has the germ of death already in it, that life is already death
potentially, that Being has not-being in it. The causation
of death is merely the mechanism, by the instrumentality of
which, through one set of causes or another, the inevitable
end is brought about.[Footnote 6: Page 64.]Not only is Being, for Heracleitus, identical with not-being,
but everything in the universe has in it its own opposite.
Every existent thing is a “harmony of opposite tensions.”
A harmony contains necessarily two opposite principles
which, in spite of their opposition, reveal an underlying