else by the power of his thought.
Heraclitus, who wrote in a particularly haughty and oracular manner, and was unusual among the early
philosophers in criticizing others by name, castigated Xenophanes as one of several notable men to
whom learning had not taught sense. Yet he shared some concepts with him, including that of a unique
divine intelligence "which governs everything. Both men accepted the existence of other gods, but
looked for an overriding master purpose. Heraclitus said that the Intelligence 'does and does not want to
be called Zeus'. This, he is saying, is what your 'Zeus' really is, but it is an inadequate name. He also
speaks of the thunderbolt, Zeus' traditional weapon, as directing all things. He holds the cosmos to have
always existed, and to be a fire which is never extinguished, though not all parts of it are alight at once.
The parts that are not alight exist as other substances, convertible with fire at a measured rate, as goods
are for money. So he finds unity in the apparent diversity of the world by regarding everything as
participating in one great continuous process - a conception which a few centuries later was to form the
basis of Stoic cosmology. This process is controlled by divine agents of justice, and perhaps given
direction and momentum by the thunderbolt. It is characterized as 'strife' or 'war', because Heraclitus
sees the continuance of the cosmos as dependent upon the sustained differentiation of opposites. But
because of the underlying unity, apparent opposites are really aspects of the same thing. Heraclitus
collected many quite dissimilar examples to illustrate this paradox. Hot and cold, wet and dry, living and
dead, are not irreconcilable opposites, since things pass from one state to the other. The road up is the
same as the road down. Sea water is simultaneously drinkable (for fish) and undrinkable (for men). A
monkey may be at once handsome (by monkey standards) and ugly. In one extraordinary fragment
Heraclitus identifies day and night, summer and winter, war and peace, famine and abundance, as
different manifestations of God.
He did not offer answers to all the cosmological questions which exercised the Milesians - he had
nothing to say, for example, about the shape or support of the earth, or what there was outside the
cosmos - and there is reason to think that what lay at the centre of his interest was rather religion,
morality, and the destiny of the soul. The cosmic stock exchange, however, is the setting in which this is
seen. Souls die by turning into water, which dies in its turn by becoming earth; they thus participate in
the cyclic transformation of elements which, starting from fire, continues throughout the world. To
preserve one's soul one must keep it dry, especially by avoiding alcoholic and sexual indulgence. At
death, according to a plausible reconstruction of Heraclitus' theory, souls rise into the air, the damper
ones to the level of the moon, where they contribute to winter, night, and rain, drier ones to the purer
region of the sun and stars; some particularly favoured ones become the watchers of living and dead that
men call heroes. The cosmos is crowded with spirits. There is, moreover, a Great Year of 360 human
generations in which the balance swings between the dominance of damp and bright - a concept which
was to be developed further by Plato and the Stoics.
Heraclitus could not have arrived at such a system by pure reason, and it has many points of contact with
Zoroastrianism and with the Upanishads. In the latter, souls which fail to pass the moon return to earth
as rain and are reincarnated in whatever animal form is appropriate to their conduct in their last life. The
doctrine of reincarnation is not attested for Heraclitus, but it had gained a foothold in Greece in the mid
sixth century, a century or so later than in India. Pythagoras believed in it, and it was taken up by