2. The single cosmic substance below the changes of nature is _un_changeable. To the Milesians the more moving is matter, the more alive is it. Life and activity are the same thing. To Xenophanes this is not the case, but, on the contrary, the opposite is true. He conceives God to be a definite sphere that is unchangeable and homogeneous. The material substance, God, always remains the same. “He has no need of going about, now hither, now thither, in order to carry out his wishes; but he governs all men without toil.” Xenophanes thus becomes the forerunner of the Eleatic school. =3. Heracleitus, “the Misanthropist” and “the Obscure”= (about 563–470 B. C.). Heracleitus was a native of Ephesus, belonged to the aristocracy, and suffered at the hands of the democracy. He wrote a treatise that was difficult to understand even by the ancients, some fragments of which are preserved. He was called the “weeping philosopher” because of his misanthropy, and also the “dark philosopher” because of the obscurity of his writings. He was a theorist rather than a physicist, and his doctrines foreshadow our modern physical theories. His name is coupled with that of Parmenides in the deep impression he made upon Greek thought. From his complacent and gloomy retirement he looked forth upon the world around him with profound contempt, as did the Stoics after him. a. =Heracleitus’ Doctrine of Absolute and Universal Change.= The wonder which the Ionians felt, that nature phenomena change into one another, found its liveliest expression in Heracleitus. He not only found that mutability was the primal aspect of nature phenomena, but he also pointed out that human experiences also had their rapid and complete transitions. Especially was he fond of citing the changes of opposites into each other. But what shows his development over the early Milesian doctrine was his isolation of the aspect of change from the Milesian conception of the cosmic matter, thereby affirming that abiding permanence is an illusion. It is one thing to affirm that reality is essentially change; it is another to universalize change by affirming that the permanent has no existence. The Milesian doctrine was too naïve to go as far as that. Heracleitus piles up figures of speech to show that there is no permanence whatever. All existing things are only “becoming”-things, passing-away things. Being is always becoming, about-to-be. The only unchanging thing is change. “You cannot step into the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger.” “All things flow” (πάντα ῥεῖ). What abides and deserves the name of Deity is not thing, but motion――Becoming.