73. In studying this alternate advance of fire and water, it will be
convenient to start with the microcosm. We have more definite
information about the two exhalations in man than about the analogous
processes in the world at large, and it would seem that Herakleitos
himself explained the world by man rather than man by the world. In a
well-known passage, Aristotle implies that soul is identical with the
dry exhalation,[385] and this is fully confirmed by the fragments. Man
is made up of three things, fire, water, and earth. But, just as in the
macrocosm fire is identified with the one wisdom, so in the microcosm
the fire alone is conscious. When it has left the body, the remainder,
the mere earth and water, is altogether worthless (fr. 85). Of course,
the fire which animates man is subject to the “upward and downward
path,” just as much as the fire of the world. The Περὶ διαίτης has
preserved the obviously Herakleitean sentence: “All things are passing,
both human and divine, upwards and downwards by exchanges.”[386] We are
just as much in perpetual flux as anything else in the world. We are and
are not the same for two consecutive instants (fr. 81). The fire in us
is perpetually becoming water, and the water earth; but, as the opposite
process goes on simultaneously, we appear to remain the same.[387]
Footnote 385:
Arist. _de An._ Α, 2. 405 a 25 (R. P. 38). Diels attributes to
Herakleitos himself the words καὶ ψυχαὶ δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν ὑγρῶν ἀναθυμιῶνται,
which are found in Areios Didymos after fr. 42. I can hardly believe,
however, that the _word_ ἀναθυμίασις is Herakleitean. He seems rather
to have called the two exhalations καπνός and ἀήρ (cf. fr. 37).
Footnote 386:
Περὶ διαίτης, i. 5, χωρεῖ δὲ πάντα καὶ θεῖα καὶ ἀνθρώπινα ἄνω καὶ κάτω
ἀμειβόμενα.
Footnote 387:
We seem to have a clear reference to this in Epicharmos, fr. 2, Diels
(170 b, Kaibel): “Look now at men too. One grows and another passes
away, and all are in change always. What changes in its substance
(κατὰ φύσιν) and never abides in the same spot, will already be
something different from what has passed away. So thou and I were
different yesterday, and are now quite other people, and again we
shall become others and never the same again, and so on in the same
way.” This is put into the mouth of a debtor who does not wish to pay.
See Bernays on the αὐξανόμενος λόγος (_Ges. Abh._ i. pp. 109 sqq.).
[Sidenote: (_a_) Sleeping and waking.]
74. This, however, is not all. Man is subject to a certain oscillation
in his “measures” of fire and water, and this gives rise to the
alternations of sleeping and waking, life and death. The _locus
classicus_ on this subject is a passage of Sextus Empiricus, which
reproduces the account of the Herakleitean psychology given by
Ainesidemos (Skeptic, _c._ 80-50 B.C.).[388] It is as follows (R. P.
41):—
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