History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2): Revised EditionDraper, John William
History
History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2): Revised Edition
Draper, John William
Europe -- Civilization
But Heraclitus totally fails to free himself from local conceptions. He
speaks of the motion of the primordial principle in the upward and
downward directions, in the higher and lower regions. He says that the
chief accumulation thereof is above, and the chief deficiency below: and
hence he regards the soul of a man as a portion of fire migrated from
heaven. He carries his ideas of the transitory nature of all phenomena
to their last consequences, and illustrates the noble doctrine that all
which appears to us to be permanent is only a regulated and
self-renewing concurrence of similar and opposite motions by such
extravagances as that the sun is daily destroyed and renewed.
[Sidenote: Physical and physiological doctrines of Heraclitus.]
In the midst of many wild physical statements many true axioms are
delivered. "All is ordered by reason and intelligence, though all is
subject to Fate." Already he perceived what the metaphysicians of our
own times are illustrating, that "man's mind can produce no certain
knowledge from its own interior resources alone." He regarded the organs
of sense as being the channels through which the outer life of the
world, and therewith truth, enters into the mind, and that in sleep,
when the organs of sense are closed, we are shut out from all communion
with the surrounding universal spirit. In his view every thing is
animated and insouled, but to different degrees, organic objects being
most completely or perfectly so. His astronomy may be anticipated from
what has been said respecting the sun, which he moreover regarded as
being scarcely more than a foot in diameter, and, like all other
celestial objects, a mere meteor. His moral system was altogether based
upon the physical, the fundamental dogma being the excellence of fire.
Thus he accounted for the imbecility of the drunkard by his having a
moist soul, and drew the inference that a warm or dry soul is the wisest
and best; with justifiable patriotism asserting that the noblest souls
must belong to a climate that is dry, intending thereby to indicate that
Greece is man's fittest and truest country. There can be no doubt that
in Heraclitus there is a strong tendency to the doctrine of a soul of
the world. If the divinity is undistinguishable from heat, whither can
we go to escape its influences? And in the restless activity and
incessant changes it produces in every thing within our reach, do we not
recognize the tokens of the illimitable and unshackled?
[Sidenote: The puerility of Ionian philosophy.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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