By this denunciation of the mischief of private judgment, Herakleitus did not mean to say that a man ought to think like his neighbours or like the public. In his view the public were wrong, collectively as well as individually. The universal reason to which he made appeal, was not the reason of most men as it actually is but that which, in his theory, ought to be their reason:[103] that which formed the perpetual and governing process throughout all nature, though most men neither recognised nor attended to it, but turned away from it in different directions equally wrong. No man was truly possessed of reason, unless his individual mind understood the general scheme of the universe, and moved in full sympathy with its perpetual movement and alternation or unity of contraries.[104] The universal process contained in itself a sum-total of particular contraries which were successively produced and destroyed: to know the universal was to know these contraries in one, and to recognise them as transient, but correlative and inseparable, manifestations, each implying the other--not as having each a separate reality and each excluding its contrary.[105] In so far as a man's mind maintained its kindred nature and perpetual conjoint movement with the universal, he acquired true knowledge; but the individualising influences arising from the body usually overpowered this kindred with the universal, and obstructed the continuity of this movement, so that most persons became plunged in error and illusion. [Footnote 103: Sextus Empiricus misinterprets the Herakleitean theory when he represents it (vii. 134) as laying down--[Greek: ta\ koinê=| phaino/mena, pista\, ô(s a)\n tô=| koinô=| krino/mena lo/gô|, ta\ de\ kat' i)di/an e(ka/stô|, pseudê=]. Herakleitus denounces mankind generally as in error. Origen. Philosophum. i. 4; Diog. Laert. ix. 1.] [Footnote 104: The analogy and sympathy between the individual mind and the Kosmical process--between the knowing and the known--was reproduced in many forms among the ancient philosophers. It appears in the Platonic Timæus, c. 20, p. 47 C.