=39.= The general import of the physical teaching of Heraclitus, and the indebtedness of the Stoics to it, have long been recognised: the bearing of this teaching upon religion, ethics and politics is a more disputable matter. Does Heraclitus by the ‘Logos’ which he so often names mean merely his own reasoning and message? is he speaking of the common reason of mankind? or does the term suggest to him a metaphysical abstraction, a divine power through which the world is created and governed? For the fuller meaning we have analogies in the beliefs of Persism before Heraclitus, and of Stoics, Judaists, and Christians afterwards. The latest commentator, adopting this explanation, sums it up in three propositions: first, the ‘Logos’ is eternal, being both pre-existent and everlasting, like the world-god of Xenophanes; secondly, all things both in the material and in the spiritual world happen through the ‘Logos’; it is a cosmic principle, ‘common’ or ‘universal’; and in the third place, it is the duty of man to obey this ‘Logos,’ and so to place himself in harmony with the rest of nature. And accordingly, in agreement with many recent writers, he adopts the translation ‘the Word’ as on the whole the most adequate[43]. Even the Romans found it impossible to translate λόγος by any single word, and they therefore adopted the phrase _ratio et oratio_ (reason and speech); in modern language it seems clearly to include also the broad notion of ‘Universal Law’ or the ‘Laws of Nature.’ If we can rightly attribute to Heraclitus all that is thus included in the interpretation of this one word, he certainly stands out as a great creative power in Greek philosophy, harmonizing by bold generalizations such diverse provinces as those of physics, religion, and ethics; ‘he was the first [in Greece, we must understand] to build bridges, which have never since been destroyed, between the natural and the spiritual life[44].’ It is to the Stoics almost alone that we owe it that teaching so suggestive and so practical was converted into a powerful social and intellectual force. [Sidenote: Zarathustra and Heraclitus.]