by saying that he would have looked on all three propositions as equivalent statements of a single fact. In accordance with this principle he calls war the father and king and lord of all, and denounces Homer’s prayer for the abolition of strife as an unconscious blasphemy against the universe itself. Yet, even his powerful intellect could not grasp the conception of a shifting relativity as the law and life of things without embodying it in a particular material substratum. Following the Ionian tradition, he sought for a world-element, and found it in that cosmic fire which enveloped the terrestrial atmosphere, and of which the heavenly luminaries were supposed to be formed. ‘Fire,’ says the Ephesian philosopher, no doubt adapting his language to the comprehension of a great commercial community, ‘is the general medium of exchange, as gold is given for everything, and everything for gold.’ ‘The world was not created by any god or any man, but always was, and is, and shall be, an ever-living fire, periodically kindled and quenched.‘ By cooling and condensation, water is formed from fire, and earth from water; then, by a converse process called the way up as the other was the way down, earth again passes into water and water into fire. At the end of certain stated periods the whole world is to be reconverted into fire, but only to enter on a new cycle in the series of its endless revolutions—a conception, so far, remarkably confirmed by modern science. The whole theory, including a future world conflagration, was afterwards adopted by the Stoics, and probably exercised a considerable influence on the eschatology of the early Christian Church. Imagination is obliged to work under forms which thought has already superseded; and Heracleitus as a philosopher had forestalled the dazzling consummation to which as a prophet he might look forward in wonder and hope. For, his elemental fire was only a picturesque presentation indispensable to him, but not to us, of the sovereign law wherein all things live and move and have their being. To have introduced such an idea into speculation was his distinctive and inestimable achievement, although it may have been suggested by the εἱμαρμένη or destiny of the theological poets, a term occasionally employed in his writings. It had a moral as well as a physical meaning, or rather it hovers ambiguously between the two. ‘The sun shall not transgress his bounds, or the Erinyes who help justice will find him out.’ It is the source of human laws, the common reason which binds men together, therefore they should hold by it even more firmly than by the laws of the State. It is not only all-wise but all-good, even where it seems to be the reverse; for our distinctions between good and evil, just and unjust, vanish in the divine harmony of Nature, the concurrent energies and identifying transformations of her universal life.