This is even more signally the case with Heracleitus of Ephesus. But I can only give you some of his marvellous anticipations in a few words; to go into any one of these systems would require a whole lecture, not a passage in this discourse. In the first place he agreed with both his predecessors, that one subtle element was the foundation of all nature and this he sought in what the vulgar call fire, but with him a far more subtle essence, never still for an instant. From this all the universe had been evolved by a process of cooling, and had developed into earth, water, and the rest, but in the end these would return into their original condition, “so that the earth would be rolled up as a scroll, and the elements dissolved with fervent heat.” This far-off glimpse of Laplace’s theory, which postulates our whole planetary system starting from a revolving mass at white heat, is less striking than another that lays down the principle that there are endless motions in things which the senses cannot perceive, and that absolute rest is impossible in nature. The world was never made; It will change, but it will not fade. So let the wind range For even and morn, ever will be, thro’ eternity. Nothing was born, nothing will die, All things will change.[46] It is but yesterday that the newest physical philosophers have declared themselves for this doctrine, and tell us that every particle of matter is made up of lesser particles in perpetual motion. Heracleitus was no less clear on the relativity of the qualities of matter, which are good or bad according to the percipient, and from that he drew the conclusion that apparent contradictions may coexist and that all nature consists in a perpetual conflict between opposites. Nature is a state of war said he, using the term in a far deeper sense than did later men. These amazing conjectures were set down in a quaint, picturesque, but abstruse treatise, which even Aristotle found difficult to grasp, but if ever a great imagination sowed seeds in the minds of men, which after long generations germinated into modern science, it was that of Heracleitus. His dark enigmas, seasoned with pessimistic utterances, with supreme contempt of the ordinary public, were always attractive and stimulating to keen minds. The next great name in this magnificent series is Pythagoras, whose influence revolutionised not only the science but the politics and ethics of Greece, and created new ideals among men, higher and purer than those of traditional morality. But as I have already said something of him in a former discourse, I will hurry on to his contemporaries and his successors.