INTRODUCTION.

condensed and turns to water. Thus the notion of continuity is
absent, and consequently the notion of Becoming. Yet, for all
that, Thales, Anaximandros, and Anaximenes were on the path to
Becoming.
The penetrating intellect of Herakleitos detected the short-
coming of his predecessors. All nature is a single element trans-
muting itself into countless diversities of form: be it so. But the
law or force which governs these transmutations must be omni-
present and perpetually active. For what power is there that
shall hold it in abeyance at any time? or how could it intermit
its own activity without perishing altogether? Therefore there
can be no abiding in one form; transmutation must be every-
where ceaseless and continuous, since nature will not move by
leaps. Motion is all-pervading, and rest is there nowhere in the
order of things. And this privation of rest is not a matter of
degree nor to be measured by intervals of time. Rest during an
infinitesimal fraction of the minutest space which our senses can
apprehend were as impossible and inconceivable as though it
should endure for ages. We must see the way up and downoriginal: "ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω" (hodos ano kato). A central fragment of Heraclitus's philosophy suggesting that the path of change is the same in both directions. as
Herakleitos saw it: all nature is a dizzy whirl of change without
rest or respite, wherein there is no thing to which we can
point and say ‘See, it is this, it is that, it is so.’ For in the
moment when what we call ‘it’ has begun to be ‘this’ or ‘that’
or ‘so,’ at that very moment it has begun to pass from the state
we thus seek to indicate: there is nowhere a fixed point. And
thus Herakleitos attains to the conception of continuity and
Becoming. He chose appropriately enough fire, the most mobile
and impalpable of the four reputed elements, to be the vehicle of
this never resting activity of nature; but it matters nothing what
was his material substrate. His great achievement is to have
firmly grasped and resolutely enunciated the principle of con-
tinuity and hence of Becoming: for continuity is a mode of
Becoming, or Becoming a mode of continuity, according as we
may choose to view it. Moreover, Herakleitos introduces us to
the antithesis of beingoriginal: "ὂν" (on) and not-beingoriginal: "μὴ ὂν" (mē on). We cannot say of any object ‘it is
so,’ or use any other phrase which implies stability. Yet the
thing in some sense or other is, else it would be nothing; it is
at any rate a continuity of change. So then the thing is and
is not; that is to say, it becomes. Or if, as we watch a falling
drop of rain, we take any spot in its course which it would just
fill, we can never say ‘it is there,’ for it never rests; yet, by the