Timaeus

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 shortcoming of his predecessors. All nature is a single element transmuting itself into countless diversities of form: be it so. But the law or force which governs these transmutations must be omnipresent 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 everywhere ceaseless and continuous, since nature will not move by leaps. Motion is all-pervading, and rest exists 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 would be as impossible and inconceivable as if it were to endure for ages. We must see the ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω (the way up and down) as Herakleitos saw it: all nature is a dizzy whirl of change without rest or respite, wherein there is no one 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 his material substrate was. His great achievement is to have firmly grasped and resolutely enunciated the principle of continuity 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 ὂν (Being) and μὴ ὄν (Not-being). 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