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HERACLITUS, known as the "weeping philosopher" or the misanthrope, was born at Ephesus about the time of the outbreak of the Ionic revolt. The Ephesians kept strangely aloof from their fellow-Ionians in this brief struggle against the Persian power; and to the fact of this inability to join together for a common cause we may well attribute some of the contempt which Heraclitus felt for the popular voice and popular government, which made him withdraw from active life, and tinged his whole philosophy. The highest office in the city is said to have been his by hereditary right, but he refused to hold it. The bitterness of his feeling was so deepened by the banishment of his friend Hermodorus, that he withdrew himself from the society of men, and lived in the mountains alone. He sought to free himself from a world which seemed to him wholly selfish and full of vanities.
His philosophy earned for him the name of "the obscure." He conceived the principle of the Universe as a fiery ether, which not merely is the substance of all things but is the Universal Intelligence. From this, in strife, does everything proceed. There is no rest in Nature, only perpetual change; the generation of one thing means the destruction of another; and all things come into being to be merged again in the fire spirit. Of this spirit the mind of each man is but a detached and infinitely small part, and therefore liable to err. It is not by much learning that we can attain to true reason, but by bringing ourselves into accord with the universal mind; for all that is purely individual in us must be false.
There is here in germ the philosophy of Zeno the Stoic and of Marcus Aurelius. But the ideal of Heraclitus is rather that of Plato, who considered that the highest effort of the soul, distracted by the world, was to see dimly something of that Universal Truth with which it will become one when released from the prison-house of the body. In various forms the same ideal appears in more modern philosophy, notably in the systems of Fichte and Hegel.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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