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'We teach the same as the Greeks', says Justin Martyr, 'though we alone are hated for what we teach. 'Some among us', says Tertullian, 'who are versed in ancient literature, have written books to prove that we have embraced no tenets for which we have not the support of common and public literature. 'The teachings of Plato', says Justin again, 'are not alien to those of Christ; and the same is true of the Stoics. 'Heracleitus and Socrates lived in accordance with the divine Logos', and should be reckoned as Christians.
But if you take none of the things which are set before you, and even despise them, then you will be not only a fellow banqueter with the gods, but also a partner with them in power. For by acting thus Diogenes and Heracleitus and those like them were deservedly divine, and were so called.
In its pure state, the Living and Rational Fire of Heracleitus resides in the highest conceivable Heaven, whence it descends stage by stage, gradually losing the velocity of its motion and vitality, until it finally reaches the Earth-stage, having previously passed through that of "Water." Thence it returns to its parent source.
As Heracleitus knew at the outset of modern philosophy, we cannot bathe twice in the same stream, though, as we know to-day, the stream still flows in an unending circle. There is never a moment when the new dawn is not breaking over the earth, and never a moment when the sunset ceases to die.
In after life when invited by some one else, they may, perhaps, go and hear a lecture, and about this they make much ado, for philosophy is not considered by them to be their proper business: at last, when they grow old, in most cases they are extinguished more truly than Heracleitus' sun, inasmuch as they never light up again. But what ought to be their course? Just the opposite.
Thus he tells us in three or four different places that Sophocles and Thucydides "play at hide-and-seek with the reader." These two authors, thus happily classed together, represent "the artificial obscurity of the Attic epoch," in distinction from "the pregnant obscurity" of Heracleitus and Æschylus and "the redundant obscurity of some modern poets."
When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence, because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in the bakehouse too'.
It should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that 'Know thyself' passed for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical period, or that Heracleitus revealed his method in the words 'I searched myself'. We shall come presently to certain parts of our modern heritage which are not Greek either by origin or by affinity.
Diving into the Mystery of Being, Heracleitus showed how a thing could be good or evil, and evil or good, at one and the same time, as for instance sea water which preserved and nourished fishes but destroyed men.
It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The passage of one element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the Ionian philosophers.
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