250 REV. H. J. CLARKE. 
phenomena and developments of theory. With it no less com- 
prehensive answer to philosophic inquiry could in his judgment 
bear comparison: it was at once an absolutely conclusive and 
an endlessly suggestive word ; it was pre-eminently the Logos. 
These prelimmary remarks may suffice to elucidate the 
significance which this well-known term, destined to hold for 
ever an imperial rank in philosophic terminology, assumed 
when first utilised in the most notable of the early and neces- 
sarily rude attempts to construct on a stable foundation, and 
in place of poetic myths, a scientific cosmogony. 
Heracleitus, a native of Ephesus, who flourished towards 
the end of the sixth or early in the fifth century before the 
Christian era, in figuring to himself the primordial condition 
of the universe, conceived a notion which, although conjectural 
and loosely formed, foreshadows,—dimly, it is true, yet still 
perceptibly in certain salient features,—theories that date from 
modern astronomical and chemical discoveries. Thales had 
imagined Water to be the primal element; by Diogenes of 
Apollonia and Anaximenes this rank was assigned to Air; 
but, according to Heracleitus, cosmic evolution has for its 
point of departure something which may be represented as 
Fire.* The object I have in view has left me free from the 
obligation to give a systematic and complete exposition of his 
philosophy. Indeed, to attempt this would be to undertake 
a by no means easy task; for the extant sayings ascribed to 
him, being few and fragmentary, and having probably, in the 
process of citation, been to some extent accommodated to 
doctrines either held or repudiated by the writers in whose 
works they appear, and, moreover, not being always per- 
spicuously worded, may be compared to pieces belonging to 
a difficult Chinese puzzle, some of which have been mutilated, 
while other pieces are altogether wanting. He seems, how- 
ever, to have conceived of the Cosmos as having been evolved 
out of an ethereal kind of igneous vapour.t How the con- 
densation was effected which is necessarily assumed to have 
taken place in the process, namely in the transformation of 
the igneous vapour into the liquid and solid materials that 
constitute the earth, and into the atmosphere which covers it, 
and how, on the other hand, the rarefaction which is observable 
in numberless phenomena may likewise be accounted for, 
* Clem. Alex., Cohort., 43 : ‘‘ rotré rot kai ot audi roy “Hpdkdetror, ro rip 
c apxéyovoy o&Bovrec, weTOv0acw.” 
+ Aristot., De Anim., i. 2, 19. 
