52 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



Further abstraction is impossible ; the lonians, the Pythagoreans, 

 the Eleatics have exhausted this process. 



But what about the world that appears with all its variety and 

 movement ? The Eleatics may deny it, but here it is all the same. 

 Zeno may demonstrate the absurdity of an arrow's flight, and the 

 impossibility of the hare overtaking the tortoise, but all the same the 

 arrow flies, and the hare wins the race. If only " pure being is," 

 whence the phenomenal world ? Now enters Heraclitus of Ephesus, 

 born 460 B. C, "the weeping philosopher" as he is called ; "the 

 deepest of pre-Socratic philosophers, according to Schwegler ; and 

 he reconciles being and rion-being, the one and the many, by 

 the principle of Becoming. " Nothing remains the same, all 

 comes and goes, resolves itself and passes out into other forms, out 

 of all comes all; from life, death, from the dead, life ; there is every- 

 where and eternally only this one process of the alternation of birth 

 and decay." If the Eleatics said that eyes and ears deceive when 

 they tell of variety, change, Heraclitus said that they deceive 

 when they tell of permanence. " In the same stream none ever 

 bathed him twice." " Time is a child at its sport." " Life is the 

 death of the gods, death is their life. These are some of his aphor- 

 isms. And so the Eleatic and Heracietic principles are the very 

 antipodes of each other, the utter denial of all change on the one 

 hand, the denial of anything but change on the other. 



If the first efforts in Thales and Anaxamander seemed exceed- 

 ingly infantile, is it not time now for us to acknowledge that the 

 Greek Philosophic child is beginning to toddle along pretty well, if 

 indeed he is not already able to run with the strongest and swiftest 

 of us ? 



How shall we reconcile Being and Becoming, Zeno and Hirac. 

 litus? This is now the question, at which Empedocles of Agrigenltum 

 tried his hand, and to the solution of which the Atomists also bent 

 their energies. Empedocles, we will pass by, not however because 

 he is unworthy of our notice. Coming then to the Atomists, the 

 very word atom seems to carry us in a moment over 2,000 years, 

 and set us down in the last quarter of the nineteenth century at the 

 feel of some of our best known Physicists. And the resemblance 

 between the Atomists of Ancient Greece and those of to-day is not 

 simply in name ; their doctrines are in a large measure identical. Of 

 the old Atomists, Democritus was the chief, and here is a paragraph 



