Plato and Platonism | Page 8

of
Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of
chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the
search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm, or
logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in
some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those
contending, infinitely diverse [18] impulses. It was an act of

recognition, even on the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the
incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom which, "reacheth from end to
end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things." But if the "weeping
philosopher," the first of the pessimists, finds the ground of his
melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he weep at
the dulness of men's ears to that continuous strain of melody
throughout it. In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and the
scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the boldly aggressive, the
paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural collusion, as it was,
with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth; that sense of rapid
dissolution, which, according to one's temperament and one's luck in
things, might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly, an interest in
the mere phenomena of existence, of one's so hasty passage through the
world.
The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension of which
the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in alliance with a
larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer observation of the
phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for Heraclitus, at that
early day. So, the seeds of almost all scientific ideas might seem to
have been dimly enfolded in the mind of antiquity; but fecundated,
admitted to their full working prerogative, one by one, in after ages, by
good favour of the special [19] intellectual conditions belonging to a
particular generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself preoccupied by a
formula, not so much new, as renovated by new application.
It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most
modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically,
justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it
under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of
Ephesus. The entire modern theory of "development," in all its various
phases, proved or unprovable,--what is it but old Heracliteanism awake
once more in a new world, and grown to full proportions?
Panta chôrei, panta rhei+--It is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to
whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion too,
each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious movements
in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other hand of
Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not but is
only always becoming. The bold paradox of Heraclitus is, in effect,

repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a cautiously
reasoned experience, and, in illustration of the very law of change
which it asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a commonplace.
Think of all that subtly disguised movement, latens processus, Bacon
calls it (again as if by a kind of anticipation) which [20] modern
research has detected, measured, hopes to reduce to minuter or ally to
still larger currents, in what had seemed most substantial to the naked
eye, the inattentive mind. To the "observation and experiment" of the
physical enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it lives by reveal
themselves, after all, as Heraclitus had declared (scarcely serious, he
seemed to those around him) as literally in constant extinction and
renewal; the sun only going out more gradually than the human eye; the
system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in ceaseless movement
nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is in constant increase by meteoric
dust, moving to it through endless time out of infinite space. The Alps
drift down the rivers into the plains, as still loftier mountains found
their level there ages ago. The granite kernel of the earth, it is said, is
ever changing in its very substance, its molecular constitution, by the
passage through it of electric currents. And the Darwinian theory--that
"species," the identifying forms of animal and vegetable life,
immutable though they seem now, as of old in the Garden of Eden, are
fashioned by slow development, while perhaps millions of years go by:
well! every month is adding to its evidence. Nay, the idea of
development (that, too, a thing of growth, developed in the progress of
reflexion) is at last invading one by one, as the secret of their
explanation, all the products of mind, the very [21] mind itself, the
abstract reason; our certainty, for instance, that two