scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried
to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous
enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to
its direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of
immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does
not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a
transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.

[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate.]

The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the
expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All
they could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declare
everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason
in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had
opened the door into another region: had he passed through, his
philosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms would
have forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials.
Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such a
synthesis had not yet arrived.

[Sidenote: Democritus and the naturally intelligible.]

At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reduce
phenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and
to conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a
natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not
merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this
scientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic
existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural