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