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 chorei, 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change which it asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a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