greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual influence in
Plato's writings.

Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which
was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and
obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten--he too might be
thought, as a writer of prose, one of the "fathers" of Plato. His
influence, however, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in early
life, was by way of antagonism or reaction; Plato's stand against any
philosophy of motion becoming, as we say, something of a "fixed idea"
with him. Heraclitus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then
is denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the
Ionian League) died about forty years before [13] Plato was born. Here
then at Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of
Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of
ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all
the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not
to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as
of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of
intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had
already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and
died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone
to the wall. In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek
youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that class, as being also of
nature's aristocracy, and a man of powerful intellectual gifts,
Heraclitus, asserts the native liberty of thought at all events;
becomes, we might truly say, sickly with "the pale cast" of his
philosophical questioning. Amid the irreflective actors in that
rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed in it superficial as it is
that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He