reflects; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth
when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels
already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly
colder. Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance
of what comes [14] to mind just then somewhat shrill or overemphatic.

Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think,
so early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does but
reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he
cries out--his philosophy was no matter of formal treatise or system,
but of harsh, protesting cries--Panta chorei kai ouden menei.+ All
things give way: nothing remaineth. There had been enquirers before
him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold,
contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary
elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes,
their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part
of the bold enterprise of that romantic age; a series of intellectual
adventures, of a piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the
sea. The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of
gifted and sanguine but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word
neotes,+ youth, came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning,
deciding, rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to
discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming
and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world,
were themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface of
existence.

[15] Surface, we say; but was there really anything beneath it? That
was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers, Heraclitus, with
an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny. Perpetual motion, alike in