8. The Dynamism of Heraclitus. -- HERACLITUS (535-475 B.C.), sprung from a noble family of Ephesus, marks an epoch in the history of Pre-Socratic Philosophy. His system is an original blend of Phenomenism, Dynamism and Pantheism. A contemporary of the Eleatics, he opposed their speculations or rather counteracted them by his own: instead of placing the fundamental essence or being of things in some immutable reality, he identifies it with the mutable as such. According to Parmenides, nothing changes. For Heraclitus everything changes. The whole world is like a river which is never exactly identical with itself because new particles of water ever replace those that have passed by. This phenomenism has a cosmological, and not a psychological signification: the phenomenon has an extra-mental reality. This perpetual flow of things is symbolized in the mutable element par excellence, -- fire. Not that fire is a substance; it is simply an ever-changing something, for it is nothing apart from its perpetual change, panta hrein einai. Every natural phenomenon is fire at some stage or other of development, and what we believe to be the stable element in things is merely "a point of intersection where various currents meet and divide ".

To explain this incessant "fire evolution" Heraclitus adopts the two fundamental axioms of dynamism and accommodates them to his phenomenism. An internal principle of activity accounts for the perpetual flow of the "fire" phenomena; whatever. "becomes" or appears is itself the principle of its appearance and development. Since all change is transition from some definite state to an opposite one, the phenomenon modifies itself at every instant under the influence of the opposing positions of which it is the resultant.

Finally, the dynamism of Heraclitus is a plain assertion of pantheism: the fire-principle is unique, it is God; it is endowed with intelligence and regulates the process of its own evolution.