Heraclitus' Fragments

Attributed to Heraclitus of Ephesus · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 28 pages

The fragments attributed to Heraclitus of Ephesus, in G.T.W. Patrick's translation, selected and arranged by the series editor. The file opens with an epigraph from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in which the theosophical position is aligned with Heraclitus — that the One Absolute is not Being but becoming, the ever-developing cyclic evolution and perpetual motion of nature visible and invisible, moving and breathing even during its long pralayic sleep — and with an abstract of central ideas supplied by the editor.

The editor's abstract states the reading the selection is arranged to support: that differentiation is contrast, leading to the polarisation of contraries; that so long as this mayavic state exists there will be perpetual struggle; and that the one law in nature counterbalances the contraries by adjusting the opposing forces eternally reacting upon each other, and so produces final harmony. The fragments themselves then follow in the editor's order. The first sets the tone and the difficulty together: that it is wise for those who hear, not the speaker but the universal Reason, to confess that all things are One — and that the majority of people have no understanding of the things they meet with daily, nor, when instructed, any right knowledge of them, although to themselves they seem to have. The sequence continues through the fragments on strife and harmony, on the ever-living fire, and on the river that cannot be entered twice, each chosen for its bearing on the doctrine of opposing forces that the epigraph and abstract announce.

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