A history of pantheism and scientific pantheism by Paul Harrison.

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Central zone of Julia set.

Heraclitus flourished in the Greek city of Ephesus, on the Ionian coast of what is now Turkey, at the end of the sixth century BC when the area was under Persian rule.

Little is reported of his life. His own writings make it plain that he had nothing but scorn for the popular mass, for political leaders, and for most previous writers on philosophy and religion including Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras and Xenophanes.

Heraclitus was once asked to write a constitution for Ephesus, but refused. He used to play at knuckle bones with children by the temple of Artemis. When adults came to gape, he replied "Why should you be astonished, you rascals? Isn't it better to do this than to take part in your civil life?" Another story relates that the Persian King Darius once invited him to his court to explain his ideas. Heraclitus declined.

Some of the tales reported of Heraclitus seem far fetched. It's said that he eventually withdrew into the mountains to live off grass and herbs. When this diet gave him dropsy, he shut himself in a cowshed and covered himself with dung, hoping the heat would dry him out. This tale makes no medical or physical sense, even in ancient terms. It may be no more than a slanderous invention.

Heraclitus' writings, like those of most pre-Socratics, have survived only in small fragments cited by other classical authors - and in Heraclitus's case they are even smaller and more fragmentary than usual. They are often dense and paradoxical - throughout antiquity he was known as Heraclitus the obscure. Aristotle complained of his word order, while Socrates said it would take a Delian diver to get to the bottom of his work.

Heraclitus is above all a materialist. No clear and explicit statement of pantheism has survived. But Heraclitus ascribes to God the same characteristics that he ascribes to fire [B67]. His statement that the cosmos is ever-living fire [B30] carries a religious tone as powerful as any scripture.

Like Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes from nearby Miletus, Heraclitus sought for a common principle underlying the various forms of matter. But his thought went far deeper and further than theirs.

The density and brevity of what survives of his writings is tantalizing. It is tempting to fill in the gaps. We may surmise that he believed all things shared an underlying identity as fire. Through opposing forces of strife and harmony they developed into many things, all of which were constantly changing. Heraclitus would have been very much at home with the idea that the universe originated in a big bang. He would have liked to believe that it would eventually recollapse again, and so on for ever.

It's easy to imagine that Heraclitus had a mind of astonishing modernity. But if other fragments are authentic, he also taught a deal of nonsense. The sun was no bigger than a human foot, he said. Explaining the sun and stars, he said they were flames inside bowls turned with their hollow sides facing us. Eclipses occurred when the bowl turned the other face to us. Although he seems to have mocked at conventional religion, some accounts suggest that he believed in judgement of the soul after death.

Heraclitus had an influence much broader than could be expected from his tiny corpus of sayings. Plato accepted his concept that matter was in endless change, but took this in an anti-materialist way to prove that there must be a better world of unchanging ideas. The Stoics, who were pantheists and materialists, regarded Heraclitus as a precursor. For his emphasis on development through the conflict of opposites, Marx and Engels viewed him as a harbinger of dialectical materialism.

Heraclitus is also the first consistent materialist pantheist.