Heraclitus

Heraclitus (Gr. Hêrakleitos), a Greek philosopher, was born at Ephesus, in Asia Minor, and flourished about 500 B.C. He is said to have resigned the hereditary office of 'king' of his native city in favour of his younger brother, and to have given himself up to a life of solitary contemplation. In the old traditions he was called, from his gloomy way of looking at things, 'the weeping philosopher,' in contrast to Democritus, 'the laughing philosopher.' He died at the age of sixty. The result of Heraclitus' meditations was a work On Nature, of which only a few obscure fragments remain. The fundamental tenets in his philosophy are that all things are in a constant flux of becoming and perishing, that fire is the primordial principle of all existence, and that the supreme law of existence is the harmony that results necessarily from the operations of universal reason. His enigmatical fragments were published by Bywater in 1877. See Die Philosophie des Herakleitos des Dunkeln (1858) by the famous Socialist Lassalle.