Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Heraclitus
Heraclitus – 4
Heraclitus’ account of the cosmos is an evolution and
involution out of his one eternal principle of Fire,– at once the one substance
and the one force,– which he expresses in his figurative language as the upward
and downward road. “The road up and down” he says “is one and the same.” Out of
Fire, the radiant and energetic principle, air, water and earth proceed,– that
is the procession of energy on its downward road; there is equally in the very
tension of this process a force of potential return which would lead things
backward to their source in the reverse order. In the balance of these two
upward and downward forces resides the whole cosmic action; everything is a
poise of contrary energies. The movement of life is like the back-returning of
the bow, to which he compares it, an energy of traction and tension restraining
an energy of release, every force of action compensated by a corresponding force
of reaction. By the resistance of one to the other all the harmonies of
existence are created.
We have the same idea of an evolution of successive
conditions of energy out of a primal substance-force in the Indian theory of
Sankhya. There indeed the system proposed is more complete and satisfying. It
starts with the original or root energy, mūla prakṛti,
which as the first substance, pradhāna, evolves by
development and change into five successive principles. Ether, not fire, is the
first principle, ignored by the Greeks, but rediscovered by modern Science;[[Now
again rejected, though that does not seem to be indubitable or final.]] there
follow air, fire, the igneous, radiant and electric energy, water, earth, the
fluid and solid. The Sankhya, like Anaximenes, puts Air first of the four
principles admitted by the Greeks, though it does not like him make it the
original substance, and it thus differs from the order of Heraclitus. But it gives to the principle of fire the function of
creating all forms,– as Agni in the Veda is the great builder of the worlds,–
and here at least it meets his thought; for it is as the energetic principle
behind all formation and mutation that Heraclitus must have chosen Fire as his
symbol and material representative of the One. We may remember in this
connection how far modern Science has gone to justify these old thinkers by the
importance it gives to electricity and radio-active forces – Heraclitus’ fire
and thunderbolt, the Indian triple Agni – in the formation of atoms and in the
transmutation of energy.
But the Greeks failed to go forward to that final
discrimination which India attributed to Kapila, the supreme analytical
thinker,– the discrimination between Prakriti and her cosmic principles, her
twenty-four tattwas forming the subjective and objective aspects of Nature, and
between Prakriti and Purusha, Conscious-Soul and Nature-Energy. Therefore while
in the Sankhya ether, fire and the rest are only principles of the objective
evolution of Prakriti, evolutionary aspects of the original phusis, the
early Greeks could not get back beyond these aspects of Nature to the idea of a
pure energy, nor could they at all account for her subjective side. The Fire of
Heraclitus has to do duty at once for the original substance of all Matter and
for God and Eternity. This preoccupation with Nature-Energy and the failure to
fathom its relations with Soul has persisted in modern scientific thought, and
we find there too the same attempt to identify some primary principle of Nature,
ether or electricity, with the original Force.
However that may be, the theory of the creation of the
world by some kind of evolutionary change out of the original substance or
energy, by pariṇāma, is common to the early Greek and
the Indian systems, however they may differ about the nature of the original
phusis. The distinction of Heraclitus among the early Greek sages is his
conception of the upward and downward road, one and the same in the descent and
the return. It corresponds to the Indian idea of nivṛtti
and pravṛtti, the double movement of the Soul and
Nature,– pravṛtti, the moving out and forward,
nivṛtti, the moving back and in. The
Indian thinkers were preoccupied with this double principle so far as it touches
the action of the individual soul entering into the procession of Nature and
drawing back from it; but still they saw a similar, a periodic movement forward
and back of Nature itself which leads to an ever-repeated cycle of creation and
dissolution; they held the idea of a periodic pralaya.
Heraclitus’ theory would seem to demand a similar conclusion. Otherwise we must
suppose that the downward tendency, once in action, has always the upper hand
over the upward or that cosmos is eternally proceeding out of the original
substance and eternally returning to it, but never actually returns. The Many
are then eternal not only in power of manifestation, but in actual fact of
manifestation.
It is possible that Heraclitus may so have thought, but
it is not the logical conclusion of his theory; it contradicts the evident
suggestion of his metaphor about the road which implies a starting-point and a
point of return; and we have too the distinct statement of the Stoics that he
believed in the theory of conflagration,– an assertion which they are hardly
likely to have made if this were not generally accepted as his teaching. The
modern arguments against enumerated by Mr. Ranade are founded upon
misconceptions. Heraclitus’ affirmation is not simply that the One is always
Many, the Many always One, but in his own words, “out of all the One and out of
One all.” Plato’s phrasing of the thought, “the reality is both many and one and
in its division it is always being brought together,” states the same idea in
different language. It means a constant current and back-current of change, the
upward and downward road, and we may suppose that as the One by downward change
becomes completely the All in the descending process, yet remains eternally the
one everliving Fire, so the All by upward change may resort completely to the
One and yet essentially exist, since it can again return into various being by
the repetition of the downward movement. All difficulty disappears if we
remember that what is implied is a process of evolution and involution,– so too
the Indian word for creation, sṛṣṭi, means a release
or bringing forth of what is held in, latent,– and that the conflagration
destroys existing forms, but not the principle
of multiplicity. There will be then no inconsistency at all in Heraclitus’
theory of a periodic conflagration; it is rather, that being the highest
expression of change, the complete logic of his system.
Heraclitus. But it gives to the principle of fire the function of
creating all forms,– as Agni in the Veda is the great builder of the worlds,–
and here at least it meets his thought; for it is as the energetic principle
behind all formation and mutation that Heraclitus must have chosen Fire as his
symbol and material representative of the One. We may remember in this
connection how far modern Science has gone to justify these old thinkers by the
importance it gives to electricity and radio-active forces – Heraclitus’ fire
and thunderbolt, the Indian triple Agni – in the formation of atoms and in the
transmutation of energy.
