Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/177

Rh accordance with these views, the world could ever recover from a general conflagration if such a thing were to take place. The whole process depends on the fact that Surfeit is also Want, or, in other words, that an advance of fire increases the moist exhalation, while an advance of water deprives the fire of its power to cause evaporation. The conflagration, though it lasted but for a moment, would destroy the opposite tension on which the rise of a new world depends, and then motion would become impossible.

79. We are now in a position to understand more clearly the law of strife or opposition which manifests itself in the "upward and downward path." At any given moment, each of the three aggregates, Fire, Water, and Earth, is made up of two equal portions—subject, of course, to the oscillation described above—one of which is taking the upward and the other the downward path. Now, it is just the fact that the two halves of everything are being "drawn in opposite directions," this "opposite tension," that "keeps things together," and maintains them in an equilibrium which can only be disturbed temporarily and within certain limits. It thus forms the "hidden attunement" of the universe (fr. 47), though, in another aspect of it, it is Strife. As to the "bow and the lyre" (fr. 45), I think that Campbell gave the best explanation of the simile. "As the arrow leaves the string," he said, "the hands are pulling opposite ways to each other, and to the different parts of the bow (cf. Plato, Rep. iv. 439); and the sweet note of the lyre is due to a similar tension and retention. The secret of