Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/179

124 that Heraclitus "maintained that the senses are the sources of all true knowledge, for they drink in the universal intelligence."—P. 57, 2d ed.

18. Let us now return to the conception of Becoming, which we must examine a little more closely, and endeavour to analyse. Keeping in mind what I have said about the universe being a process of never-pausing series of changes, no one of which has either a beginning or an end, so infinite are they, and so finely woven into each other, let us ask whether, taking this view of the universe, Being cannot be predicated of it at all. The answer is, that Being can and must be predicated of it, otherwise we should have no subject whereof to speak. But not-Being must also be predicated of it, as I shall now endeavour to show you. At a given instant the universe is in a particular definite state; it must be in this state to have Being, because a state which is not definite is not a state at all. Call this definite state, then, Being. But the universe is a process, that is, it is continually varying; therefore it is out of this particular state, in the very act and in the very instant of being in it. Call its being out of this particular state its not-Being, just as you called its being in it its Being, and you get the universe in Being and in not-Being at one and the same instant It at once is and is not. Such is the only explanation I am able to give of the expression of Heraclitus, in which he says that "all things are and are not."