But the soul, according to the view of the physiologists, has quite a different relation to the totality of life and living, and differs in this respect both from the Homeric psyche and the Homeric θυμός. The same force which manifests itself so strongly, as though specially concentrated there, in the psyche of man, works and rules in all matter as the general source of life that creates and preserves the world. Thus, the psyche loses the special singularity that distinguished it from all the other things and substances in the world, and made it incomparable and unique. Later reporters are wrong in attributing to these Ionic thinkers (for whom vital power and material substance seemed immediately and indissolubly united) the conception of a separate, independent “World-Soul”. Not as emanations from a single Soul of the World did they conceive the separate souls of men; but neither did they conceive them as simply independent, unique, and entirely incomparable essences. They are expressions of that force which everywhere in all the phenomena of the world produces life and is itself life. Attributing spiritual qualities to the primeval source of things, the physiology of the “Hylozoists” naturally could not assume any profound distinction between that source and the “soul”. Deprived in this way of its separateness, the soul acquired a new importance in exchange; in another sense from that of the mystics and theologians it could still be thought of as something divine, for it was a participator in the one Force which builds and rules the world. It is not the abode of a single daimonic [366] nature, but instead, the very nature of god is alive within it.
The closer its inward connexion with the universal Whole the less, of course, will the soul be able to preserve its individual existence, which was only lent to it while it gave life and movement to the body, when that body, the sign and support of its separateness, is overtaken by death. These earliest philosophers whose view was almost entirely concentrated on the broad outlines of the life of nature as a whole, would hardly have regarded it as part of their task to formulate a deliberate opinion about the fate of the puny individual soul after the death of its body. In no case could they have spoken of an immortality of the soul in the same sense as did the mystics who regarded the soul of which they spoke as something which has entered from without into material existence, and as a spiritual essence quite distinct from everything material. The latter were thus able to attribute to the psyche a capacity for separate and continued existence which was inadmissible in the case of a force of movement and sensation completely inhering in matter and in the shaping of matter. And it was such a force which the physiologists called the soul.
Ancient tradition, nevertheless, asserts that Thales of Miletos, whose genius first began the philosophic study of nature, was the first “to call the soul (of man) immortal”.[3] But Thales, who recognized a “soul” also in magnets and plants,[4] and thought of the material stuff and the motive force of the “soul” as inseparable, can only have spoken of the “immortality” of the human soul in the same sense as he might have spoken of the immortality of all “soul-forces” in nature. Like the primal Matter which works and creates by reason of its own natural powers of life, so, too, the universal Force which permeates it[5] is imperishable and indestructible, as it is uncreated. It is entirely and essentially alive and can never be “dead”.
Anaximander said of the “Unlimited” from which all things have been developed by separation, and by which all things are enveloped and directed, that it never grows old, but is immortal and imperishable.[6] This cannot be intended to apply to the human soul as a separate existence; for like all separate creations out of the “Unlimited” it must “in the order of the time” pay the penalty for the “offence” of its separate existence,[7] and lose itself again in the one primordial matter.
Nor could the third in this series—Anaximenes of Miletos—have differed seriously from Thales in the sense in which [367] he spoke of the soul as “immortal”; for him it was of the same nature[8] as the one divine[9] primal element of Air that is eternally in movement and produces all things out of itself.
§ 3
In the teaching of Herakleitos of Ephesos the living power of the primal essence—the one[10] and universal, out of which arises through change the many and the particular, which manifests itself in the union, regarded as indissoluble, of matter and motive force—received even greater prominence than with the older Ionians. By them matter itself—described as either limited or not limited in reference to one particular quality—is regarded as self-evidently in motion. For Herakleitos the origin of all multiplicity lies rather in the creative energy of absolute Life itself which is at the same time a definite material substance or analogous to one of the known substances. The idea of life, and that form of it which makes its appearance in man, must have been more important for him than for any of his predecessors.
This never-resting force and activity of becoming that has neither beginning nor end, is represented by the Hot and Dry and called by the name of that elementary condition which cannot be thought of as ceasing to move, namely, Fire. The ever-living (ἀείζωον) fire, which periodically kindles itself and periodically goes out (Bywater, fr. 20), is formed entirely of movement and livingness. Living belongs to everything; but living is becoming, changing, becoming something different without cessation. Every appearance brings forth from itself, at the moment of its appearance, the opposite of itself. Birth, life, and death, and fresh birth clash together in a single burning moment, like the lightning (fr. 28).
That which thus moves itself in unceasing vitality and has all its being in becoming; which perpetually changes and “in backward-straining effort” finds itself again—this is something endowed with reason, creative in accordance with reason and “art”; is Reason (λόγος) itself. In creating the world it loses itself in the elements; it suffers its “death” (frr. 66, 67) when in the “Way downwards” it becomes water and earth (fr. 21). There are degrees of value in the elements decided by the relation which they hold towards the moving and self-vivifying fire. But that which in the multiplicity of the phenomena in the world, yet preserves its godlike fiery nature—this is for Herakleitos “psyche”. Psyche is fire.[11] Fire and psyche are interchangeable terms.[12] And so, too, the psyche of man is fire, a part of the universal fiery [368] energy that surrounds it and upholds it, through the “inhalation” of which it maintains itself alive;[13] a portion of the World-Reason by participation in which it is itself rational. In men God is living.[14] But god does not descend into man, as in the teaching of the Theologians, entering as a finite individuality into the vessel of the individual human life. As a united whole he surrounds men with his flood and reaches after and into them, as though with fiery tongues. A portion[15] of his universal Wisdom is living in the soul of man: the “drier”, more fiery, nearer to the universal Fire and further from the less living elements he is, the wiser will he be (frr. 74, 75, 76). If he sundered himself from the universal wisdom, man would become nothing; it is his business in thinking, as in acting and in moral behaviour, to surrender himself to the One Living essence that “nourishes” him and is the Mind and Law of the world (frr. 91, 92, 100, 103).
But the soul itself is also a portion of the universal Fire that in the perpetual variation of its form of being has been encompassed by the body and become entangled in corporeality. Here we no longer have the rigid, unmediated contrast between “Body” and “Soul” such as it appeared from the standpoint of the theologian. The elements of the body, water and earth, have themselves arisen and perpetually arise out of the fire which changes into all other things, and into which everything else changes (fr. 22). So it is the soul itself, the creative fire, which creates the body. “Soul,” i.e. Fire, unceasingly turns itself into the lower elements; there is no contrast between them, and it is but a continual flux of transition.