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This whole, the universal and divine understanding, in unity with which we are logical, is, according to Heraclitus, the essence of truth. Hence that which appears as the universal to all, carries with it conviction, for it has part in the universal and divine Logos, while what is subscribed to by an individual carries with it no conviction from the opposite cause.

From his principle that everything that is, at the same time is not, it immediately follows that he holds that sensuous certainty has no truth; for it is the certainty for which something exists as actual, which is not so in fact. Not this immediate Being, but absolute mediation, Being as thought of, Thought itself, is Thought is the true being

They are not themselves process, but fire is process; and thus he maintains fire to be the elementary principle, and this is the real form of the Heraclitean principle, the soul and substance of the nature­process. Fire is physical time, absolute unrest, absolute disintegration of existence, the passing away of the "other," but also of itself;

To Heraclitus the truth is to have grasped the essential being of nature, i.e. to have represented it as implicitly infinite, as process in itself; and consequently it is evident to us that Heraclitus could not say that the primary principle is air, water, or any such thing.

It is not that time is or is not, for time is non­being immediately in Being and Being immediately in non­being: it is the transition out of Being into non­being, the abstract Notion, but in an objective form, i.e. in so far as it is for us.

''what coincides and what conflicts, what is harmonious and what discordant, and from out of them all comes one, and from one, all."

For Heraclitus says: "Everything is in a state of flux; nothing subsists nor does it ever remain the same." And Plato further says of Heraclitus: "He compares things to the current of a river: no one can go twice into the same stream,"1 for it flows on and other water is disturbed.

"Being and non­being are the same; everything is and yet is not." The truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non­being; but with the Eleatics we have the abstract understanding that Being is alone the truth. We say, in place of using the expression of Heraclitus, that the Absolute is the unity of being and non­being.

If we put aside the Ionics, who did not understand the Absolute as Thought, and the Pythagoreans likewise, we have the pure Being of the Eleatics, and the dialectic which denies all finite relationships. Thought to the latter is the process of such manifestations; the world in itself is the apparent, and pure Being alone the true.

If Aristotle says that Zeno denied movement because it contains an inner contradiction, it is not to be understood to mean that movement did not exist at all.

The ordinary ideas of science, where propositions result from proof, proof is the movement of intelligence, a connection brought about by mediation. Dialectic is either (a) external dialectic, in which this movement is different from the comprehension of the movement, or (b) not a movement of our intelligence only, but what proceeds from the nature of the thing itself, i.e. from the pure Notion of the content.

We here see a dialectic which may be called metaphysical reasoning, in which the principle of identity is fundamental. "The nothing is like nothing and does not pass into Being or conversely; thus nothing can originate from like." This, the oldest mode of argument, holds its place even to the present day, as, for example, in the so­ called proof of the unity of God.