HERACLEITUS, ARISTOTLE, THE NEO-PLATONISTS WHILE there is no doubt that Plato was to Emerson the eminent figure of antiquity, there are numerous references, sometimes casual, to other philosophers of the older world. Prominent among the thinkers from whom Emerson liked to quote were Heracleitus, whose Távтa peî has become proverbial; Aristotle, the follower and in a sense the opposer of Platonism; and that group of later Greeks whose thought, following Plato's, at first ran parallel to Christianity, and later tried unsuccessfully to absorb the new religion. Emerson liked to quote from Heracleitus the formula ascribed to him to illustrate the flux of the universe. But the attempt of the Greek to find unity amid the obvious diversity was what had affinity for the Concord writer's habitual attitude. "The early Greek philosophers, Heracleitus and Xenophanes," he says, "measured their forces on this problem of identity."3 Further, he recognized 2 I VIII, 200, and Note. Cf. 214. 2 See the poem, "Xenophanes," IX, 137. 3 VI, 324, and Note. Cf. x, 97. the strife of opposites, which Heracleitus would reconcile into harmony,' but he quotes "War is the Father of all things" in the literal sense of war, for a purely literary purpose, at the after-dinner speech made at Harvard to welcome back the surviving soldiers of 1865. Among the Heracleitean fragments one finds Emersonian sayings, as: "Good and ill are the same," "Man's character is his fate" ; though the great majority of references to the Greek in Emerson are, as so often, merely illustrative in character. The most interesting point in connection with Heracleitus is suggested by Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, who says that the perception of Heracleitus that the world is constantly changing suggested new values to his father, who saw in it "evolution, a doctrine by no means unanimously admitted in the year of Darwin's 'Origin of Species,' when the lecture was written."4 Quotations are given from "Woodnotes," including: I, that to-day am a pine, Yesterday was a bundle of grass. 5 I See the fragments 45, 46, 47, 62, in J. Burnet's "Early Greek Philosophy," London, 1892, p. 137. 2 XI, 341. 3 Fragments 57, 121, in Burnet. 4 VIII, 402. 5 IX, 58. More specific is the oft-quoted verse introductory to "Nature," prefixed in 1849: Striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. The whole matter of Emerson's apprehension of the doctrine of evolution, and how he came to entertain it by contact with Leibnitz, Oken, Lamarck, and other precursors of Darwin, is told in the "Biographical Sketch" prefixed to the first volume of the Centenary edition. Other anticipations by Emerson, if so much digression may be allowed, are suggestions of the self-help of modern charities, Garner's conversation. of animals, realism in literature, and Christian Science. In all these cases, as in the case of evolution, the doctrine is not worked out into its full scientific form, but is hinted at, foreseen, as by a prophet-seer. These anticipations are contained. in the following: "It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself." I To give 11, 133. A parallel passage occurs in VII, 115: money to a sufferer is only a come-off. . . . We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man man. If he is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there |