SOURCE: Malcolm Schofield, "Heraclitus' Theory of Soul and Its Antecedents," in Psychology, edited by Stephen Everson, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 13-34.

In the essay below, Scholfield explores Heraclitus's conception of the soul and psychology, concluding that the philosopher held the soul to be, like the universe itself, "a physical substance subject to the unity of opposites and to opposite sequences of transformations."

I

For souls it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth; from earth water comesto-be, and from water, soul.

A dry soul is wisest and best.

A man when he is drunk is led by an unfledged boy, stumbling and not knowing where he goes, having his soul moist.

You would not find out the boundaries of soul, even by travelling along every path: so deep a measure does it have.

(KRS 229-32 (=nos. of Frr. in [61]), frr. 36, 118, 117, 45)

We have...