Chapter XI. From Plutarch’s treatise entitled On the Εἶ at Delphi

‘NEITHER number therefore, nor order, nor conjunction, nor any other of the non-significant particles, does the letter seem to indicate. But it is an address and appellation of the god complete in itself, which as soon as the word is uttered sets the speaker thinking of the power of the god.

‘For the god, welcoming as it were each of us who approach him here, addresses to us the words “Know thyself,” which is nothing less than “Hail”: and we answering the god again say “Thou art” (Εἶ), rendering to him the appellation of “being” as his true and unerring and solely appropriate name.

‘For we have in reality no share in “being,” but every mortal nature is set in the midst between becoming and perishing, and presents a phantom and a faint and uncertain seeming of itself.

‘And if any one closely press the thought, from wishing to grasp it, then just as the violent grasping of water by pressing and squeezing it together causes what was enclosed to slip through and be lost, so when Reason seeks too much actuality in any thing passible and subject to change, it goes astray on this side to the part that is becoming, and on that to the part that is perishing, being unable to lay hold of anything permanent, or of any true “being.”

‘For it is not possible, according to Heracleitus,[1] to step twice into the same river, nor to touch a mortal substance twice in the same condition, but by the swiftness and suddenness of its change it scatters and again collects, or rather we must not say “again” nor “afterwards,” but it is at the same time both combining and passing away, both coming on and going off.

‘Wherefore neither does the part that is becoming attain to being, because the becoming never ceases nor stands still; but from a seed by constant change it makes an embryo, then a babe, then a child, in due order a youth, a young man, a man, an elder, an old man, destroying the first becomings and ages by those which come after.

‘We, however, are ridiculously afraid of one death, although we have already died and are dying so many. For not only, as Heracleitus used to say, is “the death of fire the birth of air,” [2] but still more manifestly in our own case the man in his prime perishes when the old man is coming, and the young man has passed away into the man in his prime, and the child into the young man, and the infant into the child, and the man of yesterday has died into the man of to-day, and the man of to-day (is dying) into the man of to-morrow; and not one abides nor is one,but we become many, while matter is circulating around some one phantom and common mould, and then slipping away.

‘Else how is it, if we remain the same, that we delight now in some things, formerly in others, that we love and hate the contrary things, and praise and blame, use different language, have different feelings, retain no more the same appearance, form, or thought?

‘For neither is it natural to have different feelings without a change, nor can one who changes be the same. But if he is not the same,he isnot, but is changing from this,and becoming other from other: and our sense, through ignorance of true “being,” falsely declares the apparent to “be.”

‘What then is true “being”? The eternal and uncreate, and imperishable, to which no time brings change. For time is something moveable, and imagined in connexion with the movement of matter, and ever flowing and not holding water, as it were a vessel of perishing and becoming. And so when it is said of time “after” and “before,” and “will be” and “has been,” there is at once an acknowledgement of “not-being.”

‘For to say of that which has not yet come into being, or has already ceased from being, that it “is” is silly and absurd. But at the very moment when, trying to fix our perception of time, we say “it is present,” “it is here,” and “now,” our reason slips away again from this and loses it. For it is thrust aside into the future and into the past, just as a visual ray is distorted with those who try to see what is necessarily separated by distance.

‘And if the nature which is measured is subject to the same conditions as the time which measures it, this nature itself has no permanence, nor “being,” but is becoming and perishing according to its relation to time.

‘Hence nothing of this kind may be said of “being,” such as “was” or “will be”: for these are a kind of inflexions, and transitions, and alternations of that which is not fitted by nature to continue in ‘’being.”

‘But we ought to say of God, HE is, and is in relation to no time, but in relation to eternity the motionless, and timeless, and changeless, in which is no “before” nor “after,” nor future, nor past, nor elder nor younger: but being One He has filled the “Ever” with the one “Now”; and is the sole self-dependent real “Being,” having neither past nor future, without beginning and without end.

‘Thus then ought we in worship to salute and address Him, or even indeed as some of the ancients did, THOU ART ONE, For the Deity is not many, as each of us is, a promiscuous assemblage of all kinds compounded of numberless differences arising in its conditions: but “being” must be One, just as One must be “being”: for otherness,as a differentia of “being,” inclines towards a becoming of “not-being.”’