Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, born at Ephesus, who flourished about the year 480 B.C.; was the first to note how everything throughout the universe is in constant flux, and nothing permanent but in transition from being to nothing and from nothing to being, from life to death and from death to life, that nothing is, that everything becomes, that the truth of being is becoming, that no one, nothing, is exempt from this law, the law symbolised by the fable of the Phoenix in the fire (q. v.).