W.T. Jones provides H's fragment:
Of the logos which is as I describe it men always prove tobe uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and once
they have heard it. For although all things happen
according to this logos, men are like people of no
experience, even when they experience such words and deeds
as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its
constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail
to notice what they do after they wake up just they forget
what they do when asleep.
Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although
the Logos is common, the many live as though they had a
private understanding.
Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree
that all things are one.
Jones takes all this to mean that the oneness of the world consists in the orderliness with which things change -- a formal unity in place of the material unity sought by the Milesians.
Further entails a distinction between:
the world as it appears // the world as it is really
[--> recall Xenophanes --> Thales]
Heraclitus further takes up the social and the moral: a new turn -- and one which in his case is aristocratic in character.
[Observe: as the gap between the philosophical/scientific explanation and "common sense" grows -- so grows the gap between the few and the many - a point we've seen in the context of the Pythagoreans who pursue the bios theoretikos..]
H's apparent disdain of the many extends to popular religion -- which he calls idolatry, as compared with the philosophers' god, who is apparently identical with the world-process, the logos:
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace,surfeit and hunger; but takes various shapes, just as fire,
when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the
savour of each.
In the fragment
To God all things are fair and good and right, but men holdsome things wrong and some right
Jones sees an indifference to human notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice -- and hence he sees in H. a move towards a "neutral," "amoral" natural law.
[As interpreted by Kirk & Raven, however, this perhaps suggests rather that human perception of opposites as intrinsic to "the way things are" is mistaken. See K&R notes.]
In any case -- again, recall Xenophanes' as the voice of the philosopher's contempt for "the many" and their gods.
[Jones further complains -- as is common among those who see in all this the "natural" evolution towards modern natural science, such that modern natural science is the paradigm of knowledge, theory, etc. -- that the "religious overtones" of this prevents the development of science. We will see as we go along, however, that concepts religious in origin also prove to be crucial to the development of science.]