Of the presocratic philosophersi, Heraclitus has been characterised as creating a cosmogeny centered on fire as the base element of the world. All matter is a transition of fire in states of energy, decaying to air and vapor to water and to earth. On earth everything is held to this principle. Life and death, sleeping and awakening, nothing escapes change.

There is not a duality of earth and fire, stability and instability, in Heraclitus metaphysics. The highest energy state is never achieved permanently, but that abides it's very nature by applying instability to instability itself. In contrast stability is never achieved and never will be. Road up, road down, it is still the same road. But it is not mere chaos, for there is a unity and order to the changing. A man can never step into the same river twice, nor can the river have the same man step into it twice. The waters are ever changing yet the form of the river is retained. Fire is the same. This is the hidden principle Heraclitus speaks of. Thunderbolt guides everything and fire judges all.

A common theme in the fragments and testmonies of Heraclitus is the negative view of people. They are deemed ignorant of the truth that is in front of them and possessing falsehood instead of knowledge. One fragment puts aristocratically that one person can outweigh thousands by themself if good enough. Despite this however everyone is deemed to have the capacity for wisdom and reason. Souls are explained as fires animating the body. This ties into sleep and awakening being the soul's fire dying into embers and then renewing. Souls can be dry or moist which affect the virtue of the person. Dryer are wiser while the moist souls stuff themselves with their desires. The death of the soul is it becoming water. The afterlife is impossible to guess, but it will award the wiser people. Those who are fit enough to die in battle are more worthy than those dying of disease. Could the soul leave death behind and instead reach a higher state, like the philosophers final destination of Plato? We can clearly see here a link with the cosmology and goodness that must have influenced Plato.