Heraclitus B45 · B45

Diogenes Laertius (9.7) preserves what may be Heraclitus's most quoted line on the soul. However far you travel, walking every road, you will not reach the boundaries of the <em>psychē</em> — 'so deep a <em>logos</em> it has.'

Two charged words meet here. The <em>psychē</em> is given the vastness of a landscape with no edge, a country you cannot walk to the end of; and its depth is measured by <em>logos</em> — account, measure, ratio, the same word that names the cosmic order in B1. The soul has a logos, and that logos is deep. This is the counterweight to B115, where 'the soul has a logos that increases itself': the self is not a fixed quantity but something that grows, unbounded, along its own measure. Heraclitus is the first Greek to make the interior a place of unlimited extent — an idea that will travel through Plato's <em>Phaedo</em> down to Augustine's astonishment at the caverns of memory.

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