of itself is always already at hand, continually forming and passing away of its own accord, as distinct from that which is of human making, that which springs from τέχνη, from skill, invention, and production. Φύσις, that which prevails, in this distinct and yet narrower meaning now designates a distinctive region of beings, certain beings among others. The φύσει ὄντα are opposed to that which is τέχνῃ, that which arises on the basis of a preparation and production, of a meditation proper to man. Φύσις now becomes a regional concept. Yet nature in this narrower sense, which is nevertheless fairly broad, is that which for the Greeks neither arises nor passes away. Again, Heraclitus tells us: κόσμον τόνδε, τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν οὔτα ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ᾽ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα.5 "This kosmos [I deliberately leave the word untranslated] is always the same throughout everything, and neither a god nor any human being created it, rather this φύσις always was, always is, and always will be an ever-flaming fire, flaring up according to measure and extinguishing according to measure."
p) The second meaning of φύσις: prevailing as such as the essence and inner law of the matter.
In the expression φύσις, however, prevailing as such, which lets everything that prevails be as that which it is, is equiprimordially and just as essentially understood. Φύσις now no longer means one region among others, indeed it does not mean a region of beings at all, but the nature of beings. Nature now has the meaning of innermost essence, as when we say: the nature of things, and in so doing mean not only the nature of natural things, but the nature of each and every being. We speak of the nature of spirit, of soul, of the nature of the work of art, of the nature of the matter. Here φύσις does not mean that which prevails itself, but its prevailing as such, the essence, the inner law of a matter.
What is now decisive is that one of these two concepts of φύσις does not, for instance, suppress the other, but that they both continue alongside one another. Indeed, they are not only alongside one another, for the insight gradually awakens that both meanings which come to the fore in φύσις right from the commencement, albeit unaccentuated, express something equally essential and therefore persist in that questioning which in principle questions concerning the prevailing of beings as a whole: philosophy.
We cannot here pursue more closely the historical process which in the philosophy of antiquity leads to an increasingly distinct prominence of these
5. Ibid., Frgm. 30.