 Anderson acknowledged that Heraclitus’ emphasis on the element Fire might be read as a typically Ionian response to the question “what is the world made of”, but the more important theme is his treatment of fire purely as process, as transaction and exchange, as the paradigm element of strife and harmony. In embryo Anderson found in Heraclitus so many of his own principles: the close link between logic and ethics (ethics as the field in which conflict comes primarily to the fore); the single way of being, of “what is common” (the search for a general logic, a theory of the commensurability of things in terms of a theory of process); the recognition of complexity, conflict and strife underlying existing things; the anti-sentimentality and pessimism which refuses to find solace in unity; the hidden harmony of forces in balance preferable to the open harmony of illusory unity; the unremitting attack on subjectivist illusions of desiring or imagining things as we would like them to be (unchanging and secure) rather than seeing them for what they are.