  One further difficulty remains for the monist reading. In his alleged version of monism, fire is the ultimate reality. Yet fire (as the ancients recognized) is the least substantial and the most evanescent of elemental stuffs. It makes a better symbol of change than of permanence. Other alleged cases of material monism offer a basic kind of matter that could arguably be stable and permanent over long periods of time; but fire manifests “need and satiety” (B65), a kind of ongoing consumption that can live only by devouring fuel. Is not Heraclitus’ choice of a basic reality itself paradoxical?  At best his appeal to fire seems to draw on material monism in a way that points beyond the theory to an account  in which the process of change is more real than the material substances that undergo change.