of change in general, and the river fragments in particular, suggest that he thought that change and permanence could co-exist, that is, that an object could persist in spite of continually undergoing change in some respect or other . If you step in the same river, you step in different waters: the river is still (numerically) the same river even though it has changed (compositionally), in that it (the same river) is now composed of different waters. So it is unlikely that Heraclitus denied that there are persisting objects.