Anaximander said that when the opposites destroyed or encroached on each other, this was unjust, and in order to maintain stability and order the injustice had to be rectified by the Unbounded. The Cosmic Fire Finally, fire. Heraclitus does not only compare the world as a whole to a fire, but he also thinks that fire in particular plays a vital role in the nature of the cosmos. Any series of processes involves fire, both in its past and in its future. Roughly, Heraclitus seems to think that there is a sort of fixed exchange-rate between fire and everything else.
Sea is dissolved and measured into the same proportion that existed at first.
Whenever a bit of fire turns into a bit of water, or into a bit of earth, there is the same proportion between the amount of that bit of fire, and the amount of that bit of water or earth. E.g. suppose that a bit of fire f1 turns into a bit of water w1 and then back into a another bit of fire f2. Then the fixed exchange- rate means that the f1 must contain exactly the same amount of fire as f2. If it's right to say that Heraclitus conceives of fire not so much as a kind of stuff as a kind of process, then this is equivalent to saying that the total amount of process in the world is constant. Some scholars have compared this idea to the idea of the conservation of energy.