Heraclitus is doing something Homer's language could not do — and the cost of that something is worth naming. When he says the soul has a logos that increases itself, he is not simply adding a metaphor; he is installing a grammar in which the soul's interior life becomes singular, self-augmenting, subject to a principle that is the same in you and in me. That is the koinón, the common: one logos pervading all things. Homer's organs — thūmos, phrenes, kradie — had no such unity. They were multiple, semi-autonomous, sites of visitation. You could not have the same thumos as another man any more than you could share his lungs.

What Heraclitus offers is relief. A shared rational principle is a tremendous comfort — it means there is something stable beneath the storm of Homeric feeling, something that holds, that grows, that does not merely suffer and cry and suffer and cry. The dry soul is wisest and best. But notice what gets purchased with that stability: the multiplicity of Homer's organs, the refusal to let any single principle organize interior life, the sense that value emerges from tension between the organs rather than from the ascent of one of them — all of that recedes. The logos that increases itself increases at the expense of what it cannot gather into itself.