Lucretius

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Ancient Classics for English Readers

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(SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES.)

Chapter 1

LUCRETIUS.

CHAPTER I.

Introductory.

As we look back upon the works of the great writers of the past—works and writers with which, in a certain sense, we are quite familiar, and which in a certain sense are as famous now as ever—it will sometimes give us a strange, and almost painful shock, if we realise how very few of these can be still said to live. They have their immortality, it is true; but they have passed to it through the grave and gate of death. Their forms are still heroic; but they are heroes without blood, and shadowy; and we seem to meet them in a dim Elysium, not in the world around us. Or else we may compare them to bodies embalmed with spices, hidden away underground, and to be studied only at intervals, in the crypts of literature. A few, a few only, such as Horace and Shakespeare, still keep their fleshly life in them, are able to push their way towards us through the distractions and cares surrounding us, to parley with these, and to show us how to meet them, and, standing close beside us, assail us with living voices.

Amongst this small minority Lucretius certainly can claim no place. When his own language was still living, when men in the extent of their knowledge and their ways of thought were still the same as he himself knew them, not even then does he seem to have been popular or influential. And men, since he knew them, have grown and changed. Knowledge has widened in ways he never dreamed of; new tones have grown into human sentiment; all the lights and shadows of life have shifted; and its whole surface has been dyed with different colours. Naturally, we then—we of the modern world—as far as any direct influence goes, are quite beyond his reach. His voice is not as our voice; it is of a different substance. We can make no direct response to it. At his note our minds and feelings rouse to no movement. It comes to us like a "horn of elf-land faintly blowing," and we know that it was meant for other ears than ours.

But the case of Lucretius is in some ways a singular one; and this very remoteness may give him, in these days, a sharp and vivid interest for us, that has long gone from poetry to which in many ways we are far nearer. How this is, we shall see readily when we consider the work he did. We shall see why he had as little interest as he had for his own epoch, and why he has as much as he has for ours. Of his life next to nothing is known for certain, beyond the fact that he was a Roman of probably noble family, that he died in the prime of his manhood, about half a century before the birth of Christ, and that a legend ascribes his death to the effects of a maddening love-philtre. What his fame rests on, what makes his name known to us, is a single poem—or, speaking of it as a whole, it may be perhaps more just to say, a single treatise in verse. For the main subject of this poem is not poetical; nor, in composing it, was poetry the author's first object. Primarily, and before all things, the work is a scientific treatise—as strictly scientific (at least in the author's intention) as a modern treatise on optics, or geology, or the origin of species; and, except as far as metre goes, it has in many places as little of poetry as these have. Poetry, it is true, there is in it—poetry in abundance; and some of this is the loftiest in all Roman literature. Continually, too, when we do not get poetry, we are still conscious that we are listening to a poet. All this we shall come to see by-and-by. But it will be well first to consider the work only in its primary character, that of a book of science; for here is the foundation of its special interest for ourselves; and our interest in it, under its other aspects, is largely based on this.

Lucretius called his book 'An Essay on the Nature of Things.' And he designed it to be a complete scientific explanation of the universe, and the relation of man to it, as a part of itself. He applies the same method to the investigation of mind and matter; of human and animal life; of organic and inorganic nature; and he describes the way in which the latter has risen out of the former. He traces the evolution of the present universe out of its original elements; he tells us how the earth became fit gradually to sustain life on its surface; he explains the origin of the existing species of animals, man included, together with the nature of consciousness, and the grounds of knowledge. And, finally, he gives us a history of human progress and civilisation, from the rudest to the most advanced stages, explaining the origin of language, of the state, of law, and the development of the various arts. And he does not do this as a poet might have been expected to do it. This is the thing of all others that he most seeks to avoid. He wishes to deal in no broad effective generalities, no picturesque metaphor. He seeks to drown no homely details by devices of artistic chiaroscuro. He bids all poetic imagination, as a tempter, get behind him. One by one, with all the method he can master, he goes into the questions that are before him, confusing the matter with no ornamental metaphors. He is a strict utilitarian in his choice of language. He cares not how prosaic he is. His great aim is to explain facts, and to show convincingly that his explanations are the true ones.

Judged of as an exposition of what really is, the science of Lucretius is of course completely valueless. And yet there are two things about it which, for the present generation, must give it a peculiar interest. One of these things is that very valuelessness, that strange, grotesque difference to all our modern teaching. But such a difference by itself would not create an interest. There is a second point about it, just as noticeable as the first, and which, indeed, alone makes the first worth noticing—and this is the strange likeness to our modern teaching that runs through all this difference. Couched under other forms, arrived at by other courses, the first principles of Lucretius, and—many of his last conclusions, are the same, or are all but the same, as those which are now startling the world as new revelations—revelations so new and so startling that we can as yet only half accept them. In the first place, his mission and his attitude, to view the matter broadly, are entirely analogous to those of our modern physicists. He comes forward just as they do, as the champion of natural science, claiming that by it, and by it alone, we are to understand man's life, and to explain the universe. It is his doctrine, just as it is theirs, that no event can occur either in the outer world about us, or in the inner world of our own consciousness, that is not connected with some material change, and is not conceivably explicable in terms of matter. And he makes this claim for science, just as it is made now, against all theology, and against all religion. To these he ascribes, just as is done by some modern thinkers, a large part of the ills men suffer from. To a certain extent, too, he professes the belief, so often now held out to us, that when once religion, with its blighting influence, is exterminated, there are prospects of "a better, and, above all, a happier state of existence," for the human race. Indeed, so like is much of his general language to what we hear continually in our own day, so inspired does it seem to be with just the same animus, that we might at times almost fancy he was Professor Tyndall, or one of the two Mills, confuting the arguments of Paley or of Butler, or deriding the narratives of the book of Genesis.

But it is not in his general attitude only that he is so like the moderns. With less exactness, but in perhaps a far more singular manner, he seems to anticipate many of their most special individual doctrines. The evolution of the present universe, the indestructibility of matter, the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, the origin of language, of religion, of the state, of law, and the progress of society generally—on these, as well as on numerous other points, the teachings of Lucretius are in strange accordance with much of what we are being taught now. To us these things are being told as entirely fresh tidings,—as facts and theories that have now for the first time dawned on the human spirit. And to a certain extent there is a truth in this; but to a certain extent only. The same thoughts and the same theories were the property of Lucretius or of his teacher; and they have now come back to the world, not as different things, but as the same things changed.

Here is that double fact about Lucretius which gives him his special interest for us—the likeness of his thoughts to much of the thought now, and also the difference. When we study him, we are brought face to face with two combatants—science and theology. When we look about us now, we are brought face to face with two combatants also—science and theology. At first these two pairs seem so unlike each other, that we hardly class them together, or make any comparison between them, or their modes of warfare. If we look at them a little longer, we shall see that they are the same; and then for the first time shall we fully realise their unlikeness, just as we first see fully what the years have done for a man's face, when we connect it with what it once was when a boy's. In the days of Lucretius, materialism and theism were each, as it were, in their boyhood; and, armed with simple weapons, they fought a boyish battle. If we look back a little on what they then were, it may help us better to realise what they now are,—how each has been changed by the knowledge of new perplexities—how each, armed now with weapons so far more formidable, and so far more skilful in the use of them, seems less confident of a final victory—how the faces of each have lost their old rash confidence, and are marked by deeper lines of thought and of anxiety.

In making this comparison, the form of Lucretius's work will itself be of some assistance to us. Were a similar work to be written in our time in a similar form, it might create much surprise, but could not command much attention; and even that of Lucretius, when first given to the world, seems, as has been already said, never to have been really popular. We may perhaps gain some notion of the general literary effect of it, if we conceive Mr Tennyson, instead of writing his "Arthurian Idylls," to have devoted his talents to versifying Mr Darwin's 'Origin of Species' and 'Descent of Man;' using the views of that philosopher as a text for a passionate invective against Anglican orthodoxy and the doctrine of original sin, and a passionate protest that when we were once free of these superstitions, the complexion of our whole life would change, and human society become a nobler thing. In such a composition there could not fail to be passages of powerful and lofty poetry; and touches of a poet's hand we should be sure to trace everywhere. But however clearly it might be the work of a poet, it would very certainly not be a successful poem. Our admiration for the author's power might be great; but our regret for his waste of it would be greater. But as regards Lucretius, our feelings are somewhat different. The scientific system he undertook to expound was to comprise the whole circle of the sciences, and was to unravel the whole riddle of existence with a rapidity and completeness that no one now so much as dreams of. From a poet's standpoint, therefore, his subject, judged as a whole, possessed a sort of epic grandeur, that to him seemed compatible with the strictest scientific accuracy. At the same time, in its details, and in the sort of reasonings they were founded on and supported by, there was a simplicity that made them less unfit than we should imagine to be expressed in verse. In fact, the form in which Lucretius gave the world his system is itself singularly typical of how far ancient science is removed from ours, and is the liveliest illustration possible of the sort of gulf that is between them.

But the form that Lucretius gave his work is valuable and instructive for another reason than this. The poem has a secondary character, with which its form is in more natural keeping, and of which it is a yet more special expression. Primarily, as has been said, Lucretius wrote as a man of science. To indoctrinate men with science, with accurate science, was his main object. But it was not with science for its own sake. It was for the sake of the effect it was to have upon their lives, upon their hopes, their joys, their practical conduct, their happiness. What this effect was to be, he seems to think in a large measure self-evident. At any rate it did not need the same elaborate exposition as the reasoning which led up to it. But still at the same time he is perpetually referring to it, perpetually calling the attention of his readers to it; showing them that it—it alone—is, though not the main subject of his work, at any rate the main object of it. What is man? why is he here? what hope has he in this world? what are the sources of his joys and sorrows? how shall he choose the first of these, and avoid the latter? what things are here worth living for? and, what worth is there in even the best of these? These are the ultimate questions that really concern men; and science has no general value, save as preparing our minds to meet them. And, as Lucretius views it, science gives us this preparation in one single way. Its work is to isolate life; to show us that life is self-centred, self-bounded, and, in so far as it is sufficient at all, self-sufficient. Till life is thus isolated, it is the earnest, the fierce belief of Lucretius, that we shall never have it at its best; it will be full of miseries and solicitudes which need not exist, but which we through our folly and headstrong ignorance create ourselves, for our own torment. What manner of possession he regarded life when thus isolated, what happiness or pleasure he thought it would be able to yield us, is a question of equal interest for us as the character of his physical science, and suggests an equally significant comparison with the thought of our own time. Much of his views upon this point his poetical treatment of his subject will enable us to gather, though he has not reduced these opinions to a formal system; and the fact that he was a poet, and looked at life with a great poet's vision, will give to these opinions a special value and meaning.

In examining his work, then, though it is a work that no longer speaks directly to us, or can directly influence any of our ways of thinking, or impart to us any new fragment of knowledge, we shall be examining something that has more interest for us than belongs to a mere curious antiquity. We shall be examining a distant landmark, to which the atmosphere of our own day is giving a new distinctness, and which shows us how far in twenty centuries men's minds have travelled—travelled along two courses. One course is their explanation of life by natural or by supernatural theories; the other is their sentiments and their practical teaching with regard to life when explained.

Thus, in attempting to understand the work of Lucretius, our task will be simplified by dividing it into two parts. Let us first, therefore, without reference to the literary form he gave it, try to understand accurately his scientific system, his methods of obser- vation and reasoning, and the conclusions, general and particular, that he arrived at. We shall thus see what the main message was that he wished to deliver to the world. Let us then go on to examine the poem itself, and see how, as a poet, he handled so refractory a subject; and how, in proclaiming and illustrating its relations to human life, and to human passion, he made it lead up to and suggest poetry. We shall so be brought to understand what his teaching was, and what he himself seemed to feel were the results of it. Then we may be led on to dwell briefly on the chief points of difference between him and us,—though in making such a comparison we must each of us do much for ourselves. And further, we may consider briefly—though this is the matter that will have least interest for us—the 'Essay on the Nature of Things,' not as science, not as philosophy, but simply as a literary production, as a poem, as a work of art in language, that is distinguished as such by certain technical defects and excellences.

What then we shall now begin with considering is the scientific system that Lucretius aims at expounding to us—what it was, and how he came to master it. To understand this, however, it will be necessary to go a little farther back in history, and try to realise as best we may the nature of the scientific systems that had gone before it, and that it at once grew out of and superseded.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

THE DAWN OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE.

"The impregnable position of Science," says one of our latest and most celebrated scientific teachers, "may be stated in a few words. We claim and we shall wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory." The earliest claim and the earliest aim of science was identical with this, its latest. The same words are true of it, in its birth and in its maturity.

The birth of science, using the word in the sense now popularly and specially attached to it, is not an event so vague as one might expect to find it. It is an event which, so far as we know, we can give with accuracy both a date and place to. In the Greek city of Miletus, about six hundred years before Christ, there flourished a certain thoughtful man named Thales. He it was who, so far as we know, was the first man of science. He caught the first distinct glimmer of a scientific conception of things, and revealed as best he could this new light to others. This event was a momentous one. The details of it are far remote: we have but few and scanty records of it. But let us do our best to realise what its nature was.

The race that Thales came of, and amongst whose ideas he was nurtured, was a race singularly keen, inquiring, intellectual, and imaginative. They felt, therefore, the wonder of the world, and the need for an explanation of it. But for a long time they were contented with a very simple answer. In one point, we must remember, they were very unlike ourselves. One of the ideas which weighs most heavily on the modern consciousness is the sense of our own separation from nature, often of our antagonism to it. But the Greeks, amongst whom natural science took its rise, were conscious of no such separation. They felt they were a part of nature, akin to it, in harmony with it. They were indeed themselves but one of nature's forces. Now, of many of nature's phenomena, they felt that they were themselves the causes and the controllers. But besides these, there were others which they could neither cause nor control. Here was their first problem: how should they explain these? The answer was obvious. These were the workings of beings like themselves, only indefinitely wiser and indefinitely more powerful. All the phenomena of nature they at once accounted for, so far as they realised that any account was required of them, by an anthropomorphic polytheism; or in other words, as Mr Matthew Arnold might express it, all that was done in the world, that was not done by ourselves, was done and conducted by a race of "magnified and non-natural men."

As, however, this system of theology became more definite, and more burdened with detail, it began to jar at length upon finer and more reflecting minds And such—Thales being the first of them—sought to find an escape from it in some simpler and more sedate conception. The first transition to this—the first beginning of the change from theology to science—is a very curious one. It took this form. Thales was discontented with the theory that represented all the changes and facts of the universe as due to the manipulation of a race of divine animals. It was a theory that was arbitrary, grotesque, and inharmonious. It needed to be simplified. Accordingly, discarding the divine animals altogether, he supposed the universe to be a divine animal itself, living, moving, breathing as men do, and as the gods were supposed to do. Thus one of the philosophers of the school of Thales taught that the stars were the world's breathing-holes. This conception seems strange and quaint to us now, but still it was a true step in the direction of science. And it did not end here. This theory was not allowed to remain as a mere abstract statement. Attempts were at once made to connect it with the observed facts of things. The material world, or in other words matter, being conceived of as itself alive, and as a single living thing, the variety of the shapes it took had to be conceived of as apparent only, not real—or, at any rate, all equally reducible to some common unity. Observation of facts supplied many cases that seemed to show that this was so. Vapours condensed themselves into water; ice melted into water; snow melted into water; and conversely water, or moisture, which seemed near akin to it, was absorbed into plants and animals, and sustained their life. Life, again, was seen to depend on respiration; and thus life and living beings seemed, from one point of view, to be a mode of air. Similarly, fire seemed to be possessed of a like protean power. Heat, fire's primary quality, was seen to be associated with life; nearly every substance could be burnt, and reduced to fire; and so all things, it was argued, had originally been composed out of it. Such were the natural observations of the first physicists,—one confining his attention to one set of phenomena, another to another, being guided in this choice by no assignable reason.

Thus one of them taught that everything was really water; another that everything was really air; another that everything was really fire; another that everything was really some unqualified substance, that had the power of giving itself a number of contrary qualities.

These various speculators form together the first scientific school; and in spite of their various differences, they agree in one fundamental point. They agree in substituting for an explanation of the universe that was complicated and unverifiable, one that was simple, and was at least in some degree capable of verification, and in some degree founded upon observation. They made the power of nature a single power, contained within herself, and immanent everywhere; they taught that this power was material and accessible to observation, and they tried to analyse it into its simplest form.

Science remained in this stage for about a hundred years—that is, thinkers for about that time treated matter as though it were endowed with life, and tried to explain the universe by ascribing to it the powers and the character of an animal. But all the while this school of thought bore within itself the seeds of change; and gradually and insensibly its exponents were carried beyond it. The conception of the world acting as an animal, insensibly died into, or got confused with, that of its acting under law as an automaton.

Thus Anaximander, who was born not thirty years after Thales, though basing his speculations, like Thales, on the supposed vitality of matter, still shows a tendency to rise out of this conception, or at least to merge it in another. He it was who taught that the real substance of all things was a vague uniform substance, living, but without qualities; but capable, by virtue of its life, of taking different qualities to different parts of itself. Thus, he teaches, the elementary contraries, warm and cold, moist and dry, were first separated. Up to this point he seems to have thought of matter as acting like a living thing. After this he seems to change his view of it, and to treat its movements as those of a blind and dead necessity. From the conflict of these contraries, he teaches, there arose an eternal motion, out of which the present universe gradually shaped itself, including men, and gods also, these last being thus the product of natural action, not the producers of it. The earth, he further teaches, was once fluid, and has been evolved slowly into its present state. Life at length was de- veloped on its surface through the interaction of heat and moisture, and at first existed only in the water, which at a former epoch covered everything. Gradually much of these waters dried up, and a number of living creatures were left on land. These organisms slowly adapted themselves to their environments, and the land animals acquired their present form.

In these doctrines we see certainly the germ at least of a more advanced conception of things. The first scientific conception has already given birth to a new and antagonistic one. A little later on this antagonism becomes yet more marked; and it grows quite plain that this early school of science is divided against itself.

We see this very clearly in the cases of Heracleitus and Empedocles. Both of these still look for the first cause of things as they are, in a certain living will, in a certain personal character that inheres in matter. It is this that in the first place sets things in motion; but when once the motion has begun, they seek to explain the direction of it by essentially inanimate and impersonal causes. Thus Empedocles, as his principles of movement, postulates two quasi personal forces, Strife and Love. But having started with these, he at once ceases to be personal; and analysing all substances, not into water, air, or fire, or a vague and illimitable matter, but into a combination of all of these—into what, in fact, we still are accustomed to call the four elements—he tries to show how things of necessity evolved themselves out of manifold and long-continued combinations of these.

As a specimen of the way in which Empedocles worked out his theories, it may be mentioned that his account of the origin of species is to a great extent the same as that of Mr Darwin. All sorts of living creatures, he taught, first appeared on the earth, many of them unable to defend or to reproduce themselves, and thus perished in the inevitable struggle for existence. The fittest alone survived by this process of natural selection, and these are the races of men and animals that are now living. Here, then, is a picturesque illustration of the growing inconsistency with itself of the first school of science. We have Strife and Love to explain the beginning of motion, and a crude Darwinism to explain the results of it.

The inconsistency thus indicated was due to the growing distinctness of two separate ideas, which men still tried to identify, and only ended by confusing them. This confusion was first reduced to order by Anaxagoras, another thinker of the same period, who may be said to have been the precursor of the second school of science, by expressing the double idea that was implicit in the first. He no longer treats the world as an animal, or matter as living, and leavened with such affections as love and hate. The matter there was to be moved, and the force there was to move it, he first expressly teaches, are two distinct things. "Matter," he said, as an epitome of this teaching, "was originally without form and void—all its parts were confused together: then Mind came, and wrought it into form and order." But not only was this general principle an advance on what had been before; he made a great step also in the working out of it, through his new analysis of matter. This, he taught, consists of an infinite number of minute elementary particles, of a vast variety of kinds,—such as would be produced could we turn all the wood in the world to sawdust, grind all the stone in the world to powder, file all the metals in the world into the same condition, and treat all the other substances we see about us in a like manner. And the present order of things was produced by the gradual cohering together of like particles, the elementary stone-dust becoming stone, wood-dust wood, iron-dust iron, and so on. This process, he taught, as has been said before, was not initiated by the particles themselves, or any principle immanent in them, but by an intelligent and designing Mind, independent of and external to them. But in his application of this theory, Anaxagoras uses his Mind only to account for the beginning of a mechanical movement of the particles, and he then leaves these to do all the rest for themselves. That mechanical movement began as a revolution of the particles at a single point. Then gradually ever-increasing masses were drawn into this vortex, which is still extending farther and farther into the infinite realm of matter; and out of this movement, without any succeeding intervention of Mind, the universe as we know it has evolved itself.