CHAPTER VIIILUCRETIUS AND HIS READERS

In the third century B.C. we find evidence that some of the Romans had begun to doubt the current religious beliefs. During the Second Punic War, the exaggerated superstition among the lower classes, induced apparently by a series of military disasters, led to a pronounced revolt against religion among the more enlightened element.[1]Ennius, though he reveals a strain of Pythagorean mysticism, natural enough in one educated at Tarentum, aided this movement by translating Euhemerus, whose work seems to have been a utopian romance that incidentally interpreted the gods of Greek myths as human beings honored after death. If we may judge from later quotations from this work it was the incidental element which especially attracted the attention of the Romans. Of course, the Euripidean plays presented by Ennius and Pacuvius familiarized the audiences with the phrases of skepticism, and some of the later Greek comedies, written when faith in the Olympians had virtually gone, were shockingly disrespectful of religion. TheAmphitruoof Plautus is a case in point. It could hardly have been produced except in Greek dress, but for all that such plays tended to underminerespect for the state cults. The actor’s garb was, to be sure, Greek, but the deity ridiculed was called by his Latin name, Jupiter, not Zeus.

Unfortunately a satisfying philosophy did not emerge to take the place of the departing devotion—which though of no great moral worth had possessed a certain constraining influence. The soundest Greek philosophy was itself out of date at home and was nowhere taught abroad. Plato’s great faith in ratiocination had created a highly imaged idealism of exceedingly great beauty—moral as well as aesthetic. But it had not withstood the prying curiosity of his sophisticated Greek pupils. Aristotle, afraid of the imagination, had set out almost at once to build science upon a foundation of careful and minute observation before trusting to imagination again. Epicurus, without sufficient equipment in science but stirred by a healthy respect for nature, had evolved a materialistic system on the theories of Democritus and Leucippus, which assumed an evolutionary process of creation without divine intervention. The system was attractive, but so full of inconsistencies and untested hypotheses that it led the shrewder young men of Athens into complete agnosticism. Those who were inclined to mysticism took refuge in Zeno’s equally facile pantheism. By the time the Romans were ready to delve into metaphysics, the logical flaws in all systems had been pointed out by the Greeks themselves. The world of thought was in confusion. Men had lost faith in their power to solve the riddle of the universe. Professional philosophers were quarrelling, and the rest were turning away in dismay to nearer tasks.

Rome’s introduction to Greek philosophy came at this unhappy moment, and through the tutelage of the most pitiful representatives of Greek metaphysical eristic, which had nothing of value to offer to Rome. In the year 155 Carneades, while serving on an Athenian embassy at Rome, gave a demonstration of his dialectic ability by lauding justice one day and the next proving with equal facility the futility of the preceding speech. The third book of Cicero’sDe Republica, has preserved the gist of his argument. Young men were delighted with the show, but the aged shook their heads. The pragmatist argument seemed to them a dangerous introduction to ethics. Carneades, being a state envoy, must be respected, but Cato insisted that the senate finish its business with him speedily so that he might the sooner be sent home; and when during the next year two Epicurean teachers came to Rome to display their doctrines, the authorities ordered them to leave.[2]Roman cultural history might have been very different if the first philosophers had come with a positive message, if the Platonic dialogues had still been in vogue, or if the minds of the slow-moving Romans had been gradually prepared for the incoming skepticism by proofs that this new philosophy was itself but a transient phase. As it was, the leap from old-time orthodoxy to untrammeled agnosticism was too great. The danger to political and civic stability was fully sensed by the cautious senators. The demonstration of the ridiculous futility of the new learning, if culture produced men like these prattling Greeks, was all too patent. Rome was projected into a fearand hatred of metaphysical dialectic that a century of similar experiences hardly removed. Only Panaetius, the Stoic, had better success, for, concerning himself less with metaphysics, giving more attention to ethics of a type that justified Roman ideas of jurisprudence and political activity, he was welcomed by the small circle of men who acknowledged the leadership of the younger Scipio. Stoicism thus gained respectability, but it was Stoicism prudently narrowed to ethical dogmatism.

After a generation or two of hesitation young men of family began to attend lectures in Athens. They were almost all sons of senators who were themselves preparing for public life, and they chose their teachers and courses accordingly. They needed familiarity with Greek not only because of its great literature but because Greek was the language of a very important part of the now expanding empire. They sought tuition especially with the rhetoricians who taught the art of Demosthenes, the art of public address and debate—all-important in the senate and the courts. What system of philosophy students happened to imbibe was determined by this fact, since the professors of philosophy were the heads of the scholastic hierarchies and each style of speech had a direct connection with an appropriate school of philosophy. It was not accidental that the young man who preferred a matter-of-fact style found himself also imbibing stoic philosophy, and that the one who desired a more florid manner got his philosophic needs satisfied in the circles of the New Academy. This union of rhetoric and philosophywill in part explain why Epicurean materialism was somewhat slow to reach the attention of the Romans, since the school of Epicurus gave little time to rhetoric and therefore caught few of the young men who were training for statesmanship. Furthermore, it is not difficult to comprehend why in these circumstances and in view of the fact that philosophy was no longer progressive or fruitful it continued to remain a matter of minor importance at Rome. Rome’s young nobles were going to Athens for political training, not for a general education, and their teachers accordingly gave out their philosophical lectures as ancillary to rhetorical studies.

So much must be kept in mind by way of an introduction to the work of Lucretius, the friend of Cicero, who was the first of the Romans to present a philosophic theme in an attractive literary garb. In speaking of him here we shall not be primarily concerned with Lucretius as a poet, for the art of Lucretius springs out of an inspiration not to be explained by sources or environment, nor shall we speak primarily of the philosophical system of theDe Rerum Natura—for he invents his philosophy as little or as much as did Milton or Tennyson or Browning their theology or their social philosophy. We wish rather to dwell upon Lucretius in his Roman setting, his response to it, and its effects upon him.

Of Lucretius himself we know very little, and that we owe chiefly to a few strange remarks of St. Jerome, who disliked materialism as did all the fathers of the church. The dates are probably 99-55B.C. If so Lucretius was slightly younger than Caesar and died eleven years before Caesar’s assassination. He was old enough to have observed with full comprehension all the wretched cruelty of the civil wars between the Marian and Sullan factions, and that would have been enough to turn a sensitive man away from political life. Lucretius speaks repeatedly of Latin aspatria linguawhich implies that Rome was the native city of his family, and he also reveals a certain Roman pride in his reference to foreigners as well as a sympathy with the aristocracy in his slighting references to the crowd.[3]The life of Rome was familiar to him. His name was well known from the day of Lucretia, the insult to whose honor had stirred the riots which led to the expulsion of the tyrant Tarquin. At least thirty-six men bore the name with sufficient distinction to earn space in the modern classical encyclopedia. But whether the poet belonged to one of the nobler branches of the family we do not know. If, as is quite possible, he was a son of the general who was murdered by Sulla because of his independence we would comprehend his horror of warfare. His cognomen, Carus, is somewhat less usual in early records than his nomen, but it was in good standing from its first occurrence some two centuries before the poet’s time till late in the Empire.[4]From the manner in which Lucretius addresses Memmius, a man of some family and distinction, Munro reasonably assumedthat the poet was on a footing of equality with this member of the minor nobility.

Lucretius’ great poem,On Nature, was apparently being written during the middle decade of the last pre-Christian century. It was not quite complete when the poet died; the preface addresses Memmius as one who is in the midst of danger and apparently in arms,[5]a reference perhaps to Memmius’ governorship of Bithynia in 57. But the preface assumes the present arrangement of books, which was not established till books 1, 2 and 4 had been written. Perhaps this foreword was thrown in for an incomplete presentation copy to accompany Memmius when he sailed to Bithynia in the spring of 57. Of the legend that the poet experienced intervals of insanity I need only repeat the judgment of the noted physician Dr. Osler:[6]“Of love-philtres that produce insanity we may read the truth in a chapter of that most pleasant manual of erotology, theAnatomy of Melancholy. Of insanity of any type that leaves a mind capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses asDe Rerum Naturawe know nothing. The sole value of the myth is its casual association with the poem of Tennyson.” This of course does not preclude the possibility that Lucretius committed suicide in a fit of madness, though what a father of the church reports about a member of the Epicurean sect must not be taken too seriously. Wishful thinking often ends in the misjudging of sources.

The poem of Lucretius may be classed with Milton’sParadise Lostas a purposive work of art. Milton set out to “justify the ways of God to man” in verses that should carry the reader by their sheer emotional beauty; Lucretius, while equally aware of the demands of art, proclaimed his chief purpose to be to remove fear of the gods by describing creation as natural and independent of divine intervention. Milton is one of the last of the didactic poets; Lucretius wrote while the didactic tradition was still generally accepted. He wrote in verse because his predecessors, the earlier philosophers had done so, had indeed composed wholly in verse at a time when reading and writing were not general, when teaching was by word of mouth, and rhythm seemed a legitimate aid to memory. Didactic verse, at first a necessity, had established itself by its very bulk, and was accepted as a customary form by Ennius and Vergil as well as by Lucretius. The effort that the modern reader finds in adapting himself to imaginative and highly colored phraseology employed in scientific arguments need not be strenuous if one accepts the tradition as then vital and unquestioned.

Lucretius’ argument in briefest form is this: Crimes that disturb society are due to fear—fear of death. This fear grows out of an apprehension of what the gods may do to one’s erring soul. The desire to avoid death and the dreaded hereafter drives men to accumulate wealth and power by evil means. Obviously the way to reach a life of peace, is to believe that death is simple dissolution and that the gods are not concerned in the leastabout human behavior. The proof that this belief is well founded lies in the atomistic philosophy of Epicurus, which explains the creation of the universe from a concourse of atoms, without divine activity, and considers living things, including man, as atomic, and which interprets human progress not in terms of divine interference but in terms of a theory of the “survival of the fittest.” Such is Lucretius’ argument. It is full of fallacies, as science has always been. Our generation was brought up on Dalton’s solid, immaterial molecule which now seems as antiquated as the Lucretian atom. The Curies shattered that, and we accepted in its place the electron of Rutherford; then five years ago the Quantum theory led to Bohr’s kaleidoscopic atom which has since given way to the new theories of Schrödinger and those who vigorously question the material atom. In 1907 Ostwald called the law of conservation the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century, but by 1924 scientists doubted whether it was a law at all. That has happened in one brief lifetime. We do not ask for finality in science, though like Lucretius the young scientist of each new generation seizes upon the latest hypothesis and assumes it to be true. The theory of electrons, whether right or wrong, seems to some of us to have justified itself not only because of its power to awaken the imagination, but in its capacity as a solvent that could disintegrate preceding dogmatism by seeming to prove itself more efficacious. Such was the beauty which Lucretius discovered in his new-found science. To him personally it meant release, romance, and poetry, and he spent all hisenergy trying to give to others what he had found. He assures us that his whole being is pierced with a thrill when he lets his mental eye see the vision of creation.

Moenia mundidiscedunt, totum video per inane geri res.

Moenia mundi

discedunt, totum video per inane geri res.

He becomes so absorbed in his work that he sits the night out phrasing what he has beheld, and finally when he drops to sleep his dreams are still of the vision of creation.

At the very outset however, we stumble upon a deep puzzle in attempting to picture the man in his setting. How could he suppose that fear of punishment after death was the determining factor in social ethics, when the Romans of this period had not yet developed any clear eschatological system, and when only the learned had begun to read the Platonic myths and Stoic fancies regarding a possible future life? Cicero in his old age, when after utter defeat and a very deep personal grief he needed faith in a doctrine of compensation, tried to find arguments for a theory of the soul’s survival. But theTusculansdo not represent Cicero in the heyday of his powers when, like other cultured Romans, he thought of immortality only in terms of surviving fame. Caesar assumed when he spoke in the senate that his audience accepted death as final, and Catullus gave the common view in hisNox est perpetua una dormienda. The tombstone inscriptions of the Republican period are quite reticent on the point, whereas the more garrulous ones of the Empire that teem with mystical phraseology belong largely to slaves from Asia. The epitaphs of genuineRomans are silent about future punishments and rewards.

It does not suffice to say that the central argument of theDe Rerum Naturacomes from Epicurus. The language of Lucretius is so vigorous and goes so much farther than Epicurus that we may be sure that some personal experience inspired it. Now the Etruscans, north of the Tiber, had long ago developed a very definite picture of what life after death was like. The wall-paintings on Etruscan tombs give delightful pictures of the banquets of the blest—but also gruesome portraits of Charon and of Tuchulcha scourging the souls of the damned. Giotto’s frescoes and Dante’s pictures of the lost souls in hell give almost as true an interpretation of Etruscan as of Christian conceptions. If we had a biography of Lucretius we might perhaps find that he had spent some years of his boyhood among the Etruscans or that he had had an Etruscan nurse who filled him with un-Roman superstitions which only a carefully considered philosophy could dispel. To a poetic imagination as sensitive as his, such childish beliefs might have occasioned moments of excruciating pain. We do not know the explanation. All that I would suggest at this point is that the poet may well have had some experience in his youth which gave a color to the poem that surprises us in a contemporary of Cicero and which made the new Epicurean faith of special value to him.

It is just possible that an incorrect analysis of instincts led him to stress this point. Taking a suggestion of Epicurus that fear is the cause of abnormal behavior, he drove it hard. He seems notto have surmised that fear of death was readily to be explained as an inheritance from those who had most successfully shunned death; instead he sought to explain the instinct for self-preservation by superstition and to blame that superstition for the acts that are in fact induced by a powerful instinct. How he asks, could a man let greed so dominate him that he would steal, deceive, and even murder, unless he were driven by an inordinate desire to escape the want which might bring death and suffering after death? Such is the argument which seems to be largely his own.

In his purpose then, he is wholly sincere, whatever we may think of the logic of his argument. However, he betrays in his enthusiasms the fact that what inspires him is not a negative missionary spirit, but the desire to let every man know the beauty of science. Plato spoke of the hypnotic vision of “ideas”—the ecstatic thrill that came to the philosopher who penetrated into divine knowledge. We know with what enthusiasm Sir Isaac Newton’s announcement of the laws of gravitation was greeted, with what joy scientists in our own day heard of the breaking-up of the atom and of the cosmic rays that penetrate our atmosphere. Similar must have been the exaltation of this Roman when he felt that he could lay aside childish superstitions, suddenly pierce the confines of the universe and behold the nebulae shaping into planets, when he realized, as he thought, that energy lived forever, that matter was eternal, that the universe was infinite, that in the survival of the fit there were promises of eternal progress, that law and order ruled the universe.

His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptaspercipit atque horror.

His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas

percipit atque horror.

It amazed him to find himself so carried away that he could not sleep, that he must sit the whole night through satisfying his soul with the vision he had caught. Materialism has been called an unpoetic theme. To us it may be, but to a Roman brought up in the dull mazes of polytheism and the ludicrous nursery-tales that masqueraded as cosmology, it was a sudden liberation. He had found a theme of the highest poetic worth, the epic story of the origins of life; and Vergil who half rejected his arguments still was poet enough to see that Lucretius had discovered the sublimest of all poetic themes—Felix qui potuit.

The young men who were growing up when Lucretius’ poem was published turned quickly to his faith, despite the fact that the Athenian garden had till then been unpopular. It could hardly have been the doctrine of hedonism—which Lucretius almost disregards—that enticed the youth. After all the hedonistic calculus was as exacting in its morality as was the stoic argument of obedience to nature. More probably it was the appeal to the imagination and the aesthetic vision disclosed by Lucretius that swept the younger generation of that time off its feet.

There is another fruitful idea, the idea of progress, which first entered Roman consciousness through the work of Lucretius. Our modern belief in mechanistic progress, made into a fetish as it was after the acceptance of Darwinism, at times obstructs self-criticism and encourages fatalism to such an extent that its value as a stimulant maybe almost completely negatived. A generation that could rush thoughtlessly into the most stupidly criminal war of all ages—and still blandly insist that it was the supreme fruit of civilization—has surely been gulled by a fallacious evolutionarypost hoc ergo. It is a wholesome reminder to us post-Darwinists that the Athenians of Pericles’ day had in many respects attained to a creative culture which no nation has since succeeded in reaching. Yet read with a careful attention to all its implications, the evolutionary doctrine of progress is productive of envigorating optimism. Before Lucretius wrote—and the poet himself had not entirely shaken himself free from old beliefs—the Romans looked upon the golden age as past, and they were therefore too much reconciled with the fatalism inherent in the conviction that further deterioration was only to be expected.

The belief in a golden age of the past had come from several sources: from Hesiodic genealogies of gods and “heroes,” from an early naïve faith in the actuality of Homeric descriptions, from the tendency of parents to contrast the morals of a new generation with the refurbished and selected memories of their youth, and from the utopian pictures of romances conveniently placed in the far away and long-ago. All these things and others begot the “golden age” of Chronos’ day. The Romans had found such tales plausible. They too had a splendid tradition of ancestral heroes who had undoubtedly possessed the sterling qualities of a simple puritan-agrarian primitivism—capacity to endure hardship and pain, family devotion, loyalty, and abstinence—thatlater Romans admired but too often missed in contemporary life. In their conquests of the world they had come into contact with many uncivilized peoples and had had occasion to note these very qualities in all unadvanced peoples.[7]They had evidence in the ruins of the decayed villages of Latium that the soil no longer bore the population it once had, and the conclusion was ready at hand, as Lucretius himself points out, that mother earth was not so fruitful as she had been in her youth. Furthermore, when they happened upon the tombs of the prehistoric age,[8]especially the vaults of Etruscan princes, they found in many of them the lavish furniture of gold and silver and bronze-ware that led them to accept the Hesiodic chronology—doubtless based in part on similar observations in Boeotia—of a seeming succession of gold, silver, bronze, and iron periods.

Accordingly, there were reasons enough for accepting the well-known utopian fancies of the Greek poets. Lucretius himself did not wholly free himself of these beliefs. The Ennian portraits of the ancient heroes, and the description of primitive simplicity appealed strongly to him. He did not think that the Romans he had seen in the days of the Sullan massacres and the Catilinarian conspiracy were the moral equals of those of an earlier day. In point of fact they were not. There had been a noticeable decline.

Nevertheless, as we have seen, the theory of evolution which he adopted made it possible for him to observe that in some respects civilization had actually meant progress, that in the arts, in the domain of thought, in the institutions of government and law there had been a real advance. In his fifth book[9]he remarks in an intimate note that betrays his own personal observations:

Wherefore even now some arts are receiving their last polish, some are even in course of growth: just now many improvements have been made in ships; only yesterday musicians have given birth to tuneful melodies; then too this nature or system of things has been discovered lately, and I the very first of all have only now been found able to transfer it into native words.

Lucretius’ whole sketch of social evolution (V, 1011, ff.), though replete with regret at the errors committed, reveals a strong conviction that on the whole the trend had been toward betterment, and this view is clearly stated at the end (Munro’s translation):

Ships and tillage, walls, laws, roads, arms, dress and all such like things, all the prizes, all the elegancies too of life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiselling of fine-wrought statues, all these thingspractice, together with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind, taught men by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by step. Thus time by degrees brings each several thing forth before men’s eyes, and reason raises it up into the borders of light; for things must be brought to light one after the other and in due order in the different arts, until these have reached their highest point of development.

It is sometimes said that Lucretius did not make the final fruitful deduction that progress might continuein the future—which is the dominant note in modern evolutionary literature. It is true that the poet, whose task was to describe rather than to prophesy, does not emphasize the note of optimism, but when he says explicitly that some of the arts “are even now in the process of growth” he has committed himself to the full theory. And if one is convinced that the creative process has on the whole been one of progress, the rest follows, and the theory of the Social Contract to which Lucretius so fully commits himself rests in a deep faith that the best men have aided and will continue to aid progress by their efforts. Vergil, a close reader of Lucretius, was able in the fourthEclogueto shift the golden age into the future, and in theGeorgicshe reveals the conviction that men have themselves, aware of their needs, improved the arts and crafts. Here we see immediately the consequences of the new evolutionary idea. Cicero also exhibits a practical optimism that is ready to undertake the labor of bettering conditions. While he never explicitly discusses the question he traces in hisBrutusthe evolution of Roman oratory showing its successive improvement, and in theDe Republicaand theDe Legibus, where he accepts the evolutionary theory of social progress, he asserts again and again that it is the duty of statesmen to contribute their efforts to aid this advance. Finally, Seneca has also caught the full import of the gospel of progress. As a Stoic he should have consistently held to the discouraging theory of cycles. That he did not is doubtless due to his great fondness for Epicurean science.[10]

I respect the discoveries of wise men and do reverence to the inventors ... but let us also act the part of good parents: let us increase the inheritance of these things; let the property go to our successors with some increment. Much still remains to be done and will remain; nor will the man born a thousand years hence lack the opportunity to add to what he has received.

Surely Bury has quite missed the point when he holds that the ancient idea of progress failed to look to the future.

Lucretius also responded to Roman temperamental inclinations when he stressed the importance of observation and inductive logic in philosophy. The Romans of the Republic disliked mysticism and were ripe for a cosmology that substituted sense perception for vague mystery. They were also impatient of abstractions, and made little progress with such deductive sciences as mathematics. Their immense experiences in practical affairs of government had accustomed them to the habit of organizing committees to gather data on which to base charters for cities, treaties with neighbors, and forms of government for provinces. Formal plans shaped on a priori ratiocination they had learned to distrust. They always felt their way slowly through experiments to generalizations. It is characteristic of them that without formulating a general principle of equity they shaped a court of equity for the cases of foreigners a hundred years before they found that they were putting into practice the principles that Greek theory had deduced from philosophy without the ability to realize them in actuality.

Democritus had long ago proposed the hypothesis of natural creation, and Lucretius accepted thetheory from Epicurus. What Lucretius himself saw was the need of emphasizing to the Romans the approach by induction from observable data to the theories, and the need of presenting these data in a succession of arresting pictures. In his first book, when arguing that there is no creation by miracle, he leads up to the generalization by a series of carefully established facts that give a sound basis for the final induction:

Plants germinate from seeds, they always require time for growth, they require plant-food and the cultivation of the soil that makes that food available, and they invariably grow into the same species as that of the parent plant.

Beneath every statement of this series there lies a mass of careful observation, tested by what John Stuart Mill calls the method of “agreement and difference,” and these valid conclusions are in turn used for the final induction that creation by miracle is unknown. Similarly, in the third book, he demonstrates by use of the same logical process that, since sickness, coma, age, poison, and whatever affects the body, also affect the mind, the mind has actual contact with the body. The standard method of “concomitant variations” is also used frequently as, in the second book, where the argument runs thus: since heavy and light bodies fall more nearly uniformly in thin air than in heavy water they would fall at the same rate of speed in a vacuum. Except in the sixth book, which follows sources closely, Lucretius’ wealth of examples seems to come largely from his own store.

In truth, most of Mill’s categories of inductive methods are implicit in Lucretius, for the Epicureanswere in his day busily defending their use of induction against the attacks of Stoics. The logical treatise of Philodemus,[11]which of course Mill did not know, seems to have been written very shortly after Lucretius’ death, and it is not at all improbable that Lucretius had heard the lectures of Philodemus before they were finally given to the public. In those lectures the author dwells much on the validity of carefully chosen analogy, for in the field of the unobservable—in evolutionary cosmology, in atomic theory, and in psychology—metaphor and simile have always been and will always be fruitful tools of science. But Philodemus finally insisted on the necessity of basing all inductions on extremely careful observation, of using only essential similarities and pertinent comparisons, and he implied, even if he did not explicitly state it, that every test of “agreement,” “difference,” and “residue” is necessary. Of course the Epicureans fell into the fallacies of incomplete data, as all science based upon inductive methods must, and as beginners they were obviously impatient of delay and over-optimistic;but the correct forms of the inductive processes were all in daily use and if Bacon and Mill had known the treatise of Philodemus, which so well explains the picturesque arguments of Lucretius, they would have shown more respect for the “wisest of the ancients.”

It is in the service of inductive logic that much of Lucretius’ startling imagery is invented. The poetic quality of the book is in no sense “purple-patch” work; it is not an adjunct like the Corinthian columns pasted on Roman concrete walls for ornamental purposes. The pictures will always be found to derive from unusually accurate observations of nature so that they may serve their purpose as the starting points of the induction, or, when induction was impracticable, as a basis for some significant analogue. They are so indelibly presented that the argument which they carry cannot be forgotten. To realize their vital function in the argument one has but to recall a few instances of them: the race-horse leaping forward at the gong, the birds that start singing with the first ray of morning light, the flock of pasturing sheep that from a distance seem not to stir, the particles of dust flitting in a shaft of sunlight, the sudden glory of the dawn, the sea gulls screaming over the whitecaps, the cow in the pasture distraught when her calf is taken from her, the fishes swimming about in the yielding water, the gnat that is so light that its weight is not felt, the dog barking at dreams or deceived by an imagined scent. The science is no less precise in such passages because of the vivid naturalism of the descriptions. It is indeed adaptedto the Roman mode of thought, for the dry unimaged style of Epicurus, all too readily satisfied with dogmatic abstractions, would have made little impression upon the Romans.

One may wonder why it is that, although Lucretius possessed such a clear conception of the processes and tools of inductive logic, so little time was spent in the laboratory experimentation desiderated by Bacon. Our books of logic often assume that man’s processes of thought were recent inventions, as if no one argued deductively till Aristotle, or inductively till Bacon. One might as well assume that no human being used the lens of the eye until some one discovered its existence by dissection. Indeed Nausicaa’s remarks to Ulysses are as well packed with the fruits of penetrating reasoning as the pleas of a Philadelphia lawyer, and the paleolithic savages who made stone axes and fire pistons in the primeval forests employed the same forms of logic as the modern chemist in his laboratory. Lévy-Brühl’s conclusion that the “prelogical man” lived just beyond protohistory is not very convincing to the classicist. What is sometimes called a history of logic is of course not a history of the acquisition of the logical capacity, but a history of the conscious analyses of the processes that have long been in use.

The early Greek writers naturally struck out toward the great engrossing questions of God and the universe. Here analogy and deduction could get quicker results than induction because the problem lay beyond the reach of direct observation. Furthermore, mathematics could then proceed upon a few seemingly universal maxims that had come tobe considered self-evident from ages of human experience. Here all progress happened to lie in the deductive forms of thought. However, when advance stopped in this direction, after making the most rapid progress that the history of science can record, and whena prioriratiocination was found to lead no farther, then the atomists began at the bottom again with minute observation and patient induction. They used a laboratory method, though it was not at first necessary to make an artificial laboratory, since nature had provided one near at hand with untold data still unrecorded. What need was there of planting seeds and observing the laws of creation in a garden-box until nature’s vast gardens had been studied? The method was just as sound and for the time being far more fertile. It was at this point that Lucretius came into the field. Scientific experimentation indeed had already begun at points where nature did not seem to give sufficiently precise results—one recalls Aristarchus and Archimedes—but it had not proceeded far; not however from lack of scientific curiosity, or from failure to appreciate the value of experiments, but because quicker results were still to be had by exploiting nature’s abundant store of data.

The appreciation of induction and the employment of the scientific processes by Lucretius must of course not be overstressed. Some of the large gains of formal logic have never been more highly valued than by him. In Epicurus and his predecessors, for instance, the concept of infinity had been arrived at deductively and skilfully employed in order to provide time, space, and material forthe evolutionary assumption. Lucretius fully appreciated the value of that concept, realized indeed that the creative process of natural evolution could not for a moment be assumed, for the amazingly intricate Nature which had to be explained, except on the hypothesis of infinity. And infinity was to him not merely a logical necessity, it was a stimulating concept that lifted the imagination of man into the realms of high poetry:[12]

For my mind-of-manNow seeks the nature of the vast BeyondThere on the other side, the boundless sumWhich lies without the ramparts of the world,Toward which the spirit longs to peer afar,Toward which indeed the swift élan of thoughtFlies unencumbered forth.

For my mind-of-man

Now seeks the nature of the vast Beyond

There on the other side, the boundless sum

Which lies without the ramparts of the world,

Toward which the spirit longs to peer afar,

Toward which indeed the swift élan of thought

Flies unencumbered forth.

It is also characteristic of Lucretius as a Roman that while he accepted a philosophy that made all creation kin—in this respect Lucretius may be considered the founder of philosophic Romanticism—he refused to abandon the classical humanism that insisted upon seeing in man the master of his own destiny. There is no doubt about the strong drift toward romanticism throughout the poem. Man is here inseparable from nature. The fiery temper of a choleric man, like the ferocity of the lion, is traced to the atomic composition of the soul.[13]The cool-tempered ox partakes of elements that predominate in men of prudence, and cowardice in man is explained physically as akin to the trembling of the deer. In all this, man is removed from the pedestal to which idealistic philosophy had elevated him, and by a back door, as it were, brought back againinto Pan’s forest where in the past humans had played with Satyrs and quadrupeds in the happy days of Mythopoeia. That Lucretius fully comprehended the poetic importance of this scientific kinship of all living things is apparent from his proemium where spring is pictured as the mating season, the season of song and joy, for all creation without distinction:

Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres—Amor omnibus idem.For soon as the vernal aspect of day is disclosed, and the birth-favouring breeze of Favonius unbarred is blowing fresh, first the fowls of the air, O Venus, show signs of thee and thy entering in, thoroughly smitten in heart by thy power. Next the wild herds bound over the glad pastures and swim the rapid rivers: in such wise, each made prisoner by thy charms, follows thee with desire, whither thou goest to lead it on. Yes, throughout seas and mountains and sweeping rivers and leafy homes of birds and grassy plains, striking fond love into the breasts of all thou constrainest them each after its kind to continue their races with desire.

Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres—Amor omnibus idem.

Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres—

Amor omnibus idem.

For soon as the vernal aspect of day is disclosed, and the birth-favouring breeze of Favonius unbarred is blowing fresh, first the fowls of the air, O Venus, show signs of thee and thy entering in, thoroughly smitten in heart by thy power. Next the wild herds bound over the glad pastures and swim the rapid rivers: in such wise, each made prisoner by thy charms, follows thee with desire, whither thou goest to lead it on. Yes, throughout seas and mountains and sweeping rivers and leafy homes of birds and grassy plains, striking fond love into the breasts of all thou constrainest them each after its kind to continue their races with desire.

Here first in literature we get, emerging out of atomic science, the spring poetry of Troubadour song. Lucretius drew out of his science the full value of Romantic poetry.

But when he had done that he did not forget that he was a genuine Roman and that man must be accorded the dignity due his commanding independence. At this point he took full advantage of the Epicureanclinamenand asserted man’s power of self-mastery. In the finest soul-atom lies the germ of a free-will. “Whence I ask, has been wrested from the fates the power by which we go forward whither the will leads each?” And even after explaining temperament by reference to atomic make-up,he hastened to qualify his statement by adding: “traces of the different natures left behind, which reason is unable to expel from us, are so exceedingly slight that there is nothing to hinder us from living a life worthy of the gods.” Indeed his whole life-work was a mission that revealed him a thorough humanist. The man who devoted his days and nights to expel from society the palsy due to superstition, to induce men to use reason in order that they might gain a “life worthy of the gods” was not devoted to naturism in the modern sense of the word. Indeed in some passages Lucretius seems willing to accept human nature at a very high valuation. The ugliness of life is not primarily due to its flaws, but to nature perverted by imposed fears, unreasoned desires, and artificial institutions that enlightened reason might readily dispose of.[14]There is of course in all this some inconsistency, for there lies lurking beneath it all the age-long battle between Determinism and Freedom, and the inconsistency is made the more apparent because, curiously enough, in Lucretius the poet supports the scientist against the humanist. But when one has finished the poem one leaves it with the conviction that, while the poet has not been repressed, the Roman who was conscious of his moral responsibility has held the pen. In that respect the atomic theories of recent years have not demonstrated that Lucretius was in error.

FOOTNOTES[1]W. Warde Fowler,Religious Experience, chap. XV.[2]Athenaeusxii. 68.[3]Patria, iii. 260; iv. 970; i. 41. See the introduction of Merrill’s excellent edition of Lucretius, pp. 13-14.[4]Marx was of course in error in stating that the name Carus implied humble ancestry. See “The Name T. Lucretius Carus,” inStudies in Honor of Hermann Collitz(1930); p. 63.[5]SeeClass. Phil.XIV, 286.[6]Dr. Osler’s Presidential Address to the Classical Association (England), 1918-19.[7]Lucr. v. 17.[8]Lucr. ii. 1168; v. 800, on the decay of agriculture. Most of the magnificent early tombs excavated during the last century were found already rifled; some of these had evidently been found by the Romans and must have yielded wares as rich as those of the Regolini-Galassi tomb.[9]v. 332 ff. (tr. Munro).[10]Seneca,Epist. Mor., 64. 7; 104. 16;Quaest. Nat.1 pref., vii. 25-31.[11]Philodemus, περὶ σημείων, ed. Gomperz, 1865, with additional readings from the papyrus by Philippson inRhein, Mus.(1909). See Weltring,Das σημεῖον in der Aristotelischen, Stoischen und Epikureischen Philosophie(Bonn, 1910). Philodemus anticipated some of the difficulties that later troubled Mill, noticing that in some inductive problems a single observation provided valid conclusions, whereas in others very many were required (Gomperz, 19, 13); he knew that many fallacies were due to the use of insufficient instances (Gomp. 30, 2; 35, 15), that it was well not only to observe nature but to conduct systematic research and to employ the observations of others (Philippson,loc. cit., 13), that the observer must choose essential similarities in using the mode of “agreement” and must exclude conclusions as soon as a refuting instance appeared (Gomp. 13, 1; 17, 30; 20, 32), and he emphasized the need of employing the principle of difference (Gomp. 18, 15; Phil. p. 28). This treatise which probably draws lavishly on Zeno, has not yet been fully restored, and being a defense against Stoic attack it is not to be considered a formal and complete exposition of inductive logic. But in germ it contains most of the essential observations of J. S. Mill.[12]Trans.W. E. Leonard.[13]iii. 290 ff.[14]ii. 23; iii. 57; v. 1105.

[1]W. Warde Fowler,Religious Experience, chap. XV.

[2]Athenaeusxii. 68.

[3]Patria, iii. 260; iv. 970; i. 41. See the introduction of Merrill’s excellent edition of Lucretius, pp. 13-14.

[4]Marx was of course in error in stating that the name Carus implied humble ancestry. See “The Name T. Lucretius Carus,” inStudies in Honor of Hermann Collitz(1930); p. 63.

[5]SeeClass. Phil.XIV, 286.

[6]Dr. Osler’s Presidential Address to the Classical Association (England), 1918-19.

[7]Lucr. v. 17.

[8]Lucr. ii. 1168; v. 800, on the decay of agriculture. Most of the magnificent early tombs excavated during the last century were found already rifled; some of these had evidently been found by the Romans and must have yielded wares as rich as those of the Regolini-Galassi tomb.

[9]v. 332 ff. (tr. Munro).

[10]Seneca,Epist. Mor., 64. 7; 104. 16;Quaest. Nat.1 pref., vii. 25-31.

[11]Philodemus, περὶ σημείων, ed. Gomperz, 1865, with additional readings from the papyrus by Philippson inRhein, Mus.(1909). See Weltring,Das σημεῖον in der Aristotelischen, Stoischen und Epikureischen Philosophie(Bonn, 1910). Philodemus anticipated some of the difficulties that later troubled Mill, noticing that in some inductive problems a single observation provided valid conclusions, whereas in others very many were required (Gomperz, 19, 13); he knew that many fallacies were due to the use of insufficient instances (Gomp. 30, 2; 35, 15), that it was well not only to observe nature but to conduct systematic research and to employ the observations of others (Philippson,loc. cit., 13), that the observer must choose essential similarities in using the mode of “agreement” and must exclude conclusions as soon as a refuting instance appeared (Gomp. 13, 1; 17, 30; 20, 32), and he emphasized the need of employing the principle of difference (Gomp. 18, 15; Phil. p. 28). This treatise which probably draws lavishly on Zeno, has not yet been fully restored, and being a defense against Stoic attack it is not to be considered a formal and complete exposition of inductive logic. But in germ it contains most of the essential observations of J. S. Mill.

[12]Trans.W. E. Leonard.

[13]iii. 290 ff.

[14]ii. 23; iii. 57; v. 1105.

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