LUCRETIUS 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. The _Amphitruo_ of Plautus is a
case in point. It could hardly have been produced except in Greek dress,
but for all that such plays tended to undermine respect 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was itself out of date at home and was nowhere taught abroad.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’s _De 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 fear and 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 philosophy will 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 the _De 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 99-55 B.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 as _patria lingua_ which 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 assumed that 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,
the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. Of insanity of any type that leaves a mind
capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses as _De Rerum Natura_ we
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’s _Paradise Lost_ as 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
least about 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 his energy 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 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 the _Tusculans_ do 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 his _Nox 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
genuine Romans are silent about future punishments and rewards.
It does not suffice to say that the central argument of the _De Rerum
Natura_ comes 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 not to 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 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 may be 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 evolutionary _post 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—that later 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 things _practice_, 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 continue in 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 fourth _Eclogue_ to shift the golden age into the future, and in
the _Georgics_ he 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 his _Brutus_ the evolution of Roman oratory showing its successive
improvement, and in the _De Republica_ and the _De 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 the theory 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 Epicureans were 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 adapted to 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 to be 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 when _a priori_ ratiocination 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 for the 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-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 again
into 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.
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 Epicurean
_clinamen_ and 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] _Athenaeus_ xii. 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,” in _Studies in Honor
of Hermann Collitz_ (1930); p. 63.
[5] See _Class. 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 in _Rhein, 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.