Since Lucretius is thus identical for us with his poem, and

THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS

LUCRETIUS, DANTE, AND GOETHE

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

VOLUME I

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

1910

PREFACE

The present volume is composed, with a few additions, of six lectures

read at Columbia University in February, 1910, and repeated in April of

the same year, at the University of Wisconsin. These lectures, in turn,

were based on a regular course which I had been giving for some time at

Harvard College. Though produced under such learned auspices, my book

can make no great claims to learning. It contains the impressions of an

amateur, the appreciations of an ordinary reader, concerning three great

writers, two of whom at least might furnish matter enough for the

studies of a lifetime, and actually have academies, libraries, and

university chairs especially consecrated to their memory. I am no

specialist in the study of Lucretius; I am not a Dante scholar nor a

Goethe scholar. I can report no facts and propose no hypotheses about

these men which are not at hand in their familiar works, or in

well-known commentaries upon them. My excuse for writing about them,

notwithstanding, is merely the human excuse which every new poet has for

writing about the spring. They have attracted me; they have moved me to

reflection; they have revealed to me certain aspects of nature and of

philosophy which I am prompted by mere sincerity to express, if anybody

seems interested or willing to listen. What I can offer the benevolent

reader, therefore, is no learned investigation. It is only a piece of

literary criticism, together with a first broad lesson in the history of

philosophy--and, perhaps, in philosophy itself.

G.S.

_Harvard College_

_June, 1910_

CONTENTS

I

INTRODUCTION

_Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe sum up the chief phases of European

philosophy,--naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism--Ideal

relation between philosophy and poetry._

II

LUCRETIUS

_Development of Greek cosmology--Democritus--Epicurean moral

sentiment--Changes inspired by it in the system of

Democritus--Accidental alliance of materialism with

hedonism--Imaginative value of naturalism: The Lucretian Venus, or the

propitious movement in nature--The Lucretian Mars, or the destructive

movement--Preponderant melancholy, and the reason for it--Materiality

of the soul--The fear of death and the fear of life--Lucretius a true

poet of nature--Comparison with Shelley and Wordsworth--Things he might

have added consistently: Indefeasible worth of his insight and

sentiment._

III

DANTE

_Character of Platonism--Its cosmology a parable--Combination of this

with Hebraic philosophy of history--Theory of the Papacy and the Empire

adopted by Dante--His judgement on Florence--Dante as a lyric

poet--Beatrice the woman, the symbol, and the reality--Love, magic, and

symbolism constitutive principles of Dante’s universe--Idea of the

Divine Comedy--The scheme of virtues and vices--Retributive theory of

rewards and punishments--Esoteric view of this, which makes even

punishment intrinsic to the sins--Examples--Dantesque cosmography--The

genius of the poet--His universal scope--His triumphant execution of the

Comedy--His defects, in spite of which he remains the type of a supreme

poet._

IV

GOETHE’S FAUST _Page_

_The romantic spirit--The ideals of the Renaissance--Expression of both

in the legendary Faust--Marlowe’s version--Tendency to vindicate

Faust--Contrast with Calderon’s “Wonder-working Magician”--The original

Faust of Goethe,--universal ambition and eternal dissatisfaction

--Modifications--The series of experiments in living--The story of

Gretchen fitted in--Goethe’s naturalistic theory of life and

rejuvenation: Helen--The classic manner and the judgement on

classicism--Faust’s last ambition--The conflict over his soul and his

ascent to heaven symbolical--Moral of the whole._

V

CONCLUSION

_Comparison of the three poets--Their relative rank--Ideal of a

philosophic or comprehensive poet--Untried possibilities of art._

I

INTRODUCTION

The sole advantage in possessing great works of literature lies in what

they can help us to become. In themselves, as feats performed by their

authors, they would have forfeited none of their truth or greatness if

they had perished before our day. We can neither take away nor add to

their past value or inherent dignity. It is only they, in so far as they

are appropriate food and not poison for us, that can add to the present

value and dignity of our minds. Foreign classics have to be retranslated

and reinterpreted for each generation, to render their old naturalness

in a natural way, and keep their perennial humanity living and capable

of assimilation. Even native classics have to be reapprehended by every

reader. It is this continual digestion of the substance supplied by the

past that alone renders the insights of the past still potent in the

present and for the future. Living criticism, genuine appreciation, is

the interest we draw from year to year on the unrecoverable capital of

human genius.

Regarded from this point of view, as substances to be digested, the

poetic remains of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (though it is his _Faust_

only that I shall speak of) afford rather a varied feast. In their

doctrine and genius they may seem to be too much opposed to be at all

convergent or combinable in their wisdom. Some, who know and care for

one, perhaps, of these poets, may be disposed to doubt whether they have

anything vital to learn from the other two. Yet it is as a pupil--I hope

a discriminating pupil--of each in turn that I mean to speak; and I

venture to maintain that in what makes them great they are compatible;

that without any vagueness or doubleness in one’s criterion of taste one

may admire enthusiastically the poetry of each in turn; and that one may

accept the essential philosophy, the positive intuition, of each,

without lack of definition or system in one’s own thinking.

Indeed, the diversity of these three poets passes, if I may use the

Hegelian dialect, into a unity of a higher kind. Each is typical of an

age. Taken together they sum up all European philosophy. Lucretius

adopts the most radical and the most correct of those cosmological

systems which the genius of early Greece had devised. He sees the world

to be one great edifice, one great machine, all its parts reacting upon

one another, and growing out of one another in obedience to a general

pervasive process or life. His poem describes the nature, that is, the

birth and composition, of all things. It shows how they are compounded

out of elements, and how these elements, which he thinks are atoms in

perpetual motion, are being constantly redistributed, so that old

things perish and new things arise. Into this view of the world he fits

a view of human life as it ought to be led under such conditions. His

materialism is completed by an aspiration towards freedom and quietness

of spirit. Allowed to look once upon the wonderful spectacle, which is

to repeat itself in the world for ever, we should look and admire, for

to-morrow we die; we should eat, drink, and be merry, but moderately and

with much art, lest we die miserably, and die to-day.

This is one complete system of philosophy,--materialism in natural

science, humanism in ethics. Such was the gist of all Greek philosophy

before Socrates, of that philosophy which was truly Hellenic and

corresponded with the movement which produced Greek manners, Greek

government, and Greek art--a movement towards simplicity, autonomy, and

reasonableness in everything, from dress to religion. Such is the gist

also of what may be called the philosophy of the Renaissance, the

reassertion of science and liberty in the modern world, by Bacon, by

Spinoza, by the whole contemporary school that looks to science for its

view of the facts, and to the happiness of men on earth for its ideal.

This system is called naturalism; and of this Lucretius is the

unrivalled poet.

Skip a thousand years and more, and a contrasting spectacle is before

us. All minds, all institutions, are dominated by a religion that

represents the soul as a pilgrim upon earth; the world is fallen and

subject to the devil; pain and poverty are considered normal, happiness

impossible here and to be hoped for only in a future life, provided the

snares and pleasures of the present life have not entrapped us. Meantime

a sort of Jacob’s ladder stretches from the stone on which the wayfarer

lays his head into the heaven he hopes for; and the angels he sees

ascending and descending upon it are beautiful stories, wonderful

theories, and comforting rites. Through these he partakes, even on

earth, of what will be his heavenly existence. He partly understands his

destiny; his own history and that of the world are transfigured before

him and, without ceasing to be sad, become beautiful. The raptures of a

perfect conformity with the will of God, and of union with Him, overtake

him in his prayers. This is supernaturalism, a system represented in

Christendom chiefly by the Catholic Church, but adopted also by the

later pagans, and widespread in Asia from remote antiquity down to the

present time. Little as the momentary temper of Europe and America may

now incline to such a view, it is always possible for the individual, or

for the race, to return to it. Its sources are in the solitude of the

spirit and in the disparity, or the opposition, between what the spirit

feels it is fitted to do, and what, in this world, it is condemned to

waste itself upon. The unmatched poet of this supernaturalism is Dante.

Skip again some five hundred years, and there is another change of

scene. The Teutonic races that had previously conquered Europe have

begun to dominate and understand themselves. They have become

Protestants, or protesters against the Roman world. An infinite fountain

of life seems to be unlocked within their bosom. They turn successively

to the Bible, to learning, to patriotism, to industry, for new objects

to love and fresh worlds to conquer; but they have too much vitality, or

too little maturity, to rest in any of these things. A demon drives them

on; and this demon, divine and immortal in its apparent waywardness, is

their inmost self. It is their insatiable will, their radical courage.

Nay, though this be a hard saying to the uninitiated, their will is the

creator of all those objects by which it is sometimes amused, and

sometimes baffled, but never tamed. Their will summons all opportunities

and dangers out of nothing to feed its appetite for action; and in that

ideal function lies their sole reality. Once attained, things are

transcended. Like the episodes of a spent dream, they are to be smiled

at and forgotten; the spirit that feigned and discarded them remains

always strong and undefiled; it aches for new conquests over new

fictions. This is romanticism. It is an attitude often found in English

poetry, and characteristic of German philosophy. It was adopted by

Emerson and ought to be sympathetic to Americans; for it expresses the

self-trust of world-building youth, and mystical faith in will and

action. The greatest monument to this romanticism is Goethe’s _Faust._

Can it be an accident that the most adequate and probably the most

lasting exposition of these three schools of philosophy should have been

made by poets? Are poets, at heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is

philosophy, in the end, nothing but poetry? Let us consider the

situation.

If we think of philosophy as an investigation into truth, or as

reasoning upon truths supposed to be discovered, there is nothing in

philosophy akin to poetry. There is nothing poetic about the works of

Epicurus, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or Kant; they are leafless forests. In

Lucretius and in Dante themselves we find passages where nothing is

poetical except the metre, or some incidental ornament. In such passages

the form of poetry is thrown over the substance of prose, as Lucretius

himself confesses where he says: “As when physicians would contrive to

administer loathsome wormwood to little boys they first moisten the rim

of the cup round about with sweet and golden honey, that the children’s,

unsuspecting youth may be beguiled--to the lips, but no further--while

they drink down the bitter potion, by deception not betrayed, but

rather by that stratagem made whole and restored;... so I have willed to

set forth our doctrine before thee in sweet-sounding Pierian song, and

to smear it, as it were, with the Muses’ honey.”[1]

But poetry cannot be spread upon things like butter; it must play upon

them like light, and be the medium through which we see them. Lucretius

does himself an injustice. If his philosophy had been wormwood to him,

he could not have said, as he does just before this passage: “Like a

sharp blow of the thyrsus, a great hope of praise vibrates through my

heart and fills my breast with tender love of the Muses, whereby now,

instinct with flowering fancy, I traverse pathless haunts of the

Pierides, by no man’s foot trodden before. It is joy to reach undefiled

fountains and quaff; it is joy to gather fresh flowers and weave a

matchless crown for my head of those bays with which never yet the Muses

veiled the brow of any man; first, in that I teach sublime truths and

come to free the soul from the strangling knots of superstition; then,

in that on so dark a theme I pour forth so clear a song, suffusing all

with poetic beauty,... if haply by such means I might keep thy mind

intent upon my verses, until thine eye fathoms the whole structure of

nature, and the fixed form that makes it beautiful.”[2]

Here, I think, we have the solution to our doubt. The reasonings and

investigations of philosophy are arduous, and if poetry is to be linked

with them, it can be artificially only, and with a bad grace. But the

vision of philosophy is sublime. The order it reveals in the world is

something beautiful, tragic, sympathetic to the mind, and just what

every poet, on a small or on a large scale, is always trying to catch.

In philosophy itself investigation and reasoning are only preparatory

and servile parts, means to an end. They terminate in insight, or what

in the noblest sense of the word may be called _theory, θεωρία_,--a

steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth. Such

contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach it who has not enlarged

his mind and tamed his heart. A philosopher who attains it is, for the

moment, a poet; and a poet who turns his practised and passionate

imagination on the order of all things, or on anything in the light of

the whole, is for that moment a philosopher.

Nevertheless, even if we grant that the philosopher, in his best

moments, is a poet, we may suspect that the poet has his worst moments

when he tries to be a philosopher, or rather, when he succeeds in being

one. Philosophy is something reasoned and heavy; poetry something

winged, flashing, inspired. Take almost any longish poem, and the parts

of it are better than the whole. A poet is able to put together a few

words, a cadence or two, a single interesting image. He renders in that

way some moment of comparatively high tension, of comparatively keen

sentiment. But at the next moment the tension is relaxed, the sentiment

has faded, and what succeeds is usually incongruous with what went

before, or at least inferior. The thought drifts away from what it had

started to be. It is lost in the sands of versification. As man is now

constituted, to be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Shall we say, then,--and I now broach an idea by which I set some

store,--that poetry is essentially short-winded, that what is poetic is

necessarily intermittent in the writings of poets, that only the

fleeting moment, the mood, the episode, can be rapturously felt, or

rapturously rendered, while life as a whole, history, character, and

destiny are objects unfit for imagination to dwell on, and repellent to

poetic art? I cannot think so. If it be a fact, as it often is, that we

find little things pleasing and great things arid and formless, and if

we are better poets in a line than in an epic, that is simply due to

lack of faculty on our part, lack of imagination and memory, and above

all to lack of discipline.

This might be shown, I think, by psychological analysis, if we cared to

rely on something so abstract and so debatable. For in what does the

short-winded poet himself excel the common unimaginative person who

talks or who stares? Is it that he thinks even less? Rather, I suppose,

in that he feels more; in that his moment of intuition, though fleeting,

has a vision, a scope, a symbolic something about it that renders it

deep and expressive. Intensity, even momentary intensity, if it can be

expressed at all, comports fullness and suggestion compressed into that

intense moment. Yes, everything that comes to us at all must come to us

at some time or other. It is always the fleeting moment in which we

live. To this fleeting moment the philosopher, as well as the poet, is

actually confined. Each must enrich it with his endless vistas, vistas

necessarily focused, if they are to be disclosed at all, in the eye of

the observer, here and now. What makes the difference between a moment

of poetic insight and a vulgar moment is that the passions of the poetic

moment have more perspective. Even the short-winded poet selects his

words so that they have a magic momentum in them which carries us, we

know not how, to mountain-tops of intuition. Is not the poetic quality

of phrases and images due to their concentrating and liberating the

confused promptings left in us by a long experience? When we feel the

poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in

the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a

jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

If a short passage is poetical because it is pregnant with suggestion of

a few things, which stretches our attention and makes us rapt and

serious, how much more poetical ought a vision to be which was pregnant

with all we care for? Focus a little experience, give some scope and

depth to your feeling, and it grows imaginative; give it more scope and

more depth, focus all experience within it, make it a philosopher’s

vision of the world, and it will grow imaginative in a superlative

degree, and be supremely poetical. The difficulty, after having the

experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to hold

and suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such

verbal expression that others maybe able to decipher it, and to be

stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of

their memories.

Poetry, then, is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental, but,

on the contrary, for being comprehensive and having range. If too much

matter renders it heavy, that is the fault of the poet’s weak intellect,

not of the outstretched world. A quicker eye, a more synthetic

imagination, might grasp a larger subject with the same ease. The

picture that would render this larger subject would not be flatter and

feebler for its extent, but, on the contrary, deeper and stronger, since

it would possess as much unity as the little one with greater volume. As

in a supreme dramatic crisis all our life seems to be focused in the

present, and used in colouring our consciousness and shaping our

decisions, so for each philosophic poet the whole world of man is

gathered together; and he is never so much a poet as when, in a single

cry, he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe, and

salutes his ultimate destiny. It is the acme of life to understand life.

The height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.

But enough of psychological analysis and of reasoning in the void.

Three historical illustrations will prove my point more clearly and more

conclusively.

* * * * *

[1] Lucretius, I. 936-47:

Veluti pueris absinthia tetra medentes

Cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circura

Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore,

Ut puerorum aetas improvida ludificetur

Labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum

Absinthi laticem, deceptaque non capiatur,

Sed potius tali pacto recreata valescat:

Sic ego nunc ... volui tibi suaviloquenti

Carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram,

Et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle.

[2] Lucretius, i. 922-34, 948-50:

Acri

Percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor

Et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem

Musarum, quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti

Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante

Trita solo: iuvat integros accedere fontes,

Atque haurire; iuvatque novos decerpere flores,

Insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam,

Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae.

Primum, quod magnis doceo de rebus, et artis

Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo:

Deinde, quod obscura de re tam lucida pango

Carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore....

Si tibi forte animum tali ratione tenere

Versibus in nostris possem, dum perspicis omnem

Naturam rerum, qua constet compta figura.

II

LUCRETIUS

There is perhaps no important poem the antecedents of which can be

traced so exhaustively as can those of the work of Lucretius, _De Rerum

Natura_. These antecedents, however, do not lie in the poet himself. If

they did, we should not be able to trace them, since we know nothing, or

next to nothing, about Lucretius the man. In a chronicon, compiled by

St. Jerome largely out of Suetonius, in which miscellaneous events are

noted which occurred in each successive year, we read for the year 94

B.C.: “Titus Lucretius, poet, is born. After a love-philtre had turned

him mad, and he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, several

books which Cicero revised, he killed himself by his own hand in the

forty-fourth year of his age.”

The love-philtre in this report sounds apocryphal; and the story of the

madness and suicide attributes too edifying an end to an atheist and

Epicurean not to be suspected. If anything lends colour to the story it

is a certain consonance which we may feel between its tragic incidents

and the genius of the poet as revealed in his work, where we find a

strange scorn of love, a strange vehemence, and a high melancholy. It is

by no means incredible that the author of such a poem should have been

at some time the slave of a pathological passion, that his vehemence

and inspiration should have passed into mania, and that he should have

taken his own life. But the untrustworthy authority of St. Jerome cannot

assure us whether what he repeats is a tradition founded on fact or an

ingenious fiction.

Our ignorance of the life of Lucretius is not, I think, much to be

regretted. His work preserves that part of him which he himself would

have wished to preserve. Perfect conviction ignores itself, proclaiming

the public truth. To reach this no doubt requires a peculiar genius

which is called intelligence; for intelligence is quickness in seeing

things as they are. But where intelligence is attained, the rest of a

man, like the scaffolding to a finished building, becomes irrelevant. We

do not wish it to intercept our view of the solid structure, which alone

was intended by the artist--if he was building for others, and was not a

coxcomb. It is his intellectual vision that the naturalist in particular

wishes to hand down to posterity, not the shabby incidents that preceded

that vision in his own person. These incidents, even if they were by

chance interesting, could not be repeated in us; but the vision into

which the thinker poured his faculties, and to which he devoted his

vigils, is communicable to us also, and may become a part of ourselves.

Since Lucretius is thus identical for us with his poem, and is lost in

his philosophy, the antecedents of Lucretius are simply the stages by

which his conception of nature first shaped itself in the human mind. To

retrace these stages is easy; some of them are only too familiar; yet

the very triteness of the subject may blind us to the grandeur and

audacity of the intellectual feat involved. A naturalistic conception of

things is a great work of imagination,--greater, I think, than any

dramatic or moral mythology: it is a conception fit to inspire great

poetry, and in the end, perhaps, it will prove the only conception able

to inspire it.

We are told of the old Xenophanes that he looked up into the round

heaven and cried, “The All is One.” What is logically a truism may often

be, imaginatively, a great discovery, because no one before may have

thought of the obvious analogy which the truism registers. So, in this

case, the unity of all things is logically an evident, if barren, truth;

for the most disparate and unrelated worlds would still be a multitude,

and so an aggregate, and so, in some sense, a unity. Yet it was a great

imaginative feat to cast the eye deliberately round the entire horizon,

and to draw mentally the sum of all reality, discovering that reality

makes such a sum, and may be called one; as any stone or animal, though

composed of many parts, is yet called one in common parlance. It was

doubtless some prehistoric man of genius, long before Xenophanes, who

first applied in this way to all things together that notion of unity

and wholeness which everybody had gained by observation of things

singly, and who first ventured to speak of “the world.” To do so is to

set the problem for all natural philosophy, and in a certain measure to

anticipate the solution of that problem; for it is to ask how things

hang together, and to assume that they do hang together in one way or

another.

To cry “The All is One,” and to perceive that all things are in one

landscape and form a system by their juxtaposition, is the rude

beginning of wisdom in natural philosophy. But it is easy to go farther,

and to see that things form a unity in a far deeper and more mysterious

way. One of the first things, for instance, that impresses the poet, the

man of feeling and reflection, is that these objects that people the

world all pass away, and that the place there-of knows them no more.

Yet, when they vanish, nothingness does not succeed; other things arise

in their stead. Nature remains always young and whole in spite of death

at work everywhere; and what takes the place of what continually

disappears is often remarkably like it in character. Universal

instability is not incompatible with a great monotony in things; so that

while Heraclitus lamented that everything was in flux, Ecclesiastes, who

was also entirely convinced of that truth, could lament that there was

nothing new under the sun.

This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once

sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought,

perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon, and which

was the chief inspiration of Lucretius. It is that all we observe about

us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent

substance. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in

inward quality, is constantly redistributed; in its redistribution it

forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find

constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things are dust, and to

dust they return; a dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to

fall perpetually into new, and doubtless beautiful, forms. This notion

of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world; it

persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common

ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.

The spectacle of inexorable change, the triumph of time, or whatever we

may call it, has always been a favourite theme for lyric and tragic

poetry, and for religious meditation. To perceive universal mutation, to

feel the vanity of life, has always been the beginning of seriousness.

It is the condition for any beautiful, measured, or tender philosophy.

Prior to that, everything is barbarous, both in morals and in poetry;

for until then mankind has not learned to renounce anything, has not

outgrown the instinctive egotism and optimism of the young animal, and

has not removed the centre of its being, or of its faith, from the will

to the imagination.

To discover substance, then, is a great step in the life of reason, even

if substance be conceived quite negatively as a term that serves merely

to mark, by contrast, the unsubstantiality, the vanity, of all

particular moments and things. That is the way in which Indian poetry

and philosophy conceived substance. But the step taken by Greek physics,

and by the poetry of Lucretius, passes beyond. Lucretius and the Greeks,

in observing universal mutation and the vanity of life, conceived behind

appearance a great intelligible process, an evolution in nature. The

reality became interesting, as well as the illusion. Physics became

scientific, which had previously been merely spectacular.

Here was a much richer theme for the poet and philosopher, who was

launched upon the discovery of the ground and secret causes of this gay

or melancholy flux. The understanding that enabled him to discover these

causes did for the European what no Indian mystic, what no despiser of

understanding anywhere, suffers himself to do; namely, to dominate,

foretell, and transform this changing show with a virile, practical

intelligence. The man who discovers the secret springs of appearances

opens to contemplation a second positive world, the workshop and busy

depths of nature, where a prodigious mechanism is continually supporting

our life, and making ready for it from afar by the most exquisite

adjustments. The march of this mechanism, while it produces life and

often fosters it, yet as often makes it difficult and condemns it to

extinction. This truth, which the conception of natural substance first

makes intelligible, justifies the elegies which the poets of illusion

and disillusion have always written upon human things. It is a truth

with a melancholy side; but being a truth, it satisfies and exalts the

rational mind, that craves truth as truth, whether it be sad or

comforting, and wishes to pursue a possible, not an impossible,

happiness.

So far, Greek science had made out that the world was one, that there

was a substance, that this was a physical substance, distributed and

moving in space. It was matter. The question remained, What is the

precise nature of matter, and how does it produce the appearances we

observe? The only answer that concerns us here is that given by

Lucretius; an answer he accepted from Epicurus, his master in

everything, who in turn had accepted it from Democritus. Now Democritus

had made a notable advance over the systems that selected one obvious

substance, like water, or collected all the obvious substances, as

Anaxagoras had done, and tried to make the world out of them.

Democritus thought that the substance of everything ought not to have

any of the qualities present in some things and absent in others; it

ought to have only the qualities present in all things. It should be

_merely_ matter. Materiality, according to him, consisted of extension,

figure, and solidity; in the thinnest ether, if we looked sharp enough,

we should find nothing but particles possessing these properties. All

other qualities of things were apparent only, and imputed to them by a

convention of the mind. The mind was a born mythologist, and projected

its feelings into their causes. Light, colour, taste, warmth, beauty,

excellence, were such imputed and conventional qualities; only space and

matter were real. But empty space was no less real than matter.

Consequently, although the atoms of matter never changed their form,

real changes could take place in nature, because their position might

change in a real space.

Unlike the useless substance of the Indians, the substance of Democritus

could offer a calculable ground for the flux of appearances; for this

substance was distributed unequally in the void, and was constantly

moving. Every appearance, however fleeting, corresponded to a precise

configuration of substance; it arose with that configuration and

perished with it. This substance, accordingly, was physical, not

metaphysical. It was no dialectical term, but a scientific anticipation,

a prophecy as to what an observer who should be properly equipped would

discover in the interior of bodies. Materialism is not a system of

metaphysics; it is a speculation in chemistry and physiology, to the

effect that, if analysis could go deep enough, it would find that all

substance was homogeneous, and that all motion was regular.

Though matter was homogeneous, the forms of the ultimate particles,

according to Democritus, were various; and sundry combinations of them

constituted the sundry objects in nature. Motion was not, as the vulgar

(and Aristotle) supposed, unnatural, and produced magically by some

moral cause; it had been eternal and was native to the atoms. On

striking, they rebounded; and the mechanical currents or vortices which

these contacts occasioned formed a multitude of stellar systems, called

worlds, with which infinite space was studded.

Mechanism as to motion, atomism as to structure, materialism as to

substance, that is the whole system of Democritus. It is as wonderful in

its insight, in its sense for the ideal demands of method and

understanding, as it is strange and audacious in its simplicity. Only

the most convinced rationalist, the boldest prophet, could embrace it

dogmatically; yet time has largely given it the proof. If Democritus

could look down upon the present state of science, he would laugh, as he

was in the habit of doing, partly at the confirmation we can furnish to

portions of his philosophy, and partly at our stupidity that cannot

guess the rest.

There are two maxims in Lucretius that suffice, even to this day, to

distinguish a thinker who is a naturalist from one who is not.

“Nothing,” he says, “arises in the body in order that we may use it, but

what arises brings forth its use.”[1] This is that discarding of final

causes on which all progress in science depends. The other maxim runs:

“One thing will grow plain when compared with another: and blind night

shall not obliterate the path for thee, before thou hast thoroughly

scanned the ultimate things of nature; so much will things throw light

on things.”[2] Nature is her own standard; and if she seems to us

unnatural, there is no hope for our minds.

The ethics of Democritus, in so far as we may judge from scanty

evidence, were merely descriptive or satirical. He was an aristocratic

observer, a scorner of fools. Nature was laughing at us all; the wise

man considered his fate and, by knowing it, raised himself in a measure

above it. All living things pursued the greatest happiness they could

see their way to; but they were marvellously short-sighted; and the

business of the philosopher was to foresee and pursue the greatest

happiness that was really possible. This, in so rough a world, was to be

found chiefly in abstention and retrenchment. If you asked for little,

it was more probable that the event would not disappoint you. It was

important not to be a fool, but it was very hard.

The system of Democritus was adopted by Epicurus, but not because

Epicurus had any keenness of scientific vision. On the contrary,

Epicurus, the Herbert Spencer of antiquity, was in his natural

philosophy an encyclopaedia of second-hand knowledge. Prolix and minute,

vague and inconsistent, he gathered his scientific miscellany with an

eye fixed not on nature, but on the exigencies of an inward faith,--a

faith accepted on moral grounds, deemed necessary to salvation, and

defended at all costs, with any available weapon. It is instructive that

materialism should have been adopted at that juncture on the same

irrelevant moral grounds on which it has usually been rejected.

Epicurus, strange as it may sound to those who have heard, with horror

or envy, of wallowing in his sty, Epicurus was a saint. The ways of the

world filled him with dismay. The Athens of his time, which some of us

would give our eyes to see, retained all its splendour amid its

political decay; but nothing there interested or pleased Epicurus.

Theatres, porches, gymnasiums, and above all the agora, reeked, to his

sense, with vanity and folly. Retired in his private garden, with a few

friends and disciples, he sought the ways of peace; he lived

abstemiously; he spoke gently; he gave alms to the poor; he preached

against wealth, against ambition, against passion. He defended free-will

because he wished to exercise it in withdrawing from the world, and in

not swimming with the current. He denied the supernatural, since belief

in it would have a disquieting influence on the mind, and render too

many things compulsory and momentous. There was no future life: the art

of living wisely must not be distorted by such wild imaginings.

All things happened in due course of nature; the gods were too remote

and too happy, secluded like good Epicureans, to meddle with earthly

things. Nothing ruffled what Wordsworth calls their “voluptuous

unconcern.” Nevertheless, it was pleasant to frequent their temples.

There, as in the spaces where they dwelt between the worlds, the gods

were silent and beautiful, and wore the human form. Their statues, when

an unhappy man gazed at them, reminded him of happiness; he was

refreshed and weaned for a moment from the senseless tumult of human

affairs. From those groves and hallowed sanctuaries the philosopher

returned to his garden strengthened in his wisdom, happier in his

isolation, more friendly and more indifferent to all the world. Thus the

life of Epicurus, as St. Jerome bears witness, was “full of herbs,

fruits, and abstinences.” There was a hush in it, as of bereavement. His

was a philosophy of the decadence, a philosophy of negation, and of

flight from the world.

Although science for its own sake could not interest so monkish a

nature, yet science might be useful in buttressing the faith, or in

removing objections to it. Epicurus therefore departed from the reserve

of Socrates, and looked for a natural philosophy that might support his

ethics. Of all the systems extant--and they were legion--he found that

of Democritus the most helpful and edifying. Better than any other it

would persuade men to renounce the madness that must be renounced and to

enjoy the pleasures that may be enjoyed. But, since it was adopted on

these external and pragmatic grounds, the system of Democritus did not

need to be adopted entire. In fact, one change at least was imperative.

The motion of the atoms must not be wholly regular and mechanical.

Chance must be admitted, that Fate might be removed. Fate was a

terrifying notion. It was spoken of by the people with superstitious

unction. Chance was something humbler, more congenial to the man in the

street. If only the atoms were allowed to deflect a little now and then

from their courses, the future might remain unpredictable, and free-will

might be saved. Therefore, Epicurus decreed that the atoms deflected,

and fantastic arguments were added to show that this intrusion of chance

would aid in the organization of nature; for the declension of the

atoms, as it is called, would explain how the original parallel downpour

of them might have yielded to vortices, and so to organized bodies. Let

us pass on.

Materialism, like any system of natural philosophy, carries with it no

commandments and no advice. It merely describes the world, including the

aspirations and consciences of mortals, and refers all to a material

ground. The materialist, being a man, will not fail to have preferences,

and even a conscience, of his own; but his precepts and policy will

express, not the logical implications of his science, but his human

instincts, as inheritance and experience may have shaped them. Any

system of ethics might accordingly coexist with materialism; for if

materialism declares certain things (like immortality) to be impossible,

it cannot declare them to be undesirable. Nevertheless, it is not likely

that a man so constituted as to embrace materialism will be so

constituted as to pursue things which he considers unattainable. There

is therefore a psychological, though no logical, bond between

materialism and a homely morality.

The materialist is primarily an observer; and he will probably be such

in ethics also; that is, he will have no ethics, except the emotion

produced upon him by the march of the world. If he is an _esprit fort_

and really disinterested, he will love life; as we all love perfect

vitality, or what strikes us as such, in gulls and porpoises. This, I

think, is the ethical sentiment psychologically consonant with a

vigorous materialism: sympathy with the movement of things, interest in

the rising wave, delight at the foam it bursts into, before it sinks

again. Nature does not distinguish the better from the worse, but the

lover of nature does. He calls better what, being analogous to his own

life, enhances his vitality and probably possesses some vitality of its

own. This is the ethical feeling of Spinoza, the greatest of modern

naturalists in philosophy; and we shall see how Lucretius, in spite of

his fidelity to the ascetic Epicurus, is carried by his poetic ecstasy

in the same direction.

But mark the crux of this union: the materialist will love the life of

nature when he loves his own life; but if he should hate his own life,

how should the life of nature please him? Now Epicurus, for the most

part, hated life. His moral system, called hedonism, recommends that

sort of pleasure which has no excitement and no risk about it. This

ideal is modest, and even chaste, but it is not vital. Epicurus was

remarkable for his mercy, his friendliness, his utter horror of war, of

sacrifice, of suffering. These are not sentiments that a genuine

naturalist would be apt to share. Pity and repentance, Spinoza said,

were vain and evil; what increased a man’s power and his joy increased

his goodness also. The naturalist will believe in a certain hardness, as

Nietzsche did; he will incline to a certain scorn, as the laughter of

Democritus was scornful. He will not count too scrupulously the cost of

what he achieves; he will be an imperialist, rapt in the joy of

achieving something. In a word, the moral hue of materialism in a

formative age, or in an aggressive mind, would be aristocratic and

imaginative; but in a decadent age, or in a soul that is renouncing

everything, it would be, as in Epicurus, humanitarian and timidly

sensual.

We have now before us the antecedents and components of Lucretius’ poem

on nature. There remains the genius of the poet himself. The greatest

thing about this genius is its power of losing itself in its object, its

impersonality. We seem to be reading not the poetry of a poet about

things, but the poetry of things themselves. That things have their

poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of

their own movement and life, is what Lucretius proves once for all to

mankind.

Of course, the poetry we see in nature is due to the emotion the

spectacle produces in us; the life of nature might be as romantic and

sublime as it chose, it would be dust and ashes to us if there were

nothing sublime and romantic in ourselves to be stirred by it to

sympathy. But our emotion may be ingenuous; it may be concerned with

what nature really is and does, has been and will do for ever. It need

not arise from a selfish preoccupation with what these immense realities

involve for our own persons or may be used to suggest to our

self-indulgent fancy. No, the poetry of nature may be discerned merely

by the power of intuition which it awakens and the understanding which

it employs. These faculties, more, I should say, than our moodiness or

stuffy dreams, draw taut the strings of the soul, and bring out her full

vitality and music. Naturalism is a philosophy of observation, and of an

imagination that extends the observable; all the sights and sounds of

nature enter into it, and lend it their directness, pungency, and

coercive stress. At the same time, naturalism is an intellectual

philosophy; it divines substance behind appearance, continuity behind

change, law behind fortune. It therefore attaches all those sights and

sounds to a hidden background that connects and explains them. So

understood, nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as

well as sensuous variety. Before the sublimity of this insight, all

forms of the pathetic fallacy seem cheap and artificial. Mythology, that

to a childish mind is the only possible poetry, sounds like bad rhetoric

in comparison. The naturalistic poet abandons fairy land, because he has

discovered nature, history, the actual passions of man. His imagination

has reached maturity; its pleasure is to dominate, not to play.

Poetic dominion over things as they are is seen best in Shakespeare for

the ways of men, and in Lucretius for the ways of nature. Unapproachably

vivid, relentless, direct in detail, he is unflinchingly grand and

serious in his grouping of the facts. It is the truth that absorbs him

and carries him along. He wishes us to be convinced and sobered by the

fact, by the overwhelming evidence of thing after thing, raining down

upon us, all bearing witness with one voice to the nature of the world.

Suppose, however,--and it is a tenable supposition,--that Lucretius is

quite wrong in his science, and that there is no space, no substance,

and no nature. His poem would then lose its pertinence to our lives and

personal convictions; it would not lose its imaginative grandeur. We

could still conceive a world composed as he describes. Fancy what

emotions those who lived in such a world would have felt on the day when

a Democritus or a Lucretius revealed to them their actual situation. How

great the blindness or the madness dissipated, and how wonderful the

vision gained! How clear the future, how intelligible the past, how

marvellous the swarming atoms, in their unintentional, perpetual

fertility! What the sky is to our eyes on a starry night, that every

nook and cranny of nature would resemble, with here and there the

tentative smile of life playing about those constellations. Surely that

universe, for those who lived in it, would have had its poetry. It would

have been the poetry of naturalism. Lucretius, thinking he lived in such

a world, heard the music of it, and wrote it down.