Epicurus, the greatness of that task seems to have overwhelmed him. He
was to unfold for the first time, in sonorous but unwieldy Latin, the
birth and nature of all things, as Greek subtlety had discerned them. He
was to dispel superstition, to refute antagonists, to lay the sure
foundations of science and of wisdom, to summon mankind compellingly
from its cruel passions and follies to a life of simplicity and peace.
He was himself combative and distracted enough--as it is often our
troubles, more than our attainments, that determine our ideals. Yet in
heralding the advent of human happiness, and in painting that of the
gods, he was to attain his own, soaring upon the strong wings of his
hexameters into an ecstasy of contemplation and enthusiasm. When it is
so great an emotion to read these verses, what must it have been to
compose them? Yet could he succeed? Could such great things fall to his
lot? Yes, they might, if only the creative forces of nature, always
infinite and always at hand, could pass into his brain and into his
spirit; if only the seeds of corruption and madness, which were always
coursing through the air, could be blown back for a moment; and if the
din of civil conflicts could be suspended while he thought and wrote. To
a fortunate conjunction of atoms, a child owes his first being. To a
propitious season and atmosphere, a poet owes his inspiration and his
success. Conscious that his undertaking hangs upon these chance
conjunctions, Lucretius begins by invoking the powers he is about to
describe, that they may give him breath and genius enough to describe
them. And at once these powers send him a happy inspiration, perhaps a
happy reminiscence of Empedocles. There are two great perspectives which
the moralist may distinguish in the universal drift of atoms,—a creative
movement, producing what the moralist values, and a destructive
movement, abolishing the same. Lucretius knows very well that this
distinction is moral only, or as people now say, subjective. No one else
has pointed out so often and so clearly as he that nothing arises in
this world not helped to life by the death of some other thing;[3] so
that the destructive movement creates and the creative movement
destroys. Yet from the point of view of any particular life or interest,
the distinction between a creative force and a destructive force is real
and all-important. To make it is not to deny the mechanical structure of
nature, but only to show how this mechanical structure is fruitful
morally, how the outlying parts of it are friendly or hostile to me or
to you, its local and living products.
This double colouring of things is supremely interesting to the
philosopher; so much so that before his physical science has reached the
mechanical stage, he will doubtless regard the double aspect which
things present to him as a dual principle in these things themselves. So
Empedocles had spoken of Love and Strife as two forces which
respectively gathered and disrupted the elements, so as to carry on
between them the Penelope’s labour of the world, the one perpetually
weaving fresh forms of life, and the other perpetually undoing them.[4]
It needed but a slight concession to traditional rhetoric in order to
exchange these names, Love and Strife, which designated divine powers
in Empedocles, into the names of Venus and Mars, which designated the
same influences in Roman mythology. The Mars and Venus of Lucretius are
not moral forces, incompatible with the mechanism of atoms; they are
this mechanism itself, in so far as it now produces and now destroys
life, or any precious enterprise, like this of Lucretius in composing
his saving poem. Mars and Venus, linked in each other’s arms, rule the
universe together; nothing arises save by the death of some other thing.
Yet when what arises is happier in itself, or more congenial to us, than
what is destroyed, the poet says that Venus prevails, that she woos her
captive lover to suspend his unprofitable raging. At such times it is
spring on earth; the storms recede (I paraphrase the opening
passage),[5] the fields are covered with flowers, the sunshine floods
the serene sky, and all the tribes of animals feel the mighty impulse of
Venus in their hearts.
The corn ripens in the plains, and even the sea bears in safety the
fleets that traverse it.
Not least, however, of these works of Venus is the Roman people. Never
was the formative power of nature better illustrated than in the
vitality of this race, which conquered so many other races, or than in
its assimilative power, which civilized and pacified them. Legend had
made Venus the mother of Aeneas, and Aeneas the progenitor of the
Romans. Lucretius seizes on this happy accident and identifies the Venus
of fable with the true Venus, the propitious power in all nature, of
which Rome was indeed a crowning work. But the poet’s work, also, if it
is to be accomplished worthily, must look to the same propitious
movement for its happy issue and for its power to persuade. Venus must
be the patron of his art and philosophy. She must keep Memmius from the
wars, that he may read, and be weaned from frivolous ambitions; and she
must stop the tumult of constant sedition, that Lucretius may lend his
undivided mind to the precepts of Epicurus, and his whole heart to a
sublime friendship, which prompts him to devote to intense study all the
watches of the starry night, plotting the course of each invisible atom,
and mounting almost to the seat of the gods.[6]
This impersonation in the figure of Venus of whatever makes for life
would not be legitimate--it would really contradict a mechanical view of
nature--if it were not balanced by a figure representing the opposite
tendency, the no less universal tendency towards death.
The Mars of the opening passage, subdued for a moment by the
blandishments of love, is raging in all the rest of the poem in his
irrepressible fury. These are the two sides of every transmutation, that
in creating, one thing destroys another; and this transmutation being
perpetual,--nothing being durable except the void, the atoms, and their
motion,--it follows that the tendency towards death is, for any
particular thing, the final and victorious tendency. The names of Venus
and Mars, not being essential to the poet’s thought, are allowed to drop
out, and the actual processes they stand for are described nakedly; yet,
if the poem had ever been finished, and Lucretius had wished to make the
end chime with the beginning, and represent, as it were, one great
cycle of the world, it is conceivable that he might have placed at the
close a mythical passage to match that at the beginning; and we might
have seen Mars aroused from his luxurious lethargy, reasserting his
immortal nature, and rushing, firebrand in hand, from the palace of love
to spread destruction throughout the universe, till all things should
burn fiercely, and be consumed together. Yet not quite all; for the
goddess herself would remain, more divine and desirable than ever in her
averted beauty. Instinctively into her bosom the God of War would sink
again, when weary and drunk with slaughter; and a new world would arise
from the scattered atoms of the old.
These endless revolutions, taken in themselves, exactly balance; and I
am not sure that, impartially considered, it is any sadder that new
worlds should arise than that this world should always continue.
Besides, nature cannot take from us more than she has given, and it
would be captious and thankless in us to think of her as destructive
only, or destructive essentially, after the unspeculative fashion of
modern pessimists. She destroys to create, and creates to destroy, her
interest (if we may express it so) being not in particular things, nor
in their continuance, but solely in the movement that underlies them, in
the flux of substance beneath. Life, however, belongs to form, and not
to matter; or in the language of Lucretius, life is an _eventum_, a
redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, involved in the
equilibration of matter; as the throw of sixes is an _eventum,_ a
redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, occasionally involved in
shaking a dice-box. Yet, as this throw makes the acme and best possible
issue of a game of dice, so life is the acme and best possible issue of
the dance of atoms; and it is from the point of view of this _eventum_
that the whole process is viewed by us, and is judged. Not until that
happy chance has taken place, do we exist morally, or can we reflect or
judge at all. The philosopher is at the top of the wave, he is the foam
in the rolling tempest; and as the wave must have risen before he bursts
into being, all that he lives to witness is the fall of the wave. The
decadence of all he lives by is the only prospect before him; his whole
philosophy must be a prophecy of death. Of the life that may come after,
when the atoms come together again, he can imagine nothing; the life he
knows and shares, all that is life to him, is waning and almost spent.
Therefore Lucretius, who is nothing if not honest, is possessed by a
profound melancholy. Vigorous and throbbing as are his pictures of
spring, of love, of ambition, of budding culture, of intellectual
victory, they pale before the vivid strokes with which he paints the
approach of death--fatigue of the will, lassitude in pleasure,
corruption and disintegration in society, the soil exhausted, the wild
animals tamed or exterminated, poverty, pestilence, and famine at hand;
and for the individual, almost at once, the final dissipation of the
atoms of his soul, escaping from a relaxed body, to mingle and lose
themselves in the universal flow. Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing
falls back into nothing, if we consider substance; but everything comes
from nothing and falls back into nothing if we consider things--the
objects of love and of experience. Time can make no impression on the
void or on the atoms; nay, time is itself an _eventum_ created by the
motion of atoms in the void; but the triumph of time is absolute over
persons, and nations, and worlds.[7]
In treating of the soul and of immortality Lucretius is an imperfect
psychologist and an arbitrary moralist. His zeal to prove that the soul
is mortal is inspired by the wish to dispel all fear of future
punishments, and so to liberate the mind for the calm and tepid
enjoyment of this world. There is something to be gained in this
direction, undoubtedly, especially if tales about divine vengeance to
come are used to sanction irrational practices, and to prevent poor
people from improving their lot. At the same time, it is hardly fair to
assume that hell is the only prospect which immortality could possibly
open to any of us; and it is also unfair not to observe that the
punishments which religious fables threaten the dead with are, for the
most part, symbols for the actual degradation which evil-doing brings
upon the living; so that the fear of hell is not more deterrent or
repressive than experience of life would be if it were clearly brought
before the mind.
There is another element in this polemic against immortality which,
while highly interesting and characteristic of a decadent age, betrays a
very one-sided and, at bottom, untenable ideal. This element is the fear
of life. Epicurus had been a pure and tender moralist, but
pusillanimous. He was so afraid of hurting and of being hurt, so afraid
of running risks or tempting fortune, that he wished to prove that human
life was a brief business, not subject to any great transformations, nor
capable of any great achievements. He taught accordingly that the atoms
had produced already all the animals they could produce, for though
infinite in number the atoms were of few kinds. Consequently the
possible sorts of being were finite and soon exhausted; this world,
though on the eve of destruction, was of recent date. The worlds around
it, or to be produced in future, could not afford anything essentially
different. All the suns were much alike, and there was nothing new under
them. We need not, then, fear the world; it is an explored and domestic
scene,--a home, a little garden, six feet of earth for a man to stretch
in. If people rage and make a great noise, it is not because there is
much to win, or much to fear, but because people are mad. Let me not be
mad, thought Epicurus; let me be reasonable, cultivating sentiments
appropriate to a mortal who inhabits a world morally comfortable and
small, and physically poor in its infinite monotony. The well-known
lines of Fitzgerald echo this sentiment perfectly:
_A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,_
_A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou_
_Beside me singing in the Wilderness--_
_Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!_
But what if the shadow of incalculable possibilities should fall across
this sunny retreat? What if after death we should awake in a world to
which the atomic philosophy might not in the least apply? Observe that
this suggestion is not in the least opposed to any of the arguments by
which science might prove the atomic theory to be correct. All that
Epicurus taught about the universe now before us might be perfectly true
of it; but what if to-morrow a new universe should have taken its
place? The suggestion is doubtless gratuitous, and no busy man will be
much troubled by it; yet when the heart is empty it fills itself with
such attenuated dreams. The muffled pleasures of the wise man, as
Epicurus conceived him, were really a provocation to supernaturalism.
They left a great void; and before long supernaturalism--we shall see it
in Dante--actually rushed in to quicken the pulses of life with fresh
hopes and illusions, or at least (what may seem better than nothing)
with terrors and fanatical zeal. With such tendencies already afoot as
the myths and dogmas of Plato had betrayed, it was imperative for
Epicurus to banish anxiously all thought of what might follow death. To
this end are all his arguments about the material nature of the soul and
her incapacity to survive the body.
To say that the soul is material has a strange and barbarous sound to
modern ears. We live after Descartes, who taught the world that the
essence of the soul was consciousness; and to call consciousness
material would be to talk of the blackness of white. But ancient usage
gave the word soul a rather different meaning. The essence of the soul
was not so much to be conscious as to govern the formation of the body,
to warm, move, and guide it. And if we think of the soul exclusively in
this light, it will not seem a paradox, it may even seem a truism, to
say that the soul must be material. For how are we to conceive that
preexisting consciousness should govern the formation of the body, move,
warm, or guide it? A spirit capable of such a miracle would in any case
not be human, but altogether divine. The soul that Lucretius calls
material should not, then, be identified with consciousness, but with
the ground of consciousness, which is at the same time the cause of life
in the body. This he conceives to be a swarm of very small and volatile
atoms, a sort of ether, resident in all living seeds, breathed in
abundantly during life and breathed out at death.
Even if this theory were accepted, however, it would not prove the point
which Lucretius has chiefly at heart, namely, that an after-life is
impossible. The atoms of the soul are indestructible, like all atoms;
and if consciousness were attached to the fortunes of a small group of
them, or of one only (as Leibniz afterwards taught), consciousness would
continue to exist after these atoms had escaped from the body and were
shooting through new fields of space. Indeed, they might be the more
aroused by that adventure, as a bee might find the sky or the garden
more exciting than the hive. All that Lucretius urges about the
divisibility of the soul, its diffused bodily seat, and the perils it
would meet outside fails to remove the ominous possibility that troubles
him.
To convince us that we perish at death he has to rely on vulgar
experience and inherent probability: what changes is not indestructible;
what begins, ends; mental growth, health, sanity, accompany the fortunes
of the body as a whole (not demonstrably those of the soul-atoms); the
passions are relevant to bodily life and to an earthly situation; we
should not be ourselves under a different mask or in a new setting; we
remember no previous existence if we had one, and so, in a future
existence, we should not remember this. These reflections are
impressive, and they are enforced by Lucretius with his usual vividness
and smack of reality. Nothing is proved scientifically by such a
deliverance, yet it is good philosophy and good poetry; it brings much
experience together and passes a lofty judgment upon it. The artist has
his eye on the model; he is painting death to the life.
If these considerations succeed in banishing the dread of an after-life,
there remains the distress which many feel at the idea of extinction;
and if we have ceased to fear death, like Hamlet, for the dreams that
may come after it, we may still fear death instinctively, like a stuck
pig. Against this instinctive horror of dying Lucretius has many brave
arguments. Fools, he says to us, why do you fear what never can touch
you? While you still live, death is absent; and when you are dead, you
are so dead that you cannot know you are dead, nor regret it. You will
be as much at ease as before you were born. Or is what troubles you the
childish fear of being cold in the earth, or feeling its weight stifling
you? But you will not be there; the atoms of your soul--themselves
unconscious--will be dancing in some sunbeam far away, and you yourself
will be nowhere; you will absolutely not exist. Death is by definition a
state that excludes experience. If you fear it, you fear a word.
To all this, perhaps, Memmius, or some other recalcitrant reader, might
retort that what he shrank from was not the metaphysical state of being
dead, but the very real agony of dying. Dying is something ghastly, as
being born is something ridiculous; and, even if no pain were involved
in quitting or entering this world, we might still say what Dante’s
Francesca says of it: _Il modo ancor m’offende_,--“I shudder at the way
of it.” Lucretius, for his part, makes no attempt to show that
everything is as it should be; and if our way of coming into this life
is ignoble, and our way of leaving it pitiful, that is no fault of his
nor of his philosophy. If the fear of death were merely the fear of
dying, it would be better dealt with by medicine than by argument. There
is, or there might be, an art of dying well, of dying painlessly,
willingly, and in season,--as in those noble partings which Attic
gravestones depict,--especially if we were allowed, as Lucretius would
allow us, to choose our own time.
But the radical fear of death, I venture to think, is something quite
different. It is the love of life. Epicurus, who feared life, seems to
have missed here the primordial and colossal force he was fighting
against. Had he perceived that force, he would have been obliged to meet
it in a more radical way, by an enveloping movement, as it were, and an
attack from the rear. The love of life is not something rational, or
founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and
spontaneous. It is that Venus Genetrix which covers the earth with its
flora and fauna. It teaches every animal to seek its food and its mate,
and to protect its offspring; as also to resist or fly from all injury
to the body, and most of all from threatened death. It is the original
impulse by which good is discriminated from evil, and hope from fear.
Nothing could be more futile, therefore, than to marshal arguments
against that fear of death which is merely another name for the energy
of life, or the tendency to self-preservation. Arguments involve
premises, and these premises, in the given case, express some particular
form of the love of life; whence it is impossible to conclude that death
is in no degree evil and not at all to be feared. For what is most
dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility
that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is
dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its
various undertakings. Such a present will cannot be argued away, but it
may be weakened by contradictions arising within it, by the irony of
experience, or by ascetic discipline. To introduce ascetic discipline,
to bring out the irony of experience, to expose the self-contradictions
of the will, would be the true means of mitigating the love of life; and
if the love of life were extinguished, the fear of death, like smoke
rising from that fire, would have vanished also.
Indeed, the force of the great passage against the fear of death, at the
end of the third book of Lucretius, comes chiefly from the picture it
draws of the madness of life. His philosophy deprecates covetousness,
ambition, love, and religion; it takes a long step towards the surrender
of life, by surrendering all in life that is ardent, on the ground that
it is painful in the end and ignominious. To escape from it all is a
great deliverance. And since genius must be ardent about something,
Lucretius pours out his enthusiasm on Epicurus, who brought this
deliverance and was the saviour of mankind. Yet this was only a
beginning of salvation, and the same principles carried further would
have delivered us from the Epicurean life and what it retained that was
Greek and naturalistic: science, friendship, and the healthy pleasures
of the body. Had it renounced these things also, Epicureanism would have
become altogether ascetic, a thorough system of mortification, or the
pursuit of death. To those who sincerely pursue death, death is no evil,
but the highest good. No need in that case of elaborate arguments to
prove that death should not be feared, because it is nothing; for in
spite of being nothing--or rather because it is nothing--death can be
loved by a fatigued and disillusioned spirit, just as in spite of being
nothing--or rather because it is nothing--it must be hated and feared by
every vigorous animal.
One more point, and I have done with this subject. Ancient culture was
rhetorical. It abounded in ideas that are verbally plausible, and pass
muster in a public speech, but that, if we stop to criticize them, prove
at once to be inexcusably false. One of these rhetorical fallacies is
the maxim that men cannot live for what they cannot witness. What does
it matter to you, we may say in debate, what happened before you were
born, or what may go on after you are buried? And the orator who puts
such a challenge may carry the audience with him, and raise a laugh at
the expense of human sincerity. Yet the very men who applaud are proud
of their ancestors, care for the future of their children, and are very
much interested in securing legally the execution of their last will and
testament. What may go on after their death concerns them deeply, not
because they expect to watch the event from hell or heaven, but because
they are interested ideally in what that event shall be, although they
are never to witness it. Lucretius himself, in his sympathy with nature,
in his zeal for human enlightenment, in his tears for Iphigenia, long
since dead, is not moved by the hope of observing, or the memory of
having observed, what excites his emotion. He forgets himself. He sees
the whole universe spread out in its true movement and proportions; he
sees mankind freed from the incubus of superstition, and from the havoc
of passion. The vision kindles his enthusiasm, exalts his imagination,
and swells his verse into unmistakable earnestness.
If we follow Lucretius, therefore, in narrowing the sum of our personal
fortunes to one brief and partial glimpse of earth, we must not suppose
that we need narrow at all the sphere of our moral interests. On the
contrary, just in proportion as we despise superstitious terrors and
sentimental hopes, and as our imagination becomes self-forgetful, we
shall strengthen the direct and primitive concern which we feel in the
world and in what may go on there, before us, after us, or beyond our
ken. If, like Lucretius and every philosophical poet, we range over all
time and all existence, we shall forget our own persons, as he did, and
even wish them to be forgotten, if only the things we care for may
subsist or arise. He who truly loves God, says Spinoza, cannot wish that
God should love him in return. One who lives the life of the universe
cannot be much concerned for his own. After all, the life of the
universe is but the locus and extension of ours. The atoms that have
once served to produce life remain fit to reproduce it; and although the
body they might animate later would be a new one, and would have a
somewhat different career, it would not, according to Lucretius, be of a
totally new species; perhaps not more unlike ourselves than we are
unlike one another, or than each of us is unlike himself at the various
stages of his life.
The soul of nature, in the elements of it, is then, according to
Lucretius, actually immortal; only the human individuality, the chance
composition of those elements, is transitory; so that, if a man could
care for what happens to other men, for what befell him when young or
what may overtake him when old, he might perfectly well care, on the
same imaginative principle, for what may go on in the world for ever.
The finitude and injustice of his personal life would be broken down;
the illusion of selfishness would be dissipated; and he might say to
himself, I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
* * * * *