[206] We think, however, that Prof. Sellar attributes more importance to this element in the Lucretian philosophy than it will bear. His words are: ‘The doctrine proclaimed by Lucretius was, that creation was no result of a capricious or benevolent exercise of power, but of certain processes extending through infinite time, by means of which the atoms have at length been able to combine and work together in accordance with their ultimate conditions. The conception of these ultimate conditions and of their relations to one another involves some more vital agency than that of blind chance or an iron fatalism. The foedera Naturai are opposed to the foedera fati. The idea of law in Nature as understood by Lucretius is not merely that of invariable sequence or concomitance of phenomena. It implies at least the further idea of a “secreta facultas” in the original elements.‘ (Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 335, 2nd ed.) The expression secreta facultas occurs, we believe, only once in the whole poem (I., 174), and is used on that single occasion without any reference to the atoms, which do not appear until a later stage of the exposition. Lucretius is proving that whatever begins to exist must have a cause, and in support of this principle he appeals to the fixed laws which govern the growth of plants. Each plant springs from a particular kind of seed, and so, he argues, each seed must have a distinct or specific virtue of its own, which virtue he expresses by the words secreta facultas. But, according to his subsequent teaching, this specific virtue depends on a particular combination of the atoms, not on any spontaneous power which they possess of grouping themselves together so as to form organic compounds. With regard to the properties of the atoms themselves, Lucretius enumerates them clearly enough. They are extension, figure, resistance, and motion; the last mentioned being divided into downward gravitation, lateral deflection, and the momenta produced by mutual impact. Here we have nothing more than the two elements of ‘iron fatalism’ and ‘blind chance’ which Prof. Sellar regards as insufficient to account for the Lucretian scheme of creation; gravitation and mutual impact give the one, lateral deflection gives the other. Any faculty over and above these could only be conceived under the form of conscious impulse, or of mutual attractions and repulsions exercised by the atoms on one another. The first hypothesis is expressly rejected by the poet, who tells us (I., 1020) that the primordial elements are destitute of consciousness, and have fallen into their present places through the agency of purely mechanical causes. The second hypothesis is nowhere alluded to in the most distant manner, it is contrary to the whole spirit of Epicurean physics, it never occurred to a single thinker of antiquity, and to have conceived it at that time would have needed more than the genius of a Newton. As a last escape it may be urged that Lucretius believed in ‘a sort of a something’ which, like the fourth element in the soul, he was not prepared to define. But besides the utter want of evidence for such a supposition, what necessity would there have been for the infinite chances which he postulates in order to explain how the actual system of things came to be evolved, had the elements been originally endowed with the disposition to fall into such a system rather than into any other? For Prof. Sellar’s vital agency must mean this disposition if it means anything at all.
While on this subject we must also express our surprise to find Prof. Sellar saying of Lucretius that ‘in no ancient writer’ is ‘the certainty and universality of law more emphatically and unmistakably expressed’ (p. 334). This would, we think, be much truer of the Stoics, who recognised in its absolute universality that law of causation on which all other laws depend, but which Lucretius expressly tells us (II., 255) is broken through by the clinamen. A more accurate statement of the case, we think, would be to say that the Epicurean poet believed unreservedly in uniformities of co-existence, but not, to the same extent, in uniformities of sequence; while apart from these two classes neither he nor modern science knows of any laws at all.
[207] V., 695-73, 730-49.
[208] Cicero, De Nat. Deor., I., xxiv., 66.
[209] Comm., IX., 28.
[210] Coleridge’s Friend, Section II., Essay II., sub in.
[211] ‘In the higher ranks of French society there are men who merit to be called professors of the art of happiness; who have analysed its ingredients with careful fingers and scrutinising eyes; who have consummated their experience of means and ends; who, like able doctors, can apply an immediate remedy to the daily difficulties of home-life; whose practice is worthy of their theory, and who prove it by maintaining in their wives’ hearts and in their own a perennial never-weakening sentiment of gratitude and love.‘ (French Home Life, p. 324.) Although Mr. Marshall’s observations are directly applicable to the happiness of married life only, they tend to prove that all happiness may be reduced to an art.
[212] Wallace’s Epicureanism, p. 37.
[213] Cicero, De Rep., III., vi.-xx.
[214] Plutarch, Cato Major, xxii. ff.