These themes fill the first three books. In the fourth he grapples with the mental problems of sensation and conception, and explains the origin of belief in immortality as due to ghosts and apparitions which appear in dreams. “When sleep has prostrated the body, for no other reason does the mind’s intelligence wake, except because the very same images provoke our minds which provoke them when we are awake, and to such a degree that we seem without a doubt to perceive him whom life has left, and death and earth gotten hold of. This Nature constrains to come to pass because all the senses of the body are then hampered and at rest throughout the limbs, and cannot refute the unreal by real things.”
In the fifth book Lucretius deals with origins—of the sun, the moon, the earth (which he held to be flat, denying the existence of the antipodes); of life and its development; and of civilization. In all this he excludes design, explaining everything as produced and maintained by natural agents, “the masses, suddenly brought together, became the rudiments of earth, sea, and heaven, and the race of living things.” He believed in the successive appearance of plants and animals, but in their arising separately and directly out of the earth, “under the influence of rain and the heat of the sun,” thus repeating the old speculations of the emergence of life from slime, “wherefore the earth with good title has gotten and keeps the name of mother.” He did not adopt Empedocles’s theory of the “four roots of all things,” and he will have none of the monsters—the hippogriffs, chimeras, and centaurs—which form a part of the scheme of that philosopher. These, he says, “have never existed,” thus showing himself far in advance of ages when unicorns, dragons, and such-like fabled beasts were seriously believed to exist. In one respect, more discerning than Aristotle, he accepts the doctrine of the survival of the fittest as taught by the sage of Agrigentum. For he argues that since upon “the increase of some Nature set a ban, so that they could not reach the coveted flower of age, nor find food, nor be united in marriage,” ... “many races of living things have died out, and been unable to beget and continue their breed.” Lucretius speaks of Empedocles in terms scarcely less exaggerated than those which he applied to Epicurus. The latter is “a god” “who first found out that plan of life which is now termed wisdom, and who by tried skill rescued life from such great billows and such thick darkness and moored it in so perfect a calm and in so brilliant a light, ... he cleared men’s breasts with truth-telling precepts, and fixed a limit to lust and fear, and explained what was the chief good which we all strive to reach.” As to Empedocles, “that great country (Sicily) seems to have held within it nothing more glorious than this man, nothing more holy, marvellous, and dear. The verses, too, of this godlike genius cry with a loud voice, and make known his great discoveries, so that he seems scarcely born of a mortal stock.”
Continuing his speculations on the development of living things, Lucretius strikes out in bolder and original vein. The past history of man, he says, lies in no heroic or golden age, but in one of struggle out of savagery. Only when “children, by their coaxing ways, easily broke down the proud temper of their fathers,” did there arise the family ties out of which the wider social bond has grown, and softening and civilizing agencies begin their fair offices. In his battle for food and shelter, “man’s first arms were hands, nails and teeth and stones and boughs broken off from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon as they had become known. Afterward the force of iron and copper was discovered, and the use of copper was known before that of iron, as its nature is easier to work, and it is found in greater quantity. With copper they would labour the soil of the earth and stir up the billows of war.... Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained ground and the make of the copper sickle became a byword, and with iron they began to plough through the earth’s soil, and the struggles of wavering man were rendered equal.” As to language, “Nature impelled them to utter the various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things.” Thus does Lucretius point the road along which physical and mental evolution have since travelled, and make the whole story subordinate to the high purpose of his poem in deliverance of the beings whose career he thus traces from superstition. Man “seeing the system of heaven and the different seasons of the years could not find out by what causes this was done, and sought refuge in handing over all things to the gods and supposing all things to be guided by their nod.” Then, in the sixth and last book, the completion of which would seem to have been arrested by his death, Lucretius explains the “law of winds and storms,” of earthquakes and volcanic outbursts, which men “foolishly lay to the charge of the gods,” who thereby make known their anger.
So, loath to suffer mute,
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear;
With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.
And what a motley crowd of gods they were on whose caprice or indifference he pours his vials of anger and contempt! The tolerant pantheon of Rome gave welcome to any foreign deity with respectable credentials; to Cybele, the Great Mother, imported in the shape of a rough-hewn stone with pomp and rejoicings from Phrygia 204 B. C.; to Isis, welcomed from Egypt; to Herakles, Demeter, Asklepios, and many another god from Greece. But these were dismissed from a man’s thought when the prayer or sacrifice to them had been offered at the due season. They had less influence on the Roman’s life than the crowd of native godlings who were thinly disguised fetiches, and who controlled every action of the day. For the minor gods survive the changes in the pantheon of every race. Of the Greek peasant of to-day Mr. Rennel Rodd testifies, in his Custom and Lore of Modern Greece, that much as he would shudder at the accusation of any taint of paganism, the ruling of the Fates is more immediately real to him than divine omnipotence. Mr. Tozer confirms this in his Highlands of Turkey. He says: “It is rather the minor deities and those associated with man’s ordinary life that have escaped the brunt of the storm, and returned to live in a dim twilight of popular belief.” In India, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us that, “even the supreme triad of Hindu allegory, which represents the almighty powers of creation, preservation, and destruction, have long ceased to preside actively over any such corresponding distribution of functions.” Like limited monarchs, they reign, but do not govern. They are superseded by the ever-increasing crowd of godlings whose influence is personal and special, as shown by Mr. Crooke in his instructive Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India.
The old Roman catalogue of spiritual beings, abstractions as they were, who guarded life in minute detail, is a long one. From the indigitamenta, as such lists are called, we learn that no less than forty-three were concerned with the actions of a child. When the farmer asked Mother Earth for a good harvest, the prayer would not avail unless he also invoked “the spirit of breaking up the land and the spirit of ploughing it crosswise; the spirit of furrowing and the spirit of ploughing in the seed; and the spirit of harrowing; the spirit of weeding and the spirit of reaping; the spirit of carrying corn to the barn; and the spirit of bringing it out again.” The country, moreover, swarmed with Chaldæan astrologers and casters of nativities; with Etruscan haruspices full of “childish lightning-lore,” who foretold events from the entrails of sacrificed animals; while in competition with these there was the State-supported college of augurs to divine the will of the gods by the cries and direction of the flight of birds. Well might the satirist of such a time say that the “place was so densely populated with gods as to leave hardly room for the men.”
It will be seen that the justification for including Lucretius among the Pioneers of Evolution lies in his two signal and momentous contributions to the science of man; namely, the primitive savagery of the human race, and the origin of the belief in a soul and a future life. Concerning the first, anthropological research, in its vast accumulation of materials during the last sixty years, has done little more than fill in the outline which the insight of Lucretius enabled him to sketch. As to the second, he anticipates, well-nigh in detail, the ghost-theory of the origin of belief in spirits generally which Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor, following the lines laid down by Hume and Turgot (see p. [255]), have formulated and sustained by an enormous mass of evidence. The credit thus due to Lucretius for the original ideas in his majestic poem—Greek in conception and Roman in execution—has been obscured in the general eclipse which that poem suffered for centuries through its anti-theological spirit. Grinding at the same philosophical mill, Aristotle, because of the theism assumed to be involved in his “perfecting principle,” was cited as “a pillar of the faith” by the Fathers and Schoolmen; while Lucretius, because of his denial of design, was “anathema maranatha.” Only in these days, when the far-reaching effects of the theory of evolution, supported by observation in every branch of inquiry, are apparent, are the merits of Lucretius as an original seer, more than as an expounder of the teachings of Empedocles and Epicurus, made clear.
Standing well-nigh on the threshold of the Christian era, we may pause to ask what is the sum of the speculation into the causes and nature of things which, begun in Ionia (with impulse more or less slight from the East, in the sixth century before Christ), by Thales, ceased, for many centuries, in the poem of Lucretius, thus covering an active period of about five hundred years. The caution not to see in these speculations more than an approximate approach to modern theories must be kept in mind.
1. There is a primary substance which abides amidst the general flux of things.
All modern research tends to show that the various combinations of matter are formed of some prima materia. But its ultimate nature remains unknown.