Rerum Natura by Lucretius Analyzing Man’s Happiness

Please write a journal/reaction for the given material, and it is for philosophy class. You may have a look at the journal writing instruction posted in the files. Thank you.

Make sure to read the passages in bold. These are the crucial bits.

Excerpts from De Rerum Natura, by Lucretius (99 - 55BCE)

....

In the time when people felt the weight of religion,

wallowing upon the ground and—a ghastly spectacle—

heaven scowled down upon them and showed no mercy,

a Greek man (Epicurus) was the first to raise his eyes,

daring to make a stand against it.

He took no notice at all of the thunder and lightning,

religious recitations merely incited him;

He said he would expose the secrets of nature

and so, by force of intelligence, and no other,

he pierced beyond the flaming walls of the world,

paraded up and down the whole immensity

and returned victoriously with explanations for everything

—what could happen, what not, and what were the limits,

all fixed and measured, of every nature and thing.

And so he had religion under his feet.

He won, and as a result we have no superiors.

.

149

There is one simple point we have to start from:

The gods never made a single thing out of nothing.

Because, if one things frightens people, it is

that so much happens, on earth and out in space,

the reasons for which seem somehow to escape them,

and they fill in the gap by putting it down to the gods.

That is why, once we know that nothing can come from nothing,

we are on the right track already and likely to see

how everything starts and goes on in an ordered sequence

and nothing at all is merely the work of the gods.

.

Consider: if things could be made from nothing,

there would be no such thing as the cycle of generation,

you could breed men from the sea, and the land would produce

all kinds of fishes and birds, and out of the sky

herds of cattle would come tumbling; wild animals would 

turn up in deserts or farmyards without any reason;

You could not count on an apple-tree giving you apples,

but any sort of tree would produce any fruit.

...

If things came out of nothing, they would come from nothing,

turning up at odd times in a random way;

...

As such things do not happen, but on the contrary

everything grows and changes little by little

and all growth follows the laws of particular species,

it proves that everything is made from its own material.

.

225

Besides, if all the things time removes from our sight

were really destroyed and all their matter consumed,

how would the animal world be saved from destruction,

as generation does save it? Or how would the earth

have ingenuity to continue to feed it?

How would the sea get fed by the springs and rivers?

Or how would the sky find food for its flocks of stars?

None of these things would happen, if mortal bodies

had been consumed by time in the infinite past.

But if, in the space of past and the time gone by,

there have always been elements ready for re-confection,

they are by nature immortal, that is certain

and that is why they cannot return to nothing.

.

All objects would be destroyed by a single cause

if there were not eternal matter to hold them together

more or less tightly, in various patterns or systems.

A touch would be enough to produce destruction.

If things were not composed of permanent elements,

any force would at once unravel the pattern.

As it is, patterns hold together in various ways

but substance is always identical and eternal

and so things hold until a force is encountered

which is just enough to rip their particular texture.

...

You know I have said creation out of nothing

is nonsense and so is destruction of things to nothingness.

But since you may doubt the validity of a doctrine

requiring the existence of tiny invisible elements [atoms],

I should like to draw your attention to certain bodies

which must be allowed to exist, although we can’t see them.

.

Think of the winds, which beat up the sea with their blows,

wrecking the largest vessels, scattering the clouds,

and sometimes driving a hurricane over the plains,

strewing great trees on the ground, and with shattering blasts

lashing the mountaintops: a roaring fury, 

there is rage to come in their smallest menacing murmur.

No doubt at all, the winds are invisible bodies

which sweep across the sea, the earth and the sky

and toss the clouds and carry them off in a storm.

You may compare them and the damage they do

to what is done by water, whose nature is gentle—

yet when the rivers are swollen by terrible downpours

collected on mountain slopes and sent hurtling down,

they carry before them branches and even whole trees;

No bridges are strong enough for the sudden onrush: they crumple.

The river, carrying the rains in its arms,

crashes against the piers and pushes them forward;

They fall with a roar, and they are under the water,

immense blocks: nothing could stand against the river.

So with the winds; it must be, their action is similar

for like a river they lash wherever they choose,

overturning whatever impedes them in one or several assaults;

Sometimes they lift and carry things upwards in an eddying swirl.

It proves, it must prove, that winds are invisible bodies,

for by their action and habit they rival the rivers

which no one denies are made of a substance which is visible.

....

Then observe, if you hang clothes out where the waves are breaking,

they get wet, just as they dry if they’re spread in the sun.

Yet nobody ever saw how the damp gets into them

or how it gets out when the weather is hot.

It follows that moisture must be composed of particles

so small it is not possible they should be seen.

In the same way, if you wear a ring on your finger,

after many years it will wear perceptibly thin;

A drip will hollow a stone; the blade of a plow

in time will secretly wear away in the fields;

And paving-stones grow smooth and thin with crowds

who tread on them year by year; by a city gate you may see

a statue of bronze with the right hand worn

where travelers have kissed it as they went on their way.

These things diminish, we see, little bylittle,

but what is lost at any particular time

is something that nature does not allow us to see

any more than she allows us to see what is added

to bodies in the course of their natural growth.

The same is true of what is taken away

from bodies when they are wasted by time and age;

and there are half-eaten cliffs overhanging the sea,

but who ever saw the salt removing a mouthful?

Nature does all these things with invisible substances.

.

Not everywhere, however, is crowded with matter,

for nature is such that everything has its emptiness.

This is a necessary part of the lesson,

without which nature would continue to mystify you

and my theories would in fact be incomplete.

There is the void—the emptiness of unoccupied space,

without which, clearly, nothing could ever move.

The function of matter is to get in the way;

If there were no space, nothing could ever move,

but everything would get in the way of everything else.

Nothing would ever give, and nothing would budge.

But in fact we see the seas move, the earth, the clouds,

the stars sweep by, and everything has its movement.

If there were no such thing as emptiness, none of this could happen,

nothing indeed could ever change or begin;

There would be closed-packed matter and that would be all.

.

The fact is, things which appear to us to be solid

are really made of somewhat rarefied stuff.

That is why water drips through the roof of a cave

and it looks as if thick slabs of rock had burst into tears;

That is how food distributes itself through a body;...

Noises don’t stop at a wall but are carried right through—

it makes no difference that the house is shut up.

The cold gets into our bones: and none of these things

could happen, unless there were spaces matter could go through.

...

But now I must get back to what I was saying.

The whole of nature consists of two elements:

There are material bodies, and there is the void

in which they are situated and through which they move.

...

There is indeed nothing whatever of which you can say

that exists apart from matter and emptiness,

as if there were some third element in the universe.

For if there were, it would not exist without size

—how large or small, is a matter of indifference—

and if it were sensible, even to the lightest touch

it would be classified with material objects;

If it could not be touched it would be incapable

of offering the slightest resistance to any body,

which amounts to saying that it would be void.

.

Besides, if a thing exists it must either act

or else be acted upon by other agents,

or provide a space in which other things can exist.

But only material objects can act and be acted on,

and only void can provide a space.

Apart from emptiness and material objects

there can be no third element in nature

—no third which could have an effect on our senses

or be the subject of any reasoning.

You will find that everything which can be named

is either inherent in the two basic elements

or is the effect of something that happens to them.

...

The bodies themselves are of two kinds:

Primary particles and complex bodies composed of primaries.

These first particles are of such an invincible hardness

that no force can alter them or extinguish them.

It is not easy to imagine such a body

so full of itself as the be entirely solid:

For lightning travels with ease through the walls of houses

and so do all kinds of sound; iron glows in the fire

and even stones break up in a violent heat.

Gold, which seems hard enough, can grow liquid too,

and so can bronze, which falls like a block of ice.

Warmth goes through sliver, and so indeed does the cold

so that when we hold a sliver cup in our hands

we feel the iced wine rise as it is poured.

Enough to convince us that nothing is really solid.

.

Yet, if one thinks about it and looks at the evidence,

it does turn out, as I’ll explain in a very few verses,

that there are particles made of solid and changeless matter

which are the basic constituents of the universe

from which all things are made.