Lucretius - Of the Nature of Things

And unto all, their seasons, after their kind,

Wherein they arrive the flower of their age.

Again, if bounds have not been set against

The breaking down of this corporeal world,

Yet must all bodies of whatever things

Have still endured from everlasting time

Unto this present, as not yet assailed

By shocks of peril. But because the same

Are, to thy thinking, of a nature frail,

It ill accords that thus they could remain

(As thus they do) through everlasting time,

Vexed through the ages (as indeed they are)

By the innumerable blows of chance.

So in our programme of creation, mark

How ’tis that, though the bodies of all stuff

Are solid to the core, we yet explain

The ways whereby some things are fashioned soft —

Air, water, earth, and fiery exhalations —

And by what force they function and go on:

The fact is founded in the void of things.

But if the primal germs themselves be soft,

Reason cannot be brought to bear to show

The ways whereby may be created these

Great crags of basalt and the during iron;

For their whole nature will profoundly lack

The first foundations of a solid frame.

But powerful in old simplicity,

Abide the solid, the primeval germs;

And by their combinations more condensed,

All objects can be tightly knit and bound

And made to show unconquerable strength.

Again, since all things kind by kind obtain

Fixed bounds of growing and conserving life;

Since Nature hath inviolably decreed

What each can do, what each can never do;

Since naught is changed, but all things so abide

That ever the variegated birds reveal

The spots or stripes peculiar to their kind,

Spring after spring: thus surely all that is

Must be composed of matter immutable.

For if the primal germs in any wise

Were open to conquest and to change, ‘twould be

Uncertain also what could come to birth

And what could not, and by what law to each

Its scope prescribed, its boundary stone that clings

So deep in Time. Nor could the generations

Kind after kind so often reproduce

The nature, habits, motions, ways of life,

Of their progenitors.

And then again,

Since there is ever an extreme bounding point

. . . . . .

Of that first body which our senses now

Cannot perceive: That bounding point indeed

Exists without all parts, a minimum

Of nature, nor was e’er a thing apart,

As of itself — nor shall hereafter be,

Since ’tis itself still parcel of another,

A first and single part, whence other parts

And others similar in order lie

In a packed phalanx, filling to the full

The nature of first body: being thus

Not self-existent, they must cleave to that

From which in nowise they can sundered be.

So primal germs have solid singleness,

Which tightly packed and closely joined cohere

By virtue of their minim particles —

No compound by mere union of the same;

But strong in their eternal singleness,

Nature, reserving them as seeds for things,

Permitteth naught of rupture or decrease.

Moreover, were there not a minimum,

The smallest bodies would have infinites,

Since then a half-of-half could still be halved,

With limitless division less and less.

Then what the difference ‘twixt the sum and least?

None: for however infinite the sum,

Yet even the smallest would consist the same

Of infinite parts. But since true reason here

Protests, denying that the mind can think it,

Convinced thou must confess such things there are

As have no parts, the minimums of nature.

And since these are, likewise confess thou must

That primal bodies are solid and eterne.

Again, if Nature, creatress of all things,

Were wont to force all things to be resolved

Unto least parts, then would she not avail

To reproduce from out them anything;

Because whate’er is not endowed with parts

Cannot possess those properties required

Of generative stuff — divers connections,

Weights, blows, encounters, motions, whereby things

Forevermore have being and go on.

And on such grounds it is that those who held

The stuff of things is fire, and out of fire

Alone the cosmic sum is formed, are seen

Mightily from true reason to have lapsed.

Of whom, chief leader to do battle, comes

That Heraclitus, famous for dark speech

Among the silly, not the serious Greeks

Who search for truth. For dolts are ever prone

That to bewonder and adore which hides

Beneath distorted words, holding that true

Which sweetly tickles in their stupid ears,

Or which is rouged in finely finished phrase.

For how, I ask, can things so varied be,

If formed of fire, single and pure? No whit

‘Twould help for fire to be condensed or thinned,

If all the parts of fire did still preserve

But fire’s own nature, seen before in gross.

The heat were keener with the parts compressed,

Milder, again, when severed or dispersed —

And more than this thou canst conceive of naught

That from such causes could become; much less

Might earth’s variety of things be born

From any fires soever, dense or rare.

This too: if they suppose a void in things,

Then fires can be condensed and still left rare;

But since they see such opposites of thought

Rising against them, and are loath to leave

An unmixed void in things, they fear the steep

And lose the road of truth. Nor do they see,

That, if from things we take away the void,

All things are then condensed, and out of all

One body made, which has no power to dart

Swiftly from out itself not anything —

As throws the fire its light and warmth around,

Giving thee proof its parts are not compact.

But if perhaps they think, in other wise,

Fires through their combinations can be quenched

And change their substance, very well: behold,

If fire shall spare to do so in no part,

Then heat will perish utterly and all,

And out of nothing would the world be formed.

For change in anything from out its bounds

Means instant death of that which was before;

And thus a somewhat must persist unharmed

Amid the world, lest all return to naught,

And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew.

Now since indeed there are those surest bodies

Which keep their nature evermore the same,

Upon whose going out and coming in

And changed order things their nature change,

And all corporeal substances transformed,

’Tis thine to know those primal bodies, then,

Are not of fire. For ’twere of no avail

Should some depart and go away, and some

Be added new, and some be changed in order,

If still all kept their nature of old heat:

For whatsoever they created then

Would still in any case be only fire.

The truth, I fancy, this: bodies there are

Whose clashings, motions, order, posture, shapes

Produce the fire and which, by order changed,

Do change the nature of the thing produced,

And are thereafter nothing like to fire

Nor whatso else has power to send its bodies

With impact touching on the senses’ touch.

Again, to say that all things are but fire

And no true thing in number of all things

Exists but fire, as this same fellow says,

Seems crazed folly. For the man himself

Against the senses by the senses fights,

And hews at that through which is all belief,