Of the Nature of Things. T. Lucretius Carus

The whole new void between those bodies formed;

       But air, however it stream with hastening gusts,

       Can yet not fill the gap at once--for first

       It makes for one place, ere diffused through all.

       And then, if haply any think this comes,

       When bodies spring apart, because the air

       Somehow condenses, wander they from truth:

       For then a void is formed, where none before;

       And, too, a void is filled which was before.

       Nor can air be condensed in such a wise;

       Nor, granting it could, without a void, I hold,

       It still could not contract upon itself

       And draw its parts together into one.

       Wherefore, despite demur and counter-speech,

       Confess thou must there is a void in things.

       And still I might by many an argument

       Here scrape together credence for my words.

       But for the keen eye these mere footprints serve,

       Whereby thou mayest know the rest thyself.

       As dogs full oft with noses on the ground,

       Find out the silent lairs, though hid in brush,

       Of beasts, the mountain-rangers, when but once

       They scent the certain footsteps of the way,

       Thus thou thyself in themes like these alone

       Can hunt from thought to thought, and keenly wind

       Along even onward to the secret places

       And drag out truth. But, if thou loiter loth

       Or veer, however little, from the point,

       This I can promise, Memmius, for a fact:

       Such copious drafts my singing tongue shall pour

       From the large well-springs of my plenished breast

       That much I dread slow age will steal and coil

       Along our members, and unloose the gates

       Of life within us, ere for thee my verse

       Hath put within thine ears the stores of proofs

       At hand for one soever question broached.

       NOTHING EXISTS per se EXCEPT ATOMS AND THE VOID

       But, now again to weave the tale begun,

       All nature, then, as self-sustained, consists

       Of twain of things: of bodies and of void

       In which they're set, and where they're moved around.

       For common instinct of our race declares

       That body of itself exists: unless

       This primal faith, deep-founded, fail us not,

       Naught will there be whereunto to appeal

       On things occult when seeking aught to prove

       By reasonings of mind. Again, without

       That place and room, which we do call the inane,

       Nowhere could bodies then be set, nor go

       Hither or thither at all--as shown before.

       Besides, there's naught of which thou canst declare

       It lives disjoined from body, shut from void--

       A kind of third in nature. For whatever

       Exists must be a somewhat; and the same,

       If tangible, however fight and slight,

       Will yet increase the count of body's sum,

       With its own augmentation big or small;

       But, if intangible and powerless ever

       To keep a thing from passing through itself

       On any side, 'twill be naught else but that

       Which we do call the empty, the inane.

       Again, whate'er exists, as of itself,

       Must either act or suffer action on it,

       Or else be that wherein things move and be:

       Naught, saving body, acts, is acted on;

       Naught but the inane can furnish room. And thus,

       Beside the inane and bodies, is no third

       Nature amid the number of all things--

       Remainder none to fall at any time

       Under our senses, nor be seized and seen

       By any man through reasonings of mind.

       Name o'er creation with what names thou wilt,

       Thou'lt find but properties of those first twain,

       Or see but accidents those twain produce.

       A property is that which not at all

       Can be disjoined and severed from a thing

       Without a fatal dissolution: such,

       Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow

       To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,

       Intangibility to the viewless void.

       But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,

       Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else

       Which come and go whilst nature stands the same,

       We're wont, and rightly, to call accidents.

       Even time exists not of itself; but sense

       Reads out of things what happened long ago,

       What presses now, and what shall follow after:

       No man, we must admit, feels time itself,

       Disjoined from motion and repose of things.

       Thus, when they say there "is" the ravishment

       Of Princess Helen, "is" the siege and sack

       Of Trojan Town, look out, they force us not

       To admit these acts existent by themselves,

       Merely because those races of mankind

       (Of whom these acts were accidents) long since

       Irrevocable age has borne away:

       For all past actions may be said to be

       But accidents, in one way, of mankind,--

       In other, of some region of the world.

       Add, too, had been no matter, and no room

       Wherein all things go on, the fire of love

       Upblown by that fair form, the glowing coal

       Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast,

       Had ne'er enkindled that renowned strife

       Of savage war, nor had the wooden horse

       Involved in flames old Pergama, by a birth

       At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes.

       And thus thou canst remark that every act

       At bottom exists not of itself, nor is

       As body is, nor has like name with void;

       But rather of sort more fitly to be called

       An accident of body, and of place

       Wherein all things go on.

       CHARACTER OF THE ATOMS

       Bodies, again,

       Are partly primal germs of things, and partly

       Unions