On the Nature of Things. Тит Лукреций Кар

Be born, and arrive its prime and top of life.

           For, lo, each thing is quicker marred than made;

           And so whate'er the long infinitude

           Of days and all fore-passed time would now

           By this have broken and ruined and dissolved,

           That same could ne'er in all remaining time

           Be builded up for plenishing the world.

           But mark: infallibly a fixed bound

           Remaineth stablished 'gainst their breaking down;

           Since we behold each thing soever renewed,

           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.

      CONFUTATION