i66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



LUCRETIUS AND THE EVOLUTION IDEA. 



By Professor WILLIAM L. POTEAT, M.A., 



WAKE FOREST COLLEGE. 



Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 

 atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum 

 subiecit strepitumque Acherontis avari. 



—Virgil, Georg. II. 490-492. 



It seem'd 

 A void was made in Nature; all her bonds 

 Crack'd; and I saw the flaring atom streams 

 And torrents of her myriad universe, 

 Ruining along the illimitable inane. 

 Fly on to clash together again, and make 

 Another and another frame of things 

 Forever: that was mine, my dream, I knew it. 



— Tennyson, Lucretius. 



Lucretius, nobler than his mood. 



Who dropped his plummet down the broad, 



Deep universe, and said, 'No God,' 



Finding no bottom : he denied 

 Divinely the divine, and died 

 Chief poet on the Tiber-side 



By grace of God : His face is stern 

 As one compelled, in spite of scorn, 

 To teach a truth he would not learn. 



— Mrs. Browning, A Vision of Poets. 



IN the essay on Dante, Macaulay reproached the English poets with 

 the tendency then showing itself among them to consider the 

 ohjects and phases of external nature fit material for the exercise of 

 their art. The reproach arose in part out of the fancied antagonism 

 between poetry and science, and it has been often echoed since that 

 day by poets as well as critics. 



The judgment is a shallow one. Poetry is, indeed, imaginative. 

 Whatever else it may have or want, it ceases to be poetry when the glow 

 of imagination fades out of it. Science, on the other hand, occupies 

 itself with fact only, with things as they are observed to be, not as they 

 are imagined to be. But imagination and observation are not at war 

 with each other. Distinction is not opposition. And, besides, the 

 poet's constructive imagination is helpless without the materials sup- 

 plied by observation; and the scientist's observation is aimless and un- 

 fruitful without the stimulus and guidance of imagination. 



