CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 47 

 tion. Even in Rome, however, it gained adherents of a nobler character. One 

 of these, Lucretius, deserves further mention, especially as his enunciation of 

 the atomic theory is the most detailed of its kind that has been handed down 

 to us from antiquity, and as such it is also of interest on the grounds of the 

 biological particulars which it contains. 



Titus Lucretius Carus was probably born in 99 and died in 55 B.C. He 

 belonged to a famous patrician family and seems to have been acquainted 

 with several well-known persons among his contemporaries, but although 

 the epoch in which he lived — he was contemporary with Cassar and Cicero — 

 is without doubt the best known in antiquity from a historical point of 

 view, nothing is known of his life with any certainty. He seems to have kept 

 aloof from the political struggles of his time and devoted himself entirely 

 to philosophical and literary study. An early father of the Christian Church 

 declares that he died by his own hand; the statement may indeed be true, 

 for in the deeply unhappy age in which he lived, this desperate way out of 

 life was, as is well known, resorted to by many. It was not until after his 

 death that his great work On the Nature of Things was published, in which he 

 recorded the results of his philosophical speculations. Following the example 

 of the earlier Greek philosophers, particularly of Empedocles, whom he 

 greatly admired, he has clothed his thoughts in verse form; he is the last of 

 the ancient philosophers to do so. The wealth of imagination and the high 

 inspiration which fill his poem have given him a place amongst the greatest 

 poets of antiquity, but he is of great interest also as a philosopher. The most 

 striking feature of his poem is his passionate love of truth and his absolute 

 conviction that thought ultimately will succeed in penetrating the true 

 nature of things. To the glorious mission of philosophy to seek after truth 

 he opposes the grim picture of darkness and superstition called forth by 

 traditional theism, a miserable state from which he hopes free-thought will 

 save humanity. The cosmic explanation which he accepts as the only pos- 

 sible right one is the atomic theory, in the form in which Epicurus expounded 

 it; Democritus is mentioned only in passing. It can hardly be said that he 

 contributed anything towards the development of the general principle of 

 that theory, but at any rate his conception differs from that of which an 

 account has been given above in connexion with his predecessors. The worlds 

 are infinite in number, formed of atoms moving in empty space. Their mo- 

 tion is due to gravity and consequently represents a constant descent; the 

 fact, however, that they strike against one another, as presupposed in the 

 atomic theory, is due to their fall's being for internal reasons not quite 

 perpendicular, but deflecting to one side. 



Lucretius' soul theory 

 The most interesting of all, however, is Lucretius' attempt to apply the 

 atomic theory in detail to the phenomena of the senses and the processes of 



