FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS. ^ 



spirit of reaping; the spirit of carrying corn to the 

 barn; and the spirit of bringing it out again." The 

 country, moreover, swarmed with Chaldaean astrolo- 

 gers and casters of nativities; with Etruscan harus- 

 pices full of " childish lightning-lore," who foretold 

 events from the entrails of sacrificed animals; while 

 in competition with these there was the State-sup- 

 ported college of augurs to divine the will of the 

 gods by the cries and direction of the flight of birds. 

 Well might the satirist of such a time say that the 

 "place was so densely populated with gods as to 

 leave hardly room for the men." 



It will be seen that the justification for including 

 Lucretius among the Pioneers of Evolution lies in 

 his two signal and momentous contributions to the 

 science of man; namely, the primitive savagery of 

 the human race, and the origin of the belief in a 

 soul and a future life. Concerning the first, an- 

 thropological research, in its vast accumulation of 

 materials during the last sixty years, has done little 

 more than fill in the outline which the insight of 

 Lucretius enabled him to sketch. As to the second, 

 he anticipates, well-nigh in detail, the ghost-theory 

 of the origin of belief in spirits generally which Her- 

 bert Spencer and Dr. Tylor, following the lines laid 

 down by Hume and Turgot (see p. 255), have 

 formulated and sustained by an enormous mass of 

 evidence. The credit thus due to Lucretius for the 

 original ideas in his majestic poem Greek in con- 

 ception and Roman in execution has been ob- 



