92 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



inal observer of Nature must be inferred from 

 his considerable knowledge of animals and 

 plants. It is possible that the speculations treated 

 in his great poem may have been more precisely 

 recorded in some of his lost books. His indebted- 

 ness to Empedocles, to Epicurus, to Democritus, 

 to Anaxagoras and to Heraclitus is beautifully 

 phrased in the following passage:^ 



This terror, then, this darkness of the mind, 



Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light. 



Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse, 



But only Nature's aspect and her law. 



Which, teaching us, hath this exordium : 



Nothing from nothing ever yet was horn. 



Fear holds dominion over mortality 



Only because, seeing in land and sky 



So much the cause whereof no wise they know, 



Men think Divinities are working there. 



Meantime, when once we know from nothing still 



Nothing can be create, we shall divine 



More clearly what we seek: those elements 



From which alone all things created are, 



And how accomplished by no tool of Gods. 



Suppose all sprang from all things : any kind 



Might take its origin from any thing. 



No fixed seed required. Men from the sea 



Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed. 



And, fowl full fledged come bursting from the sky; 



The horned cattle, the herds and all the wild 



^0/ the Nature of Things. Book I, 146. Leonard translation. 



