LUCRETIUS AND THE ATOMIC THEORY 179 



pagan divinities, and states this principle so roundly as at first 

 to shock our feelings ; but if we limit the application of the 

 principle to matter once created, and such as we can observe, his 

 principle is true, and invariably acted upon. Not even by 

 divine power is matter now created out of nothing nor does 

 any effect happen without what we call a natural cause. 

 Lucretius seizes the opportunity of stating that men think 

 things are done by divine power because they do not understand 

 how they happen, whereas he will show how all things are done 

 without the hand of the gods a bold proposition truly, but 

 one which, translated into modern language, means simply that 

 natural phenomena are subject to definite laws, and are not 

 unintelligible miracles. Lucretius fails to perceive that definite 

 physical laws are consistent with the work of God ; and the 

 difficulty of reconciling the two ideas, unreal as it seems to us, 

 has been felt by able men even nowadays, when the conception 

 of divine power is very different from any present to the mind 

 of Lucretius. To most of us the very conception of a law 

 suggests a lawgiver, while he, to prove the existence of laws, 

 thought it necessary to deny the action of beings who could set 

 those laws at nought. The demonstration which he gives of 

 his first principle is loose, and goes rather to establish the fact 

 that natural phenomena occur according to definite rules than 

 to prove that no matter is created out of nothing, except in so 

 far as this creation would, he thinks, disturb the order of nature. 

 This first principle, as to the creation of matter, cannot indeed 

 be otherwise than loosely stated by Lucretius, for no definition 

 is given of what should measure the quantity of matter, 1 and 

 until we have defined how this quantity is to be measured, we 

 cannot experimentally determine whether matter is being created 

 or not. But Lucretius meant his proposition to include the 

 statement that nothing happens without a cause, and without 

 a material cause, and his proof of this is precisely that which 

 we should still adduce, being the perfect regularity with which 

 in nature similar effects follow similar causes. 



The next proposition is that ' nothing is ever annihilated, 

 but simply dissolved into its first bodies,' or, as we should say, 



1 Afterwards, -i. 360, the quantity of body is assumed as proportional to 

 weight. 



N 2 



