7 



cussing the different elements of the teleological view resijcc- 

 tively. , 



The Philosophy of Lucretius. 



The first, Epicurean or Democrital view is scarcely worth 

 considering at any length. The arguments are so puerile as to 

 be, at this age, absolutely contemptible. For instance, Lucre- 

 tius, starting from the dictum that nothing can proceed from 

 nothing, asserts all bodies, and indeed all souls, to be composed 

 of solid material atoms : the composition of all things to have 

 resulted from the cohesion of atoms meeting in their course 

 downwards, as they are supposed by him to have been im- 

 pressed from all eternity with proper motions. But he fails to 

 show how such proper motions were acquired, and does not 

 perceive that in infinite space, direction is absolute, and not 

 relative; so that downwards " has no meaning at all. He 

 maintains that the soul, being material and intimately con- 

 nected with the body, perishes with it ; and consequently, ridi- 

 culing the fear of death, boasts that he has, by his philosophy, 

 freed men^s minds from its terrors. 



Perhaps his greatest perversion of reason appears in his asser- 

 tion that eyes, hands, feet, &c., were not made for seeing, 

 handling, and walking, but that men, finding them well adapted 

 for these purposes, used them for such : ^ their origin having 

 been simply due to a fortuitous concourse of atoms meeting in 

 their downward and slanting courses through space — and which 

 atoms have thereby formed them by their closer unions. Such 

 processes, by the nature of the case, could not involve intention 

 or design. Nature, he adds, is the origin of all living crea- 

 tures, natural wombs having formed (how formed he does not 

 describe) on the surface of the earth, to which they adhered by 

 fibres, gave rise to the first races. Such are specimens of his 

 positive statements. On the other hand, he maintains that the 

 world could not have been made by the Gods for the sake of 

 man or their own pleasure, from the many evils existing in it. 

 Now this is a most important assertion. Although his con- 

 clusion is erroneous, yet this very reason goes a long way to- 

 wards establishing that spirit of scepticism, not only in natural 

 theology, but in a belief in a God at all, which is so prevalent at 

 the present day. There are other and perhaps as weighty ob- 

 jections raised by unbelievers ; but this is one. On the other 

 hand, the so-called physical evils of the world have been far too 



* I am well aware that Positivism maintams that " structure is the cause 

 of function, not function the cause of structure but that does not lessen 

 the absurdity of the above. 



