7 
cussing the different elements of the teleological view respec- 
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 33 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 maintains that “ structure is the cause 
of function, not function the cause of structure hut that does not lessen 
the absurdity of the above. 
