Of the Nature of Things

by Lucretius

Book I - Characters of the Atoms

Bodies, again,
     Are partly primal germs of things, and partly
     Unions deriving from the primal germs.
     And those which are the primal germs of things
     No power can quench; for in the end they conquer
     By their own solidness; though hard it be
     To think that aught in things has solid frame;
     For lightnings pass, no less than voice and shout,
     Through hedging walls of houses, and the iron
     White-dazzles in the fire, and rocks will burn
     With exhalations fierce and burst asunder.
     Totters the rigid gold dissolved in heat;
     The ice of bronze melts conquered in the flame;
     Warmth and the piercing cold through silver seep,
     Since, with the cups held rightly in the hand,
     We oft feel both, as from above is poured
     The dew of waters between their shining sides:
     So true it is no solid form is found.
     But yet because true reason and nature of things
     Constrain us, come, whilst in few verses now
     I disentangle how there still exist
     Bodies of solid, everlasting frame—
     The seeds of things, the primal germs we teach,
     Whence all creation around us came to be.
     First since we know a twofold nature exists,
     Of things, both twain and utterly unlike—
     Body, and place in which an things go on—
     Then each must be both for and through itself,
     And all unmixed: where'er be empty space,
     There body's not; and so where body bides,
     There not at all exists the void inane.
     Thus primal bodies are solid, without a void.
     But since there's void in all begotten things,
     All solid matter must be round the same;
     Nor, by true reason canst thou prove aught hides
     And holds a void within its body, unless
     Thou grant what holds it be a solid. Know,
     That which can hold a void of things within
     Can be naught else than matter in union knit.
     Thus matter, consisting of a solid frame,
     Hath power to be eternal, though all else,
     Though all creation, be dissolved away.
     Again, were naught of empty and inane,
     The world were then a solid; as, without
     Some certain bodies to fill the places held,
     The world that is were but a vacant void.
     And so, infallibly, alternate-wise
     Body and void are still distinguished,
     Since nature knows no wholly full nor void.
     There are, then, certain bodies, possessed of power
     To vary forever the empty and the full;
     And these can nor be sundered from without
     By beats and blows, nor from within be torn
     By penetration, nor be overthrown
     By any assault soever through the world—
     For without void, naught can be crushed, it seems,
     Nor broken, nor severed by a cut in twain,
     Nor can it take the damp, or seeping cold
     Or piercing fire, those old destroyers three;
     But the more void within a thing, the more
     Entirely it totters at their sure assault.
     Thus if first bodies be, as I have taught,
     Solid, without a void, they must be then
     Eternal; and, if matter ne'er had been
     Eternal, long ere now had all things gone
     Back into nothing utterly, and all
     We see around from nothing had been born—
     But since I taught above that naught can be
     From naught created, nor the once begotten
     To naught be summoned back, these primal germs
     Must have an immortality of frame.
     And into these must each thing be resolved,
     When comes its supreme hour, that thus there be
     At hand the stuff for plenishing the world.

     So primal germs have solid singleness
     Nor otherwise could they have been conserved
     Through aeons and infinity of time
     For the replenishment of wasted worlds.
     Once more, if nature had given a scope for things
     To be forever broken more and more,
     By now the bodies of matter would have been
     So far reduced by breakings in old days
     That from them nothing could, at season fixed,
     Be born, and arrive its prime and top of life.
     For, lo, each thing is quicker marred than made;
     And so whate'er the long infinitude
     Of days and all fore-passed time would now
     By this have broken and ruined and dissolved,
     That same could ne'er in all remaining time
     Be builded up for plenishing the world.
     But mark: infallibly a fixed bound
     Remaineth stablished 'gainst their breaking down;
     Since we behold each thing soever renewed,
     And unto all, their seasons, after their kind,
     Wherein they arrive the flower of their age.

       Again, if bounds have not been set against
     The breaking down of this corporeal world,
     Yet must all bodies of whatever things
     Have still endured from everlasting time
     Unto this present, as not yet assailed
     By shocks of peril. But because the same
     Are, to thy thinking, of a nature frail,
     It ill accords that thus they could remain
     (As thus they do) through everlasting time,
     Vexed through the ages (as indeed they are)
     By the innumerable blows of chance.

     So in our programme of creation, mark
     How 'tis that, though the bodies of all stuff
     Are solid to the core, we yet explain
     The ways whereby some things are fashioned soft—
     Air, water, earth, and fiery exhalations—
     And by what force they function and go on:
     The fact is founded in the void of things.
     But if the primal germs themselves be soft,
     Reason cannot be brought to bear to show
     The ways whereby may be created these
     Great crags of basalt and the during iron;
     For their whole nature will profoundly lack
     The first foundations of a solid frame.
     But powerful in old simplicity,
     Abide the solid, the primeval germs;
     And by their combinations more condensed,
     All objects can be tightly knit and bound
     And made to show unconquerable strength.
     Again, since all things kind by kind obtain
     Fixed bounds of growing and conserving life;
     Since Nature hath inviolably decreed
     What each can do, what each can never do;
     Since naught is changed, but all things so abide
     That ever the variegated birds reveal
     The spots or stripes peculiar to their kind,
     Spring after spring: thus surely all that is
     Must be composed of matter immutable.
     For if the primal germs in any wise
     Were open to conquest and to change, 'twould be
     Uncertain also what could come to birth
     And what could not, and by what law to each
     Its scope prescribed, its boundary stone that clings
     So deep in Time. Nor could the generations
     Kind after kind so often reproduce
     The nature, habits, motions, ways of life,
     Of their progenitors.

                                 And then again,
     Since there is ever an extreme bounding point

     Of that first body which our senses now
     Cannot perceive: That bounding point indeed
     Exists without all parts, a minimum
     Of nature, nor was e'er a thing apart,
     As of itself,—nor shall hereafter be,
     Since 'tis itself still parcel of another,
     A first and single part, whence other parts
     And others similar in order lie
     In a packed phalanx, filling to the full
     The nature of first body: being thus
     Not self-existent, they must cleave to that
     From which in nowise they can sundered be.
     So primal germs have solid singleness,
     Which tightly packed and closely joined cohere
     By virtue of their minim particles—
     No compound by mere union of the same;
     But strong in their eternal singleness,
     Nature, reserving them as seeds for things,
     Permitteth naught of rupture or decrease.

     Moreover, were there not a minimum,
     The smallest bodies would have infinites,
     Since then a half-of-half could still be halved,
     With limitless division less and less.
     Then what the difference 'twixt the sum and least?
     None: for however infinite the sum,
     Yet even the smallest would consist the same
     Of infinite parts. But since true reason here
     Protests, denying that the mind can think it,
     Convinced thou must confess such things there are
     As have no parts, the minimums of nature.
     And since these are, likewise confess thou must
     That primal bodies are solid and eterne.
     Again, if Nature, creatress of all things,
     Were wont to force all things to be resolved
     Unto least parts, then would she not avail
     To reproduce from out them anything;
     Because whate'er is not endowed with parts
     Cannot possess those properties required
     Of generative stuff—divers connections,
     Weights, blows, encounters, motions, whereby things
     Forevermore have being and go on.