[Lucretius had] "a fierce hatred of conventional superstitions and a yearning for intellectual liberty..."  "Religion was his enemy and he could have no truce with it, for he saw in it the cause of the greater part of the sorrows and even the crimes of human life."  "In the philosophy of Epicurus Lucretius had found his own rest, and it was the purpose of his life to put that philosophy at the service of his countrymen and so deliver them too from the tyranny of religion."  "For the atomic system, capable of being worked out in detail throughout the whole realm of the universe, can show how every phenomenon is but the result of natural causes.  The atoms in the void, obeying the law of their own nature, falling downwards owing to their weight, meeting and clashing, form first into little molecules, then into larger masses, and ultimately build up the whole universe of worlds, planted about here and there in infinite space, and all things, down to the smallest, contained in them nature, acting by law, and yet without puirpose - 'for not by design did the first-beginnings of things place themselves each in their order with foreseeing mind ... but by trying movements and unions of every kind, at last they fall into such dispositions as those, whereby our world of things is created' - acting indeed blindly and occasionally with a kind of spontaneity which seems like chance, nature made all the worlds and 'all that in them is.'  There is no need for the aid of the gods, there is not even room for their interference."  "But is man free?  The exclusion of the gods from the workings of the universe has been accomplished by the establishment of law, the demonstration of the natural sequence of cause and effect from the first downward movement of the atoms to the formation of the newest 'thing' in the remotest world.  Is man then alone exempt from this chain of causation?  Has he the power to direct his own actions, or is he too ruled by this inexorable destiny, so that his smallest act is but the inevitable outcome of all that has preceeded?  (Democritus had already been confronted with this problem and had boldly answered it with an absolute determinism; man's actions are no exception to the universal law, free-will is but a delusion.)"  Introduction to On the Nature of Things, by Cyril Bailey, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910.

"O miserable minds of men!  O blind hearts!  In what darkness of life, in what great dangers ye spend this little span of years! ... Life is one long struggle in the dark."  Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, ca 54 BC.

The following offsite URL contains the complete text of On the Nature of Things:

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This site opened:  November 26, 1999.  Last Update: December 22, 1999