It is inconceivable that the obvious harmony of outlook between Lucretius and Galileo should be a coincidence. He must have recognised the kinship just as strongly as did a later Italian scientist-writer, Primo Levi.
In England, Lucretius became scientifically respectable in the 17th century. Robert Boyle was a Lucretian who visualized the air as a springy mass of atoms creating pressure by their incessant bombardments. More than that, he deduced that this springiness obeyed a simple equation, the pressure doubling as the volume halved. A few years later, Lucretian ideas found their most powerful champion in the towering figure of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton cleverly formulated a compromise between science and religion that satisfied many at the time. In a ringing passage in The Optics (1704) he wrote:
... it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation.
So God was the first mover, after which matter behaved in ways amenable to scientific enquiry. One of Lucretius’ most astounding prefigurings is his anticipation of Newton's revolutionary First Law of Motion. Lucretius had written, 1700 years before Newton: “Through undisturbed vacuum all bodies must travel at equal speed although impelled by unequal weights”. The Aristotelian theory held that bodies fell at speeds proportional to their weight.
But respectable to Galileo, Boyle and Newton did not mean respectable to the world at large. In 1600 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome for professing Lucretian beliefs and the dissimulatory code held sway throughout the 17th century. The first English translation of Lucretius was, remarkably, by a woman. Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81) was an aristocratic poet and biographer. In the preface to her Lucretius (1675) she felt obliged to distance herself from the content of the poem in the most extreme manner. In a grovelling abasement before her patron, Lord Anglesey, she wrote: “I am sorry I had not the capacity of making a work, nor the good fortune of choosing a subject, worthy of being presented to your lordship ... I abhor the atheisms and impieties in it, and translated it only out of youthful curiosity to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernicious doctrines in it.” Anglesey probably agreed with this sentiment because the work languished in his family’s library for hundreds of years, finally being published in 1996.
She goes on to refer to “the whole work being one fault” and the author as “this lunatic”, his discoveries being “so silly, foolish, and false, that nothing but his lunacy can extenuate the crime of his arrogant ignorance”. Her abuse reflected the conventional pieties of the time but at one point sheds some light on the problem many still have with the scientific account of nature. She refers to “the foppish casual dance of atoms” and sets against it, with apparently undeniable authority: . . . the sovereign wisdom of God in the great design of the whole universe and every creature in it, and His eternal omnipotence, exerting itself in the production of all things, according to His most wise and fixed purpose, and His most gracious, ever-active Providence, upholding, ordering and governing the whole creation, and conducting all that appears most casual to us and our narrow comprehensions to the accomplishment of those just ends for which they were made. Who wouldn’t prefer ever-active Providence, should it exist, to “the foppish casual dance of atoms”? It was left to the most Lucretian of naturalists, Charles Darwin, nearly 200 years later, to once again find nobility in a mechanistic account of life: There is grandeur in this view of life [evolution by natural selection], with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. In the 18th century in Northern Europe and North America, Christian condemnation of Lucretius weakened. The liberal surge of the Enlightenment in Britain, France and America clearly had connections with Lucretian ideas. David Hume, the philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, imbibed Lucretius via Montaigne. Thomas Jefferson owned five copies of The Nature of Things.
The mid 18th century also marked chemistry’s coming of age and thus the beginning of the road to a solid knowledge of atoms. The discovery of the gases oxygen and hydrogen led to the recognition of truly elemental substances; to the systematic chemistry of Lavoisier; and to John Dalton’s atomic theory of 1800, in which Lucretius’ physical atoms were married to the chemical elements of Lavoisier to form the basis of chemistry that survives to this day.
At this time, in Britain especially, there was a brief, golden period when scientists rubbed shoulders quite naturally with artists and entrepreneurs. This was the world of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and the central figure of the Lunar movement, the polymath Erasmus Darwin, was a Lucretian, even imitating him in writing long scientific poems: The Botanic Garden (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803). Darwin’s verses and thought are far below those of Lucretius in quality but he was a radical and inventive man, planting the seed of the idea of evolution that would flower in his grandson, Charles.
The Lunar Men paved the way for English Romanticism in which, at least in its early days, Lucretian influence continued. All of the Romantic poets read Lucretius and Shelley in particular was deeply influenced by him, responding to Lucretius’ panoptic view of the atoms:
There’s not one atom of yon earth
But once was a living man;
Nor the minutest drop of rain,
That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,
But flowed in human veins . . .
(Queen Mab)
But, above all, it was Lucretius’ assault on false piety that inspired him: “and priests dare babble of a God of peace / Even while their hands are red with guiltless blood”.
However, as the 19th century progressed, Lucretian ideas divided the scientists from the humanists, and even some scientists begged to differ. Despite the success of the atomic theory in 1800 with John Dalton’s work, some physicists held out against the reality of atoms, but the most illustrious of them, the Scot James Clerk Maxwell, was avowedly a Lucretian, referring in a public lecture to: “the atomic doctrine of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, and, I may add, of your lecturer”.
Following the late-Romantic schism between science and art, the Victorians agonized about the loss of faith. Even before Darwin published The Origin of Species, in the poem In Memoriam (1849), Tennyson was brooding on the cold hard universe and its indifference to creation. Lucretius’ denial of any hand of the gods in human affairs and his vision of swirling atoms as the wellspring of creation was now taken to be an entirely gloomy philosophy. As the critic David Cecil wrote:
. . . for the first time, pessimism – conscious, considered pessimism – found expression in English Letters: in the works of Arnold and Fitzgerald, of Thompson and Hardy. Hardy was especially open to the melancholy implications of the new outlook.
(Hardy the Novelist, 1978)
This mood hardened into a poetic conceit in the 19th century – what I call Atomic Pessimism. Perhaps the most explicit expression of this mood can be found in Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship (written in 1903 but essentially 19th century in mood):
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms . . . all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand.
Russell seems to need to set up this apparently cold, blind universe so that he can bravely defy it. Lucretius insists that by removing the fear that we are puppets of gods who might require something from us (but what it is we can only guess), we can take pleasure in the world we inhabit. The Atomic Pessimist is a person who petulantly demands that the universe ought to notice us and because it doesn’t feels lonely. The world goes its own way – continents break apart, mountains rise, countless species emerge and disappear, the dinosaurs rule for 135 million years. The evidence for the world’s indifference to the late creation of an intelligent ape that managed to make hay during a 10,000-year period of benign climate is overwhelming.
Of course it was Darwin who precipitated the full-blown Victorian melancholy. Until then, many people had preserved the illusion that, even if the material world consisted of atoms and the void, living things were somehow different. With Darwin, mechanism invaded life itself. But so much of Darwin can already be found in Lucretius.
Lucretius was a pioneer ecologist in his account of living things and the earth’s material cycles (water and what we now know as the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen cycles, etc.). His atomism led him to understand that nothing is ever lost: the air, the rivers, the soil and all living things are sustained by the ceaseless traffic of atoms which continually make new combinations.
His starting point for considering living things was that many species have become extinct, exactly the same idea that rekindled evolutionary thinking in the 19th century. He rejected design by the gods through the argument that the world is so imperfect, no one could have designed it in such a form: “…the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections”. Darwin’s argument again. Without, of course, Darwin’s welter of evidence, Lucretius had divined the core idea of natural selection:
And many creatures must long ago have perished
Unable to pass on the spark of life;
For, wherever you see a creature in the full of life,
It must have been safeguarded from aeons ago
By cunning or courage or fleetness of foot.
And Lucretius proposed a most subtle biological idea: that that the evolution of complex organs such as the eye and tongue did not evolve in order that we might see and speak: “Nature did not the limbs for use compose,/But th’uses out of their creation arose”. This is now known as the concept of exaptation and it was not formerly proposed until 1982, by Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba. Darwin himself was not directly influenced by Lucretius – the striking parallels were pointed out to him after he had published.
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In England, Lucretius became scientifically respectable in the 17th century. Robert Boyle was a Lucretian who visualized the air as a springy mass of atoms creating pressure by their incessant bombardments. More than that, he deduced that this springiness obeyed a simple equation, the pressure doubling as the volume halved. A few years later, Lucretian ideas found their most powerful champion in the towering figure of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton cleverly formulated a compromise between science and religion that satisfied many at the time. In a ringing passage in The Optics (1704) he wrote:
... it seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation.
So God was the first mover, after which matter behaved in ways amenable to scientific enquiry. One of Lucretius’ most astounding prefigurings is his anticipation of Newton's revolutionary First Law of Motion. Lucretius had written, 1700 years before Newton: “Through undisturbed vacuum all bodies must travel at equal speed although impelled by unequal weights”. The Aristotelian theory held that bodies fell at speeds proportional to their weight.
But respectable to Galileo, Boyle and Newton did not mean respectable to the world at large. In 1600 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome for professing Lucretian beliefs and the dissimulatory code held sway throughout the 17th century. The first English translation of Lucretius was, remarkably, by a woman. Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81) was an aristocratic poet and biographer. In the preface to her Lucretius (1675) she felt obliged to distance herself from the content of the poem in the most extreme manner. In a grovelling abasement before her patron, Lord Anglesey, she wrote: “I am sorry I had not the capacity of making a work, nor the good fortune of choosing a subject, worthy of being presented to your lordship ... I abhor the atheisms and impieties in it, and translated it only out of youthful curiosity to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernicious doctrines in it.” Anglesey probably agreed with this sentiment because the work languished in his family’s library for hundreds of years, finally being published in 1996.
She goes on to refer to “the whole work being one fault” and the author as “this lunatic”, his discoveries being “so silly, foolish, and false, that nothing but his lunacy can extenuate the crime of his arrogant ignorance”. Her abuse reflected the conventional pieties of the time but at one point sheds some light on the problem many still have with the scientific account of nature. She refers to “the foppish casual dance of atoms” and sets against it, with apparently undeniable authority: . . . the sovereign wisdom of God in the great design of the whole universe and every creature in it, and His eternal omnipotence, exerting itself in the production of all things, according to His most wise and fixed purpose, and His most gracious, ever-active Providence, upholding, ordering and governing the whole creation, and conducting all that appears most casual to us and our narrow comprehensions to the accomplishment of those just ends for which they were made. Who wouldn’t prefer ever-active Providence, should it exist, to “the foppish casual dance of atoms”? It was left to the most Lucretian of naturalists, Charles Darwin, nearly 200 years later, to once again find nobility in a mechanistic account of life: There is grandeur in this view of life [evolution by natural selection], with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. In the 18th century in Northern Europe and North America, Christian condemnation of Lucretius weakened. The liberal surge of the Enlightenment in Britain, France and America clearly had connections with Lucretian ideas. David Hume, the philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, imbibed Lucretius via Montaigne. Thomas Jefferson owned five copies of The Nature of Things.
The mid 18th century also marked chemistry’s coming of age and thus the beginning of the road to a solid knowledge of atoms. The discovery of the gases oxygen and hydrogen led to the recognition of truly elemental substances; to the systematic chemistry of Lavoisier; and to John Dalton’s atomic theory of 1800, in which Lucretius’ physical atoms were married to the chemical elements of Lavoisier to form the basis of chemistry that survives to this day.
At this time, in Britain especially, there was a brief, golden period when scientists rubbed shoulders quite naturally with artists and entrepreneurs. This was the world of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and the central figure of the Lunar movement, the polymath Erasmus Darwin, was a Lucretian, even imitating him in writing long scientific poems: The Botanic Garden (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803). Darwin’s verses and thought are far below those of Lucretius in quality but he was a radical and inventive man, planting the seed of the idea of evolution that would flower in his grandson, Charles.
The Lunar Men paved the way for English Romanticism in which, at least in its early days, Lucretian influence continued. All of the Romantic poets read Lucretius and Shelley in particular was deeply influenced by him, responding to Lucretius’ panoptic view of the atoms:
There’s not one atom of yon earth
But once was a living man;
Nor the minutest drop of rain,
That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,
But flowed in human veins . . .
(Queen Mab)
But, above all, it was Lucretius’ assault on false piety that inspired him: “and priests dare babble of a God of peace / Even while their hands are red with guiltless blood”.
However, as the 19th century progressed, Lucretian ideas divided the scientists from the humanists, and even some scientists begged to differ. Despite the success of the atomic theory in 1800 with John Dalton’s work, some physicists held out against the reality of atoms, but the most illustrious of them, the Scot James Clerk Maxwell, was avowedly a Lucretian, referring in a public lecture to: “the atomic doctrine of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, and, I may add, of your lecturer”.
Following the late-Romantic schism between science and art, the Victorians agonized about the loss of faith. Even before Darwin published The Origin of Species, in the poem In Memoriam (1849), Tennyson was brooding on the cold hard universe and its indifference to creation. Lucretius’ denial of any hand of the gods in human affairs and his vision of swirling atoms as the wellspring of creation was now taken to be an entirely gloomy philosophy. As the critic David Cecil wrote:
. . . for the first time, pessimism – conscious, considered pessimism – found expression in English Letters: in the works of Arnold and Fitzgerald, of Thompson and Hardy. Hardy was especially open to the melancholy implications of the new outlook.
(Hardy the Novelist, 1978)
This mood hardened into a poetic conceit in the 19th century – what I call Atomic Pessimism. Perhaps the most explicit expression of this mood can be found in Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship (written in 1903 but essentially 19th century in mood):
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms . . . all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand.
Russell seems to need to set up this apparently cold, blind universe so that he can bravely defy it. Lucretius insists that by removing the fear that we are puppets of gods who might require something from us (but what it is we can only guess), we can take pleasure in the world we inhabit. The Atomic Pessimist is a person who petulantly demands that the universe ought to notice us and because it doesn’t feels lonely. The world goes its own way – continents break apart, mountains rise, countless species emerge and disappear, the dinosaurs rule for 135 million years. The evidence for the world’s indifference to the late creation of an intelligent ape that managed to make hay during a 10,000-year period of benign climate is overwhelming.
Of course it was Darwin who precipitated the full-blown Victorian melancholy. Until then, many people had preserved the illusion that, even if the material world consisted of atoms and the void, living things were somehow different. With Darwin, mechanism invaded life itself. But so much of Darwin can already be found in Lucretius.
Lucretius was a pioneer ecologist in his account of living things and the earth’s material cycles (water and what we now know as the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen cycles, etc.). His atomism led him to understand that nothing is ever lost: the air, the rivers, the soil and all living things are sustained by the ceaseless traffic of atoms which continually make new combinations.
His starting point for considering living things was that many species have become extinct, exactly the same idea that rekindled evolutionary thinking in the 19th century. He rejected design by the gods through the argument that the world is so imperfect, no one could have designed it in such a form: “…the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections”. Darwin’s argument again. Without, of course, Darwin’s welter of evidence, Lucretius had divined the core idea of natural selection:
And many creatures must long ago have perished
Unable to pass on the spark of life;
For, wherever you see a creature in the full of life,
It must have been safeguarded from aeons ago
By cunning or courage or fleetness of foot.
And Lucretius proposed a most subtle biological idea: that that the evolution of complex organs such as the eye and tongue did not evolve in order that we might see and speak: “Nature did not the limbs for use compose,/But th’uses out of their creation arose”. This is now known as the concept of exaptation and it was not formerly proposed until 1982, by Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba. Darwin himself was not directly influenced by Lucretius – the striking parallels were pointed out to him after he had published.
READ MORE
