On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) Read Online Free PDF

commentators. But metaphors and models such as the atoms as ‘seeds’ have become in recent years a central concern of scientists and philosophers as well, and there are obvious parallels between a poet’s concern with the concrete specifics of language and the Epicurean call to pay attention to the ‘first image’ associated with each word. This is one aspect of a general call to look at the world ‘before our eyes’ which again can be seen as simultaneously a poet’s interest in evocative description and a scientist’s concern with the empirical basis of hypotheses about the unseen. ‘Look and think’ is an injunction both can share. Another aspect of this is the extensive use, especially in the firstpart of the poem, of the argument-form known as
modus tollendo tollens
or ‘denying the consequent’, whose form is:
    If P, then Q (e.g. ‘If there is no void, there is no motion’)
    But not Q (‘But (we can see that) it is not the case that there is no motion’);
    Therefore not P (‘Therefore it is not the case that there is no void’).
    The process of refuting hypotheses about the unknown by reference to observed reality was known to the Epicureans as ‘witnessing against’: it is the basic argument form of science, which formulates hypotheses and attempts to refute them with empirical data. But the appeal to empirical reality often contained in the second premiss—‘but you can
see
that this consequence cannot be true’—is also a key poetic feature of
On the Nature of the Universe
. On the one hand, the descriptions of the world as it is serve constantly to ground readers in lived reality, bring them back to the way things are, the ordinary and comprehensible life that we live before we begin to be assailed by philosophical doubts. On the other, the descriptions of the world as it is figured by the opponents play a major part in what has always been seen as a strong satirical element in the poem, mocking the delusions of the unphilosophic, as in the very first argument:
        For if things came out of nothing, all kinds of things
    Could be produced from all things. Nothing would need a seed.
    Men could arise from the sea, and scaly fish
    From earth, and birds hatch in the sky.
    Cattle and farm animals and wild beasts of every kind
    Would fill alike farmlands and wilderness,
    Breed all mixed up, all origins confused.
    Nor could the fruits stay constant on the trees,
    But all would change, all would bear everything.
    (1. 159–66)
    The satirical edge to the poem goes deeper than this, however. Epicureanism is in one sense a negative philosophy, in that the emphasis falls on removing the confusions and delusions of unphilosophic humanity, all the false opinions that prevent human beings from being happy. Its central metaphors are of purging and liberating, freeing people from complex accretions of popular belief: its positive content is much simpler, to live a natural life listening to the voice of the body, ‘not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold…’. It shares this stance of heroic removalof superstition and nonsense with much of the rhetoric of modern science, with its implicit or explicit role of sweeping away humbug and recalling us to the plain and simple facts. This Baconian project was famously celebrated in the poem Abraham Cowley wrote ‘To the Royal Society’ on its foundation:
    Some few exalted Spirits this latter age has shown,
    That labour’d to assert the Liberty
    (From Guardians who were now Usurpers grown)
    Of this old Minor still, Captiv’d Philosophy;
    But ’twas rebellion call’d to fight
    For such a long-oppressed Right.
    Bacon at last, a mighty Man arose
    Whom a wise King and Nature chose
    Lord Chancellor of both their Lawes,
    And boldly undertook the injur’d pupils cause.
    Authority, which did a Body boast,
    Though ’twas but air condens’d and stalk’d about,
    Like some old Giant’s more Gigantic Ghost,
    To terrifie the Learned Rout
    With the plain