superstition and ignorance; his mission is to dispel their darkness by
that light of truth which is "clearer than the beams of the sun or the
shining shafts of day." Spinoza has been called, in a bold figure, "a man
drunk with God;" the contemplation of the "nature of things," the
physical structure of the universe, and the living and all but
impersonate law which forms and sustains it, has the same intoxicating
influence over Lucretius. God and man are alike to him bubbles on the
ceaseless stream of existence; yet they do not therefore, as they have so
often done in other philosophies, fade away to a spectral thinness. His
contemplation of existence is no brooding over abstractions; Nature is
not in his view the majestic and silent figure before whose unchanging
eyes the shifting shadow-shapes go and come; but an essential life,
manifesting itself in a million workings, _creatrix, gubernans, daedala
rerum_. The universe is filled through all its illimitable spaces by the
roar of her working, the ceaseless unexhausted energy with which she
alternates life and death.

To our own age the Epicurean philosophy has a double interest. Not only
was it a philosophy of life and conduct, but, in the effort to place life
and conduct under ascertainable physical laws, it was led to frame an
extremely detailed and ingenious body of natural philosophy, which,
partly from being based on really sound postulates, partly from a happy
instinct in connecting phenomena, still remains interesting and valuable.
To the Epicureans, indeed, as to all ancient thinkers, the scientific
method as it is now understood was unknown; and a series of unverified
generalizations, however brilliant and acute, is not the true way towards
knowledge. But it still remains an astonishing fact that many of the most
important physical discoveries of modern times are hinted at or even
expressly stated by Lucretius. The general outlines of the atomic
doctrine have long been accepted as in the main true; in all important