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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SCIENTIFIC SYSTEM OF LUCRETIUS. SECTION I. THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER. The problem Lucretius set himself to solve was a double one. First, What was the original nature of matter 1 secondly, By what process has it in the course of time arrived at its present state ? And the solution he offered was the joint product of certain a priori assumptions and reflections, and a keen and extensive observation of natural facts. His first great assumption, and his first great observation, were as follows: He assumed that all our knowledge was derived from sense, ?that the senses were the only channels and the only tests of truth; he observed that the order of things revealed to him by his senses, and whose secrets he had set himself to explain, was something not capricious, but acting in a fixed way, and therefore really constant under all apparent change. Without fixed seasons of rain, he says, the earth is unable to put forth its gladdening produce; nor, again, if kept from food, could the nature of living things continue its kind and sustain life. Or again, ' he asks, why should not some men outlive many generations, if it were not that an unchanging matter had been assigned for begetting things, and what can arise out of this matter, is fixed 1 He observes, further, another set of facts. Rains die, but goodly crops spring up, and boughs are green with leaves upon the trees. Trees themselves are laden with fruit; by them in turn our race and the race of wild beasts are fed; by them we see glad towns teem with children, and the leafy forests ring on all sides with the song of new birds. And from this Lucretius arrives at another general conclusion. Nature, he says, dissolves everything back into its first bodies, and does not annihilate things. H...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217860031 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217860036 |
| Weight | 0.37 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.25 In |
| List Price | $14.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 106 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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