That motions also of the primal stuff
Secret and viewless lurk beneath, behind.
For thou wilt mark here many a speck, impelled By viewless blows, to change its little course, And beaten backwards to return again,
Hither and thither in all directions round. Lo, all their shifting movement is of old, From the primeval atoms; for the same Primordial seeds of things first move of self, And then those bodies built of unions small And nearest, as it were, unto the powers
Of the primeval atoms, are stirred up
By impulse of those atoms' unseen blows, And these thereafter goad the next in size: Thus motion ascends from the primevals on, And stage by stage emerges to our sense, Until those objects also move which we
Can mark in sunbeams, though it not appears
What blows do urge them.
Herein wonder not
How 'tis that, while the seeds of things are all
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Moving forever, the sum yet seems to stand
Supremely still, except in cases where
A thing shows motion of its frame as whole. For far beneath the ken of senses lies
The nature of those ultimates of the world;
And so, since those themselves thou canst not see, Their motion also must they veil from men--
For mark, indeed, how things we can see, oft Yet hide their motions, when afar from us Along the distant landscape. Often thus, Upon a hillside will the woolly flocks
Be cropping their goodly food and creeping about Whither the summons of the grass, begemmed With the fresh dew, is calling, and the lambs,
Well filled, are frisking, locking horns in sport:
Yet all for us seem blurred and blent afar-- A glint of white at rest on a green hill.
Again, when mighty legions, marching round, Fill all the quarters of the plains below, Rousing a mimic warfare, there the sheen Shoots up the sky, and all the fields about Glitter with brass, and from beneath, a sound Goes forth from feet of stalwart soldiery,
And mountain walls, smote by the shouting, send
The voices onward to the stars of heaven, And hither and thither darts the cavalry, And of a sudden down the midmost fields Charges with onset stout enough to rock The solid earth: and yet some post there is
Up the high mountains, viewed from which they seem
To stand--a gleam at rest along the plains.
Now what the speed to matter's atoms given
Thou mayest in few, my Memmius, learn from this: When first the dawn is sprinkling with new light The lands, and all the breed of birds abroad
Flit round the trackless forests, with liquid notes
Filling the regions along the mellow air, We see 'tis forthwith manifest to man How suddenly the risen sun is wont
At such an hour to overspread and clothe
The whole with its own splendour; but the sun's
Warm exhalations and this serene light Travel not down an empty void; and thus They are compelled more slowly to advance,
Whilst, as it were, they cleave the waves of air; Nor one by one travel these particles
Of the warm exhalations, but are all Entangled and enmassed, whereby at once Each is restrained by each, and from without
Checked, till compelled more slowly to advance. But the primordial atoms with their old
Simple solidity, when forth they travel
Along the empty void, all undelayed
By aught outside them there, and they, each one
Being one unit from nature of its parts,
Are borne to that one place on which they strive
Still to lay hold, must then, beyond a doubt,
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Outstrip in speed, and be more swiftly borne
Than light of sun, and over regions rush,
Of space much vaster, in the selfsame time
The sun's effulgence widens round the sky.
Nor to pursue the atoms one by one,
To see the law whereby each thing goes on. But some men, ignorant of matter, think, Opposing this, that not without the gods,
In such adjustment to our human ways,
Can nature change the seasons of the years, And bring to birth the grains and all of else To which divine Delight, the guide of life, Persuades mortality and leads it on,
That, through her artful blandishments of love, It propagate the generations still,
Lest humankind should perish. When they feign That gods have stablished all things but for man, They seem in all ways mightily to lapse
From reason's truth: for ev'n if ne'er I knew What seeds primordial are, yet would I dare This to affirm, ev'n from deep judgment based Upon the ways and conduct of the skies--
This to maintain by many a fact besides-- That in no wise the nature of the world For us was builded by a power divine--
So great the faults it stands encumbered with: The which, my Memmius, later on, for thee We will clear up. Now as to what remains
Concerning motions we'll unfold our thought.
Now is the place, meseems, in these affairs
To prove for thee this too: nothing corporeal Of its own force can e'er be upward borne, Or upward go--nor let the bodies of flames Deceive thee here: for they engendered are With urge to upwards, taking thus increase,
Whereby grow upwards shining grains and trees, Though all the weight within them downward bears. Nor, when the fires will leap from under round
The roofs of houses, and swift flame laps up Timber and beam, 'tis then to be supposed They act of own accord, no force beneath
To urge them up. 'Tis thus that blood, discharged
From out our bodies, spurts its jets aloft
And spatters gore. And hast thou never marked
With what a force the water will disgorge
Timber and beam? The deeper, straight and down, We push them in, and, many though we be,
The more we press with main and toil, the more
The water vomits up and flings them back,
That, more than half their length, they there emerge, Rebounding. Yet we never doubt, meseems,
That all the weight within them downward bears Through empty void. Well, in like manner, flames Ought also to be able, when pressed out,
Through winds of air to rise aloft, even though
The weight within them strive to draw them down.
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Hast thou not seen, sweeping so far and high, The meteors, midnight flambeaus of the sky, How after them they draw long trails of flame Wherever Nature gives a thoroughfare?
How stars and constellations drop to earth,
Seest not? Nay, too, the sun from peak of heaven
Sheds round to every quarter its large heat,
And sows the new-ploughed intervales with light: Thus also sun's heat downward tends to earth. Athwart the rain thou seest the lightning fly;
Now here, now there, bursting from out the clouds, The fires dash zig-zag--and that flaming power Falls likewise down to earth.
In these affairs