The swerve
That’s that then. A skyhook still exists, just out of sight. Again and again this was the pattern of the Enlightenment: gain a yard of ground from God, but then insist he still holds the field beyond and always will. It did not matter how many skyhooks were found to be illusory, the next one was always going to prove real. Indeed, so common is the habit of suddenly seeing design, after all the hard work has been done to show that emergence is more plausible, that I shall borrow a name for it – the swerve. Lucretius himself was the first to swerve. In a world composed of atoms whose motions were predictable, Lucretius (channelling Democritus and Epicurus) could not explain the apparent human capacity for free will. In order to do so, he suggested, arbitrarily, that atoms must occasionally swerve unpredictably, because the gods make them do so. This failure of nerve on the part of the poet has been known since as the Lucretian swerve, but I intend to use the same phrase more generally for each occasion on which I catch a philosopher swerving to explain something he struggles to understand, and positing an arbitrary skyhook. Watch out, in the pages that follow, for many Lucretian swerves.
Newton’s rival, Gottfried Leibniz, in his 1710 treatise on theodicy, attempted a sort of mathematical proof that God existed. Evil stalked the world, he concluded, the better to bring out the best in people. God was always calculating carefully how to minimise evil, if necessary by allowing disasters to occur that killed more bad people than good. Voltaire mocked Leibniz’s ‘optimism’, a word that then meant almost the opposite of what it means today: that the world was perfect and unimprovable (‘optimal’), because God had made it. After 60,000 people died in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, on the morning of All Saints’ Day when the churches were full, theologians followed Leibniz in explaining helpfully that Lisbon had earned its punishment by sinning. This was too much for Voltaire, who asked sardonically in a poem: ‘Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found/Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?’
Newton’s French follower Pierre-Louis Maupertuis went to Swedish Lapland to prove that the earth was flattened towards the poles, as Newtonian mechanics predicted. He then moved on from Newton by rejecting other arguments for the existence of God founded on the wonders of nature, or the regularity of the solar system. But having gone thus far, he suddenly stopped (his Lucretian swerve), concluding that his own ‘least action’ principle to explain motion displayed such wisdom on the part of nature that it must be the product of a wise creator. Or, to paraphrase Maupertuis, if God’s as clever as me, he must exist. A blazing non sequitur.
Voltaire, perhaps irritated by the fact that his mathematically gifted mistress Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet had slept with Maupertuis and had written in defence of Leibniz, then based his character Dr Pangloss in his novel Candide on an amalgam of Leibniz and Maupertuis. Pangloss remains blissfully persuaded – and convinces the naïve Candide – that this is the best of all possible worlds, even as they both experience syphilis, shipwreck, earthquake, fire, slavery and being hanged. Voltaire’s contempt for theodicy derived directly and explicitly from Lucretius, whose arguments he borrowed throughout life, styling himself at one point the ‘latter-day Lucretius’.
Pasta or worms?
Voltaire was by no means the first poet or prose stylist to draw upon Lucretius, nor would he be the last. Thomas More tried to reconcile Lucretian pleasure with faith in Utopia. Montaigne quoted Lucretius frequently, and echoed him in saying ‘the world is but a perennial movement … all things in it are in constant motion’; he recommended that we ‘fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms’. Britain’s Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne and Francis Bacon, all play with themes of explicit materialism and atomism that came either directly or indirectly from Lucretius. Ben Jonson heavily annotated his Dutch edition of Lucretius. Machiavelli copied out De Rerum Natura in his youth. Molière, Dryden and John Evelyn translated it; John Milton and Alexander Pope emulated, echoed and attempted to rebut it.
Thomas Jefferson, who collected five Latin versions of De Rerum Natura along with translations into three languages, declared himself an Epicurean, and perhaps deliberately echoed Lucretius in his phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’. The poet and physician Erasmus Darwin, who helped inspire not just his evolutionary grandson but many of the Romantic poets too, wrote his epic, erotic, evolutionary, philosophical poems in conscious imitation of Lucretius. His last poem, The Temple of Nature, was intended as his version of De Rerum Natura.
The influence of this great Roman materialist culminates rather neatly in the moment when Mary Shelley had the idea for Frankenstein. She had her epiphany after listening to her husband Percy discuss with George, Lord Byron, the coming alive of ‘vermicelli’ that had been left to ferment, in experiments of ‘Dr Darwin’. Given that Shelley, Byron and Erasmus Darwin were all enthusiastic Lucretians, perhaps she misheard and, rather than debating the resurrection of pasta, they were actually quoting the passage in De Rerum Natura (and Darwin’s experimental imitation of it) where Lucretius discusses spontaneous generation of little worms in rotting vegetable matter – ‘vermiculos’. Here is the history of Western thought in a single incident: a Classical writer, rediscovered in the Renaissance, who inspired the Enlightenment and influenced the Romantic movement, then sparks the most famous Gothic novel, whose villain becomes a recurring star of modern cinema.
Lucretius haunted philosophers of the Enlightenment, daring free thinkers further down the path that leads away from creationist thinking. Pierre Bayle, in his Thoughts on the Comet of 1680, closely followed Lucretius’s Book 5 in suggesting that the power of religion derived from fear. Montesquieu channelled Lucretius in the very first sentence of The Spirit of the Laws (1748): ‘Laws in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things’ (my emphasis). Denis Diderot in his Philosophical Thoughts echoed Lucretius to the effect that nature was devoid of purpose, the motto for his book being a line from De Rerum Natura: ‘Now we see out of the dark what is in the light’. Later, in The Letter on the Blind and the Deaf, Diderot suggested that God himself was a mere product of the senses, and went to jail for the heresy. The atheist philosopher Paul-Henri, baron d’Holbach, took Lucretian ideas to their ultimate extreme in his Le Système de la Nature of 1770. D’Holbach saw nothing but cause and effect, and matter in motion: ‘no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers to account for the formation of things’.
One place where such scepticism began to take hold was in geology. James Hutton, a farmer from southern Scotland, in 1785 laid out a theory that the rocks beneath our feet were made by processes of erosion and uplift that are still at work today, and that no great Noachian flood was needed to explain seashells on mountaintops: ‘Hence we are led to conclude, that the greater part of our land, if not the whole, had been produced by operations natural to this globe.’ He glimpsed the vast depths of geological time, saying famously, ‘We find no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end.’ For this he was vilified as a blasphemer and an atheist. The leading Irish scientist Richard Kirwan even went as far as to hint that ideas like Hutton’s contributed to dangerous events like the French Revolution, remarking on how they had ‘proved too favourable to the structure of various systems of atheism or infidelity, as these have been in their turn to turbulence and immorality’.
No need of that hypothesis
The physicists, who had set the pace in tearing down skyhooks, continued to surprise the world. It fell to Pierre-Simon Laplace (using Emilie du Châtelet’s improvements to cumbersome Newtonian geometry) to take