The excerpt from Book One begins with praise of Epicurus, the “man of Greece” who dared to teach that the gods did not control daily life it also deals with the inevitable evils of “Religion,” which for Lucretius is mere superstition which darkens the mind, making it unable to reach any true or accurate understanding of the world.īook Two explains that a degenerative principle is at work in the universe, one of the earliest attempts to lay out a philosophy of entropy.īook Five explores the implications of Lucretius’s atomism: there is no designer all that is has come from a chance collision of the atomic particles which make up the world. Each deals with one of Lucretius’s key positions. Three excerpts from On the Nature of Things are found below. On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) Watson translation is available as a free online read or download from.
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