8 - Lucretius and the history of science

Summary

The central aim of the DRN was to demolish religious belief and banish superstitious fear. To that end Lucretius, following Epicurus’ largely lost On Nature, referred the production of all effects to the motion and interaction of atoms and denied all providential regulation of the universe: ‘Nature is her own mistress and is exempt from the oppression of arrogant despots, accomplishing everything by herself spontaneously and independently and free from the jurisdiction of the gods’ (2.1090-2). By way of accomplishing its aim, the poem addressed a range of scientific subjects: nutrition, perception and mental illness; cosmology, the seasons and eclipses; thunder, clouds, and the magnet; the emergence and evolution of animal and vegetable life; contagion, poisoning and plague.

Reintroduced into a Christian culture in which metaphysics and natural philosophy were dominated by a theory of providence and bolstered by Platonic-Aristotelian arguments against materialism, Lucretius’ poem produced both fascination and alarm. The theses that reality consists exclusively of atoms and void, that atomic interactions are purposeless and reflect no plan, that there are no immaterial spirits, and that the gods do not care about humanity and produce no effects in the visible world were purged of some features and variously absorbed and reworked into the so-called ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth century. Thanks in large measure to their compelling presentation in Lucretius’ poem, Epicurean ideas effectively replaced the scholastic-Aristotelian theory of nature formerly dominant in the universities.