Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze Go off. Those moonèd sands forsake their place; And where they are shall other seas in turn Mow with their sands of whiteness other bays.
How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than these?
What, shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown Back to the unremembered and unknown, And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday-- Burn on forlorn, immortal and alone?
What though there lurks behind yon veil of sky Some fabled Maker, some immortal Spy, Ready to torture each poor thing he made? Thou canst do more than God can. Thou canst die.
Will not the thunders of thy God be dumb When thou art deaf for ever? Can the sum Of all things bruise what is not? Nay, take heart, For where thou go'st thither no God can come.
And no omnipotent wearer of a crown Of righteousness, or fiend with branded frown Swart from the pit, shall break or reach thy rest, Or stir thy temples from the eternal down.
In writing this poem I experienced the full sensation of having become a convert to the Lucretian gospel myself, against which throughout my life it had been my dominant impulse to protest.
There are, doubtless, many others who experience this disconcerting vicissitude--for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is their final condition, they will perhaps deserve commiseration, but they will hardly deserve castigation, for their attitude is one which will bring its own castigation with it. I can only hope that I am entitled to the truly charitable satisfaction of regarding them as a class to which I do not myself belong, and that the literary industry of a life otherwise idle may prove to be a form of action, or rather a reaction, which, alike as to religion and politics, will have not been unserviceable to the world.
To sum the matter up, the Lucretian philosophy of life, appealing as it may to men when in certain moods, is one which, when submitted to what Kant calls the "practical reason," shrivels up into an absurdity, and I have shown at length, in my work _The Reconstruction of Belief_, that this becomes only the more apparent when we consider the attempts which have been made by modern thinkers to vivify it by an idea of which in Lucretius there is no trace. Put into language less imposing than his own, the gospel of Lucretius virtually comes to this, that men may eat and drink and propagate their kind in comfort if only they will hold fast to the belief that men, when they die, slip into their burrows like rabbits, and will, though they have done with pleasure, be out of the reach of pain--that whatever they may have done or not done, they will all, as individuals, be as though they never had been. The only enlargement of this gospel which modern thought can suggest is rooted in a transference of men's serious interests in life from the life of the individual to the life of the community or the race, and in the thought that, though the individual perishes, the race will continue and progress.