ious reformer
or an effective prophet: as Sellar has said of him,[543] he had no
sympathy with human activity. His secret, the remedy for all the
world's evil and misery, was only a philosophical creed, which he had
learnt from Epicurus and Democritus. His profound belief in it is one
of the most singular facts in literary history; no man ever put such
poetic passion into a dogma, and no such imperious dogma was ever
built upon a scientific theory of the universe. He seems to have
combined two Italian types of character, which never have been united
before or since,--that of the ecclesiastic, earnest and dogmatic,
seeing human nature from a doctrinal platform, not working and
thinking with it; and secondly the poetic type, of which Dante is the
noblest example, perfectly clear and definite in inward and outward
vision, and illuminating all that it touches with an indescribable
glow of pure poetic imagination.

Lucretius' secret then is knowledge,[544]--not the dilettanteism of
the day, but real scientific knowledge of a single philosophical
attempt to explain the universe,--the atomic theory of the Epicurean
school. Democritus and Epicurus are the only saviours,--of this
Lucretius never had the shadow of a doubt. As the result of this
knowledge, the whole supernatural and spiritual world of fancy
vanishes, together with all futile hopes or fears of a future life.
The gods, if they exist, will cease to be of any importance to
mankind, as having no interest in him, and doing him neither good nor
harm. Chimaeras, portents, ghosts, death, and all that frightens the
ignorant and paralyses their energies, will vanish in the pure light
of this knowledge; man will have nothing to be afraid of but himself.
Nor indeed need he fear himself when he has mastered "the truth." By
that time, as the scales of fear fall from his eyes, his moral balance
will be recovered; the blind man will see. What will he see? What is
the moral standard that will become clear to him, the sanction of
right living that will grip his conscience?

It is simply the conviction that as this life is all we have in past,
present, or future, it _must be used well_. After all then, Lucretius
is reduced to ordinary moral suasion, and finds no new power or
sanction that could keep erring human nature in the right path. And
we must sadly allow that no real moral end is enunciated by him;
his ideal seems to be quietism in this life, and annihilation
afterwards.[54