areless, indolent deities. There is nothing conscious
that survives death, no soul that can exist apart from the fleshly
body.' Such were the doctrines of Epicurus and Lucretius, but to
these human nature opposed 'facts'; we see, people said, men long
dead in our dreams, or even when awake: the Homeric Achilles,
beholding Patroclus in a dream, instantly infers that there verily
_is_ a shadow, an eidolon, a shadowy consciousness, shadowy
presence, which outlasts the death of the body. To this Epicurus
and Lucretius reply, that the belief is caused by fallacious
inferences from facts, these facts, appearances beheld in sleep or
vision, these spectral faces of the long dead, are caused by 'films
peeled off from the surface of objects, which fly to and fro through
the air, and do likewise frighten our minds when they present
themselves to us _awake as well as in sleep_, what time we behold
strange shapes, and "idols" of the light-bereaved,' Lucretius
expressly advances this doctrine of 'films' (an application of the
Democritean theory of perception), 'that we may not believe that
souls break loose from Acheron, or that shades fly about among the
living, or that any part of us is left behind after death'. {341a}
Believers in ghosts must have replied that they do _not_ see, in
sleep or awake, 'films' representing a mouldering corpse, as they
ought to do on the Lucretian hypothesis, but the image, or idolon of
a living face. Plutarch says that if philosophers may laugh, these
long enduring 'films,' from a body perhaps many ages deep in dust,
are laughable. {341b} However Lucretius is so wedded to his 'films'
that he explains a purely fanciful being, like a centaur, by a
fortuitous combination of the film of a man with the film of a
horse. A 'ghost' then, is, to the mind of Lucretius, merely a
casual persistent film of a dead man, composed of atoms very light
which can fly at inconceivable speed, and are not arrested by
material obstacles. By parity of reasoning no doubt, if Pythagoras
is seen at the same moment in Thurii and Metapontum, only a film of
him is beheld at one of these two places. The Democritean theory of
ordinary perception thus becomes the Lucretian theory of dreams and
ghosts. Not that Lucretius denies the existence of a rational soul,
in living men, {341c} a portion of it may even leave the body during
sleep, and only a spark may be left in the embers of the physical
organism. If even that spark wit