he seems to me to make those points worse which he
endeavours to correct. He believes that atoms, as he calls them, that is
to say bodies which by reason of their solidity are indivisible, are borne
about in an interminable vacuum, destitute of any highest, or lowest, or
middle, or furthest, or nearest boundary, in such a manner that by their
concourse they cohere together; by which cohesion everything which exists
and which is seen is formed. And he thinks that motion of atoms should be
understood never to have had a beginning, but to have subsisted from all
eternity.

But in those matters in which Epicurus follows Democritus, he is usually
not very wrong. Although there are many assertions of each with which I
disagree, and especially with this--that as in the nature of things there
are two points which must be inquired into,--one, what the material out of
which everything is made, is; the other, what the power is which makes
everything,--they discussed only the material, and omitted all
consideration of the efficient power and cause. However, that is a fault
common to both of them; but these blunders which I am going to mention are
Epicurus's own.

For he thinks that those indivisible and solid bodies are borne downwards
by their own weight in a straight line; and that this is the natural
motion of all bodies. After this assertion, that shrewd man,--as it
occurred to him, that if everything were borne downwards in a straight
line, as I have just said, it would be quite impossible for one atom ever
to touch another,--on this account he introduced another purely imaginary
idea, and said that the atoms diverged a little from the straight line,
which is the most impossible thing in the world. And he asserted that it
is in this way that all those embraces, and conjunctions, and unions of
the atoms with one another took place, by which the world was made, and
all the parts of the world, and all that is in the world. And not only is
all this idea perfectly childish, but it fails in effecting its object.
For this very divergence is invented in a most capricious manner, (for he
says that each atom diverges without any cause,) though nothing can be
more discreditable to a natural philosopher than to say that anything
takes place without a cause; and also, without any reason, he deprives
atoms of that motion which is natural to every body of any weight (as he
himself lays it down) which goes downwards from the upper regions; a