This Book is a Compilation of Several Books and Parts of Books:

• On the Nature of Things (Book V) by Lucretius
• On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres by Nicholas Copernicus
• Novum Organum (Book I) by Francis Bacon
• Discourse on Method by René Descartes
• The Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
• Recapitulation and Conclusion (from The Origin of Species) by Charles Darwin
• The Evolution of Life (From Creative Evolution) by Henri Bergson

So little is known about the life of Lucretius beyond his birth and death dates that even scholars, with their zeal for filling in lacunae, can only surmise from some casual phrases that he went insane, that his work was edited by Cicero and that he committed suicide. What remains undisputed is the existence of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Two centuries after the death of Epicurus, the doctrines of Epicureanism, especially those which emphasize the liberation of mankind from superstition and the fear of death, found reaffirmation in Lucretius.

Fundamentally a treatise on science, the first four Books of this poem examine atoms and the void, the soul, sense-perception, psychology and the will. The fifth Book, which is given here in toto, considers the origin of the world, astronomy, a study of species and their development, human institutions, language, art and religion, and is a summary of prevailing scientific concepts just before the begin- ning of the Christian era.

Who is able with powerful genius to frame a poem worthy of the grandeur of the things and these discoveries? Or who is so great a master of words as to be able to devise praises equal to the deserts of him who left to us such prizes won and earned by his own genius? None methinks who is formed of mortal body. For if we must speak as the acknowledged grandeur of the things itself demands, a god he was, a god, most noble Memmius, who first found out that plan of life which is now termed wisdom, and who by trained skill rescued life from such great billows and such thick darkness and moored it in so perfect a calm and in so brilliant a light.

Compare the godlike discoveries of others in old times: Ceres is famed to have pointed out to mortals corn, and Liber the vine-born juice of the grape; though life might well have subsisted without these things, as we are told some nations even now live without them. But a happy life was not possible without a clean breast; wherefore with more reason this man is deemed by us a god, from whom come those sweet solaces of existence which even now are distributed over great nations and gently soothe men’s minds. Then if you shall sup- pose that the deeds of Hercules surpass his, you will be car- ried still farther away from true reason. For what would yon great gaping maw of Nemean lion now harm us and the bristled Arcadian boar?