Читать книгу On the Nature of Things - Тит Лукреций Кар - Страница 4

     But, now again to weave the tale begun,

     All nature, then, as self-sustained, consists

     Of twain of things: of bodies and of void

     In which they're set, and where they're moved around.

     For common instinct of our race declares

     That body of itself exists: unless

     This primal faith, deep-founded, fail us not,

     Naught will there be whereunto to appeal

     On things occult when seeking aught to prove

     By reasonings of mind. Again, without

     That place and room, which we do call the inane,

     Nowhere could bodies then be set, nor go

     Hither or thither at all—as shown before.

     Besides, there's naught of which thou canst declare

     It lives disjoined from body, shut from void—

     A kind of third in nature. For whatever

     Exists must be a somewhat; and the same,

     If tangible, however fight and slight,

     Will yet increase the count of body's sum,

     With its own augmentation big or small;

     But, if intangible and powerless ever

     To keep a thing from passing through itself

     On any side, 'twill be naught else but that

     Which we do call the empty, the inane.

     Again, whate'er exists, as of itself,

     Must either act or suffer action on it,

     Or else be that wherein things move and be:

     Naught, saving body, acts, is acted on;

     Naught but the inane can furnish room. And thus,

     Beside the inane and bodies, is no third

     Nature amid the number of all things—

     Remainder none to fall at any time

     Under our senses, nor be seized and seen

     By any man through reasonings of mind.

     Name o'er creation with what names thou wilt,

     Thou'lt find but properties of those first twain,

     Or see but accidents those twain produce.

     A property is that which not at all

     Can be disjoined and severed from a thing

     Without a fatal dissolution: such,

     Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow

     To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,

     Intangibility to the viewless void.

     But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,

     Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else

     Which come and go whilst nature stands the same,

     We're wont, and rightly, to call accidents.

     Even time exists not of itself; but sense

     Reads out of things what happened long ago,

     What presses now, and what shall follow after:

     No man, we must admit, feels time itself,

     Disjoined from motion and repose of things.

     Thus, when they say there "is" the ravishment

     Of Princess Helen, "is" the siege and sack

     Of Trojan Town, look out, they force us not

     To admit these acts existent by themselves,

     Merely because those races of mankind

     (Of whom these acts were accidents) long since

     Irrevocable age has borne away:

     For all past actions may be said to be

     But accidents, in one way, of mankind,—

     In other, of some region of the world.

     Add, too, had been no matter, and no room

     Wherein all things go on, the fire of love

     Upblown by that fair form, the glowing coal

     Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast,

     Had ne'er enkindled that renowned strife

     Of savage war, nor had the wooden horse

     Involved in flames old Pergama, by a birth

     At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes.

     And thus thou canst remark that every act

     At bottom exists not of itself, nor is

     As body is, nor has like name with void;

     But rather of sort more fitly to be called

     An accident of body, and of place

     Wherein all things go on.