The Good Book (2 page)

  2. The fruitful earth, without its seasons of rains and sun, could not bear the produce that makes us glad,

  3. And everything that lives, if deprived of nourishment, could neither survive nor further its kind.

  4. We see that all things have elements in common, as we see letters common to many words.

  5. Why should nature not make men large enough to ford the seas afoot, or tear mountains with their hands,

  6. Or conquer time with great length of days, if it were not that all things are subject to proportion?

  7. We see how far the tilled fields surpass the untilled, returning to the labour of our hands their more abounding crops;

  8. Would we see, without toil of ours, the straight furrow and the tended orchard, fairer forms than ours coming from spontaneous generation? Yes;

  9. For nature likewise is a husbandman, whose ploughshare turns the fertile soil and kneads the mould, quickening life to birth;

10. Nothing comes from nothing; all things have their origins in nature’s laws, and by their edicts reach the shores of light.

Chapter 5

  1. When things fall and decay they return to primal bodies again; nothing perishes to annihilation.

  2. For if time, that wastes with age the works of all the world, destroyed things entirely, how would nature’s generations replenish themselves, kind by kind?  

  3. How might the water-springs of the mountain, and the far-flowing inland rivers, keep the oceans full?

  4. And what feeds the stars? Time and ages must otherwise eat all things away, except that nature’s laws infallibly rule that nothing returns to nothing.

  5. Behold, the rains, streamed down from the sky, sink into the earth; then springs up the shining grain,

  6. And boughs are green amid the trees, and trees themselves are heavy with fruit.

  7. By these gifts of nature mankind and all creatures are fed; so joyful cities thrive with children, and woodlands echo with birdsong;

  8. Cattle, fat and drowsy, lay their bulk in the pastures while their milk flows, and sheep grow their wool on lush hillsides;

  9. Nature offers its bounties; the kind earth gives up its stores; then what is given returns to its source, to prepare bounties anew;

10. Nothing perishes utterly, nor does anything come to birth but through some other thing’s death,

11. For death is nothing but the origin of life, as life is the compensation of death.

Chapter 6

  1. And now, since nature teaches that things cannot be born from nothing,

  2. Nor the same, when born, be recalled to nothingness, do not doubt this truth because our eyes cannot see the minute parts of things.

  3. For mark those bodies which, though known and felt, yet are invisible:

  4. The winds lash our face and frame, unseen, and swamp ships at sea when the waves rage, and rend the clouds,

  5. Or, eddying wildly down, strew the plains with broken branches, or scour the mountaintops with forest-rending blasts.

  6. The winds are invisible, yet they sweep sea, lands, the clouds along the sky, vexing and whirling all amain;

  7. Invisible, yet mighty as the river flood that dashes houses and trees headlong down its raging course,

  8. So that even a solid bridge cannot bide the shock when floods overwhelm: the turbulent stream,

  9. Strong with a hundred rains, beats round the piers, crashes with havoc, and rolls beneath its waves down-toppled masonry and ponderous stone,

10. Hurling away whatever opposes it. Even so the blasts of the hurricane, like a mighty flood hither or thither driving all before,

11. Or sometimes in their circling vortex seizing and bearing helpless objects in whirlwinds down the world:

12. Yet these invisible winds are real, both in works and ways rivalling mighty rivers whose waters we can see.

Chapter 7

  1. Consider, too, we know the varied perfumes of things, yet never see the scent touch our nostrils;

  2. With eyes we do not see heat, nor cold, yet we feel them; nor do we see men’s voices, yet we hear them: everything is corporeal,

  3. All things are body or arise from it; the real is the corporeal, visible and invisible alike.

  4. Raiment, hung by the surf-beaten shore, grows moist; the same, spread before the sun, then dries;

  5. No one saw how the moisture sank in, nor how it was lifted by heat. Thus we know that moisture is dispersed in parts too small to see.

  6. A ring upon the finger thins away along the under side, with the passing of the years;

  7. Raindrops dripping from our roof’s eaves will scoop the stone;

  8. The hooked ploughshare, though of iron, wastes insidiously amid the furrows of the fields.

  9. We see the rock-paved highways worn by many feet, and the gates’ bronze statues show right hands leaner from the greeting touch of wayfarers.

10. We see how wearing-down diminishes these, but what tiny parts depart, the envious nature of vision bars from our sight.

11. Lastly whatever days and nature add little by little, constraining things to grow in due proportion,

12. No unaided gaze, however keen, sees. No more can we observe what time steals, when things wane with age and decay,

13. Or when salt seas eat away the beetling cliffs. Thus nature by unseen bodies and forces works;

14. Thus the elements and seeds of nature lie far beneath the ordinary gaze of eyes,

15. Needing instead the mind’s gaze, the eye of science and reason’s eye, to penetrate and understand;

16. And at last the instruments that man’s ingenuity has devised, to see and record the minute parts of things,

17. And nature’s ultimates, from which its infinite variety is built.

Chapter 8

  1. Bodies are unions of the primal atoms. And these no power can quench; they live by their own powers, and endure.

  2. Though it is hard to think that anything is solid; for lightnings pass, like sound, through walls,

  3. And iron liquefies in fire, and rocks burn with fierce exhalations in the volcano’s heart, and burst asunder;

  4. Rigid gold dissolves in heat; cold bronze melts, conquered by the flame;

  5. Warmth and the piercing cold seep through silver, since, with cup in hand, we often feel either, when liquid pours in;

  6. It seems that nothing truly solid can be found, other than the world’s foundation of elements.

  7. But if nature had given scope for things to be dissolved for ever, no more rejoined or renewed in being,

  8. By now all bodies that once existed would be reduced to ultimate parts alone, nothing returned or built from them again.

  9. For each thing is quicker marred than made; whatever the long infinitude of days and all fore-passed time dissolved,

10. That same could never refurnish the world, no matter how much time remained.

11. Yet we see things renewed, in their seasons and after their kind: renewed or new made, by nature’s laws and necessities;

12. We see how things endure, great crags of basalt and bars of strong iron, demonstrating the foundations of nature’s frame.

13. The entities and forces underlying everything are powerful in their ancient simplicity, knitting and tying all objects.

14. By this they show their strength, binding each other by bonds which our senses do not perceive:

15. A bonding that exists within all parts, in the minima of nature, each thing itself a parcel of another,

16. From which other parts and others similar in order lie, packed in phalanx: the plenitude of body.

17. Whatever has parts, its parts have their bonds, connections and motions, whereby things have being, and continue, decay, and renew.

18. What is less than atoms make atoms; and atoms, molecules; and these in the animate and inanimate make the solid, liquid and gaseous varieties that in their systems and relationships are nature,

19. Forming everything from the animalcule to the host of stars that figure the night with brilliance, vast in time and space.

Chapter 9

  1. The generations of the world and life in the world evolve, one from another, through the vastness of time.

  2. Earths from each sun burst, and second planets issued from the first;

  3. Then the sea at their coeval birth, surge over surge, involved the shoreless earth;

  4. Nursed by warm sunlight in the primeval caves, organic life arose beneath the waves.

  5. First, heat from chemical changes springs, and gives to matter its elliptic wings;

  6. With strong repulsion parts the exploding mass, melts into solids, or kindles into gas.

  7. Attraction next, as earth or air subside, the heavy atoms from the light divide,

  8. Approaching parts with quick embrace combine, swell into spheres, and lengthen to a line.

  9. Last, as fine goads the matter-threads excite, cords grapple cords, and webs with webs unite,

10. And quick contraction with ethereal flame lights into life the atom-woven frame.

11. Hence in biochemical spontaneous birth rose the first specks of animated earth;

12. From nature’s womb the plant or insect swims, and buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.

13. In earth, sea, air, around, below, above, life’s subtle weft in nature’s loom is wove;

14. Points joined to points a living line extends, and touched by light approach the bending ends.

15. Rings join to rings; and outreaching tubes clasp with young lips the nutrient globes or cubes,

16. And urged by new appetencies select, imbibe, retain, digest, secrete, eject.

17. In branching cones the living web expands, organs grow, and life-giving glands;

18. Arterial tubes carry nascent blood, and lengthening veins return the crimson flood;

19. Leaves, lungs and gills the vital ether breathe, on earth’s green surface, or in the waves beneath.

20. So life’s first powers arrest the winds and floods, to bones convert them, or to shells, or woods;

21. Stretch the vast beds of argil, lime and sand, and from diminished oceans form the land.

Chapter 10

  1. Next, nerves unite their long synaptic train, and new sensations wake the early brain;

  2. Through each new sense the keen emotions dart, flush the cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.

  3. From pain and pleasure quick volitions rise, command the limbs and guide enquiring eyes;

  4. With reason’s light new-woken man direct, and right and wrong with balance nice detect.

  5. Last, multiple associations spring, thoughts join to thoughts, feelings to emotions cling;

  6. Whence in long trains of linkage quickly flow imagined joy and voluntary woe.

  7. Organic life beneath the shoreless waves was born and nursed in ocean’s pearly caves;

  8. First forms minute, unseen by microscope, swim the sea, or climb the muddy slope;

  9. These, as successive generations bloom, new powers acquire, and larger forms assume;

10. Whence countless forms of vegetation spring, and breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

11. Thus came our world and life, a natural realm, from nature born, with nature at the helm:

12. By evolution, in the aeons vast, since life first rose, to complex life at last.

Chapter 11

  1. In all species, nature works to renew itself as it works to nourish itself, and to protect itself from danger,

  2. Each by its kind and for its kind, in the great work of continuation that is evolution.

  3. In humankind the work of renewal lies in the work of affection, the bond of one to another made by desire;

  4. Among the objects that nature everywhere offers desire, there is little more worthy of pursuit, little that makes people happier,

  5. Than the enjoyment of another who thinks and feels as oneself,

  6. Who has the same ideas, experiences the same sensations, the same ecstasies,

  7. Who brings affectionate and sensitive arms towards one’s own,

  8. Whose embraces and caresses are followed with the existence of a new being who resembles its progenitors,

  9. And looks for them in the first movements of life to embrace them,

10. Who will be brought up by their side to be loved together, whose happy birth already strengthens the ties that bind its parents together.

11. If there is anyone who could take offence at the praise given to the most noble and universal of passions, let us evoke nature before him, and make it speak.