But Atomism has not been by any means universally regarded as the most satisfactory conception of the relation between space and matter.
"The Approach to Philosophy"
Ralph Barton Perry
There is a remarkable passage in Lucretius in which Atomism is thus written large and inspired with cosmical eloquence: "For verily not by design did the first-beginnings of things station themselves each in its right place guided by keen intelligence, nor did they bargain sooth to say what motions each should assume, but because many in number and shifting about in many ways throughout the universe, they are driven and tormented by blows during infinite time past, after trying motions and unions of every kind at length they fall into arrangements such as those out of which our sum of things has been formed, and by which too it is preserved through many great years, when once it has been thrown into the appropriate motions, and causes the streams to replenish the greedy sea with copious river waters, and the earth, fostered by the heat of the sun, to renew its produce, and the race of living things to come up and flourish, and the gliding fires of ether to live: all which these several things could in no wise bring to pass, unless a store of matter could rise up from infinite space, out of which store they are wont to make up in due season whatever has been lost."
"The Approach to Philosophy"
Ralph Barton Perry
Literature took up this new and difficult subject, and, as early as the time of Augustus or Tiberius, Manilius, inspired by the sidereal fatalism, endeavored to make poetry of that dry "mathematics," as Lucretius, his forerunner, had done with the Epicurean Atomism.
"The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism"
Franz Cumont
