We may be certain that he was
absolutely convinced of the truth of all he wrote.
So far Lucretius may be called a religious poet, in that with profound
conviction and passionate utterance he denounced the wickedness of
his age, and, like the Hebrew prophets, called on mankind to put away
their false gods and degrading superstitions, and learn the true
secret of guidance in this life. It is only when we come to ask what
that secret was, that we feel that this extraordinary man knew far too
little of ordinary human nature to be either a religious reformer
or an effective prophet: as Sellar has said of him,[543] he had no
sympathy with human activity. His secret, the remedy for all the
world's evil and misery, was only a philosophical creed, which he had
learnt from Epicurus and Democritus. His profound belief in it is one
of the most singular facts in literary history; no man ever put such
poetic passion into a dogma, and no such imperious dogma was ever
built upon a scientific theory of the universe.
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