Book 10
1.38
When this is clearly understood, it is time to consider generally things which are obscure. To begin with, nothing comes into being out of what is non-existent.This is no innovation of Epicurus but a tenet common to all the pre-Socratics: the One, or Nature as a whole, assumed by the Ionians, is unchangeable in respect of generation and destruction; cf. Aristotle, Met. i. 3. 984 a 31. The pluralists were naturally even more explicit: see the wellknown fragments, Anax. 17 d, Emped. 8 d. Lucretius (i. 180 f.) expands the doctrine. For in that case anything would have arisen out of anything, standing as it would in no need of its proper germs.Cf.§§ 41, 54. Lucr. i. 125 f. is the best commentary.
1.39
And if that which disappears had been destroyed and become non-existent, everything would have perished, that into which the things were dissolved being non-existent. Moreover, the sum total of things was always such as it is now, and such it will ever remain. For there is nothing into which it can change. For outside the sum of things there is nothing which could enter into it and bring about the change.
1.39
Further [this he says also in the Larger Epitome near the beginning and in his First Book On Nature], the whole of being consists of bodies and space.Usener’s insertion of bodies and space comes from § 86;cf.Diels,Dox. Gr. 581. 28. For the existence of bodies is everywhere attested by sense itself, and it is upon sensation that reason must rely when it attempts to infer the unknown from the known.
1.40
And if there were no space (which we call also void and place and intangible nature),Cf. Lucr. i. 426. bodies would have nothing in which to be and through which to move, as they are plainly seen to move. Beyond bodies and space there is nothing which by mental apprehension or on its analogy we can conceive to exist. When we speak of bodies and space, both are regarded as wholes or separate things, not as the properties or accidents of separate things.
