De Rerum Natura

And eyes, and every sense which pilots life;

And just as hand, or eye, or nose, apart,

Severed from us, can neither feel nor be,

But in the least of time is left to rot,

Thus mind alone can never be, without

The body and the man himself, which seems,

As 'twere the vessel of the same- or aught

Whate'er thou'lt feign as yet more closely joined:

Since body cleaves to mind by surest bonds.

Again, the body's and the mind's live powers

Only in union prosper and enjoy;

For neither can nature of mind, alone of self

Sans body, give the vital motions forth;

Nor, then, can body, wanting soul, endure

And use the senses. Verily, as the eye,

Alone, up-rended from its roots, apart

From all the body, can peer about at naught,

So soul and mind it seems are nothing able,

When by themselves. No marvel, because, commixed

Through veins and inwards, and through bones and thews,

Their elements primordial are confined

By all the body, and own no power free

To bound around through interspaces big,

Thus, shut within these confines, they take on

Motions of sense, which, after death, thrown out

Beyond the body to the winds of air,

Take on they cannot- and on this account,

Because no more in such a way confined.

For air will be a body, be alive,

If in that air the soul can keep itself,

And in that air enclose those motions all

Which in the thews and in the body itself

A while ago 'twas making. So for this,

Again, again, I say confess we must,

That, when the body's wrappings are unwound,

And when the vital breath is forced without,

The soul, the senses of the mind dissolve,-

Since for the twain the cause and ground of life

Is in the fact of their conjoined estate.

Once more, since body's unable to sustain

Division from the soul, without decay

And obscene stench, how canst thou doubt but that

The soul, uprisen from the body's deeps,

Has filtered away, wide-drifted like a smoke,

Or that the changed body crumbling fell

With ruin so entire, because, indeed,

Its deep foundations have been moved from place,

The soul out-filtering even through the frame,

And through the body's every winding way

And orifice? And so by many means

Thou'rt free to learn that nature of the soul

Hath passed in fragments out along the frame,

And that 'twas shivered in the very body

Ere ever it slipped abroad and swam away

Into the winds of air.

For never a man

Dying appears to feel the soul go forth

As one sure whole from all his body at once,

Nor first come up the throat and into mouth;

But feels it failing in a certain spot,

Even as he knows the senses too dissolve

Each in its own location in the frame.

But were this mind of ours immortal mind,

Dying 'twould scarce bewail a dissolution,

But rather the going, the leaving of its coat,

Like to a snake. Wherefore, when once the body

Hath passed away, admit we must that soul,

Shivered in all that body, perished too.

Nay, even when moving in the bounds of life,

Often the soul, now tottering from some cause,

Craves to go out, and from the frame entire

Loosened to be; the countenance becomes

Flaccid, as if the supreme hour were there;

And flabbily collapse the members all

Against the bloodless trunk- the kind of case

We see when we remark in common phrase,

"That man's quite gone," or "fainted dead away";

And where there's now a bustle of alarm,

And all are eager to get some hold upon

The man's last link of life. For then the mind

And all the power of soul are shook so sore,

And these so totter along with all the frame,

That any cause a little stronger might

Dissolve them altogether.- Why, then, doubt

That soul, when once without the body thrust,

There in the open, an enfeebled thing,

Its wrappings stripped away, cannot endure

Not only through no everlasting age,

But even, indeed, through not the least of time?

Then, too, why never is the intellect,

The counselling mind, begotten in the head,

The feet, the hands, instead of cleaving still

To one sole seat, to one fixed haunt, the breast,

If not that fixed places be assigned

For each thing's birth, where each, when 'tis create,

Is able to endure, and that our frames

Have such complex adjustments that no shift

In order of our members may appear?

To that degree effect succeeds to cause,

Nor is the flame once wont to be create