there is no other method. "From the senses first has proceeded the
knowledge of the true, and the senses cannot be refuted. Shall reason,
founded on false sense, be able to contradict [the senses], wholly
founded as it is on the senses? And if they are not true, then all
reason as well is rendered false." The first principle in nature is
asserted by Lucretius to be that "Nothing is ever gotten out of
nothing." "A thing never returns to nothing, but all things after
disruption go back to the first bodies of matter." If there were not
imperishable seeds of things, atoms, "first-beginnings of solid
singleness," then, Lucretius urges, "infinite time gone by and lapse
of days must have eaten up all things that are of mortal body."

The first-beginnings, or atoms, of things were thought of by Lucretius
as always moving; "there is no lowest point in the sum of the
universe" where they can rest; they meet, clash, rebound, or sometimes
join together into groups of atoms which move about as wholes. Change,
growth, decay, formation, disruption--these are the marks of all
things. "The war of first-beginnings waged from eternity is carried on
with dubious issue: now here, now there, the life-bringing elements of
things get the mastery, and are o'ermastered in turn; with the funeral
wail blends the cry which babies raise when they enter the borders of
light; and no night ever followed day, nor morning night, that heard
not, mingling with the sickly infant's cries, the attendants' wailings
on death and black funeral."

Lucretius pictured the atoms of things as like the things perceived by
the senses; he said that atoms of different kinds have different
shapes, but the number of shapes is finite, because there is a limit
to the number of different things we see, smell, taste, and handle; he
implies, although I do not think he definitely asserts, that all atoms