Text: John W. Basore, “Poe as an Epicurean,” Modern Language Notes (Baltimore, MD), vol. XXV, March 1910, pp. 86-87

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POE AS AN EPICUREAN.

Since Gassendi and Dalton have made the Democritean theory of the atomic constitution of matter, transmitted by Epicurus, the basis of modern chemical and physical science, Epicurean physics has been rescued somewhat from the ridicule bestowed upon it by contemporary critics and become a heritage of recognized value to later scientific thought. “Res tota ficta pueriliter,” says Cicero, but the ‘picked phrase of Tully's’ contempt the modern must apply with more discrimination. Yet however much Lucretius may win our respect for the theories of Epicurus, which he has so skillfully cast into lucid Latin verse, even a modern may decry his master's ethics and venture a laugh at the Epicurean gods, whose nature the later adherents of the school report either with inconsiderate brevity, or with the ludicrous obscurity of muddled thinking.

In the dialogue of Cicero, “On the Nature of the Gods,” Velleius, the Epicurean, with characteristic assumption essays the theme, in Stoic and Academic company, but fails so utterly to make intelligible or rationally convincing his conception of their atomic constitution, that the passage has passed from his auditors to us as a legacy of bewilderment and irreverent jest “Hoc, per ipsos deos, de quibus loquimur,” cries Cotta, “quale tandem est!”

The life of the listless, shadowy gods of the intermundane spaces, where “neither winds do shake nor clouds drench with rains nor snow congealed by sharp frosts harms with hoary fall,” Lucretius exalts as tbe perfect type of Epicurean άταραξία. Why, with his noble passion for truth established by an appeal to reason and a zeal for science only to make her serve theology, he should have been content merely to dogmatize on the nature of the gods and have left unfulfilled his promise of copious explanation of their subtle material nature, remains a matter of conjecture. Perhaps the task was too difficult to be executed with his characteristic confidence or, perhaps, as suggested by the exceedingly confused ideas of later Epicureans, their master, content with his concession to popular belief which his acknowledgment of their existence implied, left [page 87:] formless and unconvincing his own conception of their bodily nature.

In view of this deficiency, it is interesting to note how Poe, somewhat akin to the frenzied, dream-haunted Lucretius in his morbid vision of the ‘grotesque and arabesque” of life, attempts 4formally to rationalize, incurious consistency With Epicurean theories, the conception of such materialistic quasi-spirits, as it seems the Epicurean gods were. In “Mesmeric Revelation,” Vankirk under the supposed hypnotic influence of his interlocutor has revealed his discovery of au unparticled matter of infinite fineness, which he designates deity. When pressed for a more precise idea of this existence he proceeds : “The matters of which man is cognizant escape the senses in gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether. . . . . When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility. The only consideration which restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution, and here, even, we have to seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. . . . . Take now, a step beyond the luminiferous ether, conceive a matter as much more rare than ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once . . . . at a unique mass — an un particeled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point — there will be a degree of rarity at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of the atomic constitution being now taken away, the nature of the mass inevitably glides into what we conceive as spirit. It is clear, however, that it is as fully matter as before.”

The postulates here of an ontology that included only void and matter, and an ultimate form of matter whose nature was atomic and beyond the ken of the senses are thoroughly Lucretian; likewise Epicurean is the fantastic reasoning for a divine nature that in the end is matter, yet unparticled. [column 2:] particled. Such at least seems the import of a fragment of Philodemus, μητε γαρ ατομους νομιζειν του θεους συγκρισεις, which in the apologetics of the school may count as a defence of the eternity of the gods. One may scarcely venture to theorize upon an explanation of the psychology of Poe, which willy nilly assigns him to the Epicureans, yet when it is remembered that modern materialism leaves no place for deity, what is more likely than that the later author, under the spell of Lueretius, as a curious experiment in the occult and the bizarre, has played at the task which the other, with all his seriousness, left unfinished?

JOHN W. BASORE.

Princeton University.