By reasonings of mind. Again, without
  That place and room, which we do call the inane,
  Nowhere could bodies then be set, nor go
  Hither or thither at all- as shown before.
  Besides, there's naught of which thou canst declare
  It lives disjoined from body, shut from void-
  A kind of third in nature. For whatever
  Exists must be a somewhat; and the same,
  If tangible, however fight and slight,
  Will yet increase the count of body's sum,
  With its own augmentation big or small;
  But, if intangible and powerless ever
  To keep a thing from passing through itself
  On any side, 'twill be naught else but that
  Which we do call the empty, the inane.
  Again, whate'er exists, as of itself,
  Must either act or suffer action on it.
  Or else be that wherein things move and be:
  Naught, saving body, acts, is acted on;
  Naught but the inane can furnish room. And thus,
  Beside the inane and bodies, is no third
  Nature amid the number of all things-
  Remainder none to fall at any time
  Under our senses, nor be seized and seen
  By any man through reasonings of mind.
  Name o'er creation with what names thou wilt,
  Thou'lt find but properties of those first twain,
  Or see but accidents those twain produce.

    A property is that which not at all
  Can be disjoined and severed from a thing
  Without a fatal dissolution: such,
  Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow
  To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,
  Intangibility to the viewless void.
  But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,
  Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else
  Which come and go whilst Nature stands the same,
  We're wont, and rightly, to call accidents.
  Even time exists not of itself; but sense
  Reads out of things what happened long ago,
  What presses now, and what shall follow after:
  No man, we must admit, feels time itself,
  Disjoined from motion and repose of things.
  Thus, when they say there "is" the ravishment
  Of Princess Helen, "is" the siege and sack
  Of Trojan Town, look out, they force us not
  To admit these acts existent by themselves,
  Merely because those races of mankind
  (Of whom these acts were accidents) long since
  Irrevocable age has borne away:
  For all past actions may be said to be
  But accidents, in one way, of mankind,-
  In other, of some region of the world.
  Add, too, had been no matter, and no room
  Wherein all things go on, the fire of love
  Upblown by that fair form, the glowing coal
  Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast,
  Had ne'er enkindled that renowned strife
  Of savage war, nor had the wooden horse
  Involved in flames old Pergama, by a birth
  At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes.
  And thus thou canst remark that every act
  At bottom exists not of itself, nor is
  As body is, nor has like name with void;
  But rather of sort more fitly to be called
  An accident of body, and of place
  Wherein all things go on.
              CHARACTER OF THE ATOMS

                          Bodies, again,
  Are partly primal germs of things, and partly
  Unions deriving from the primal germs.
  And those which are the primal germs of things
  No power can quench; for in the end they conquer
  By their own solidness; though hard it be
  To think that aught in things has solid frame;
  For lightnings pass, no less than voice and shout,
  Through hedging walls of houses, and the iron
  White-dazzles in the fire, and rocks will burn
  With exhalations fierce and burst asunder.
  Totters the rigid gold dissolved in heat;
  The ice of bronze melts conquered in the flame;
  Warmth and the piercing cold through silver seep,
  Since, with the cups held rightly in the hand,
  We oft feel both, as from above is poured
  The dew of waters between their shining sides:
  So true it is no solid form is found.
  But yet because true reason and nature of things
  Constrain us, come, whilst in few verses now
  I disentangle how there still exist
  Bodies of solid, everlasting frame-
  The seeds of things, the primal germs we teach,
  Whence all creation around us came to be.
  First since we know a twofold nature exists,
  Of things, both twain and utterly unlike-
  Body, and place in which an things go on-
  Then each must be both for and through itself,
  And all unmixed: where'er be empty space,
  There body's not; and so where body bides,