Lucretius’ argument in briefest form is this: Crimes that disturb society are due to fear—fear of death. This fear grows out of an apprehension of what the gods may do to one’s erring soul. The desire to avoid death and the dreaded hereafter drives men to accumulate wealth and power by evil means. Obviously the way to reach a life of peace, is to believe that death is simple dissolution and that the gods are not concerned in the least about human behavior. The proof that this belief is well founded lies in the atomistic philosophy of Epicurus, which explains the creation of the universe from a concourse of atoms, without divine activity, and considers living things, including man, as atomic, and which interprets human progress not in terms of divine interference but in terms of a theory of the “survival of the fittest.” Such is Lucretius’ argument. It is full of fallacies, as science has always been. Our generation was brought up on Dalton’s solid, immaterial molecule which now seems as antiquated as the Lucretian atom. The Curies shattered that, and we accepted in its place the electron of Rutherford; then five years ago the Quantum theory led to Bohr’s kaleidoscopic atom which has since given way to the new theories of Schrödinger and those who vigorously question the material atom. In 1907 Ostwald called the law of conservation the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century, but by 1924 scientists doubted whether it was a law at all. That has happened in one brief lifetime. We do not ask for finality in science, though like Lucretius the young scientist of each new generation seizes upon the latest hypothesis and assumes it to be true. The theory of electrons, whether right or wrong, seems to some of us to have justified itself not only because of its power to awaken the imagination, but in its capacity as a solvent that could disintegrate preceding dogmatism by seeming to prove itself more efficacious. Such was the beauty which Lucretius discovered in his new-found science. To him personally it meant release, romance, and poetry, and he spent all his energy trying to give to others what he had found. He assures us that his whole being is pierced with a thrill when he lets his mental eye see the vision of creation. Moenia mundi discedunt, totum video per inane geri res. He becomes so absorbed in his work that he sits the night out phrasing what he has beheld, and finally when he drops to sleep his dreams are still of the vision of creation.