The early Greek writers naturally struck out toward the great engrossing questions of God and the universe. Here analogy and deduction could get quicker results than induction because the problem lay beyond the reach of direct observation. Furthermore, mathematics could then proceed upon a few seemingly universal maxims that had come to be considered self-evident from ages of human experience. Here all progress happened to lie in the deductive forms of thought. However, when advance stopped in this direction, after making the most rapid progress that the history of science can record, and when _a priori_ ratiocination was found to lead no farther, then the atomists began at the bottom again with minute observation and patient induction. They used a laboratory method, though it was not at first necessary to make an artificial laboratory, since nature had provided one near at hand with untold data still unrecorded. What need was there of planting seeds and observing the laws of creation in a garden-box until nature’s vast gardens had been studied? The method was just as sound and for the time being far more fertile. It was at this point that Lucretius came into the field. Scientific experimentation indeed had already begun at points where nature did not seem to give sufficiently precise results—one recalls Aristarchus and Archimedes—but it had not proceeded far; not however from lack of scientific curiosity, or from failure to appreciate the value of experiments, but because quicker results were still to be had by exploiting nature’s abundant store of data. The appreciation of induction and the employment of the scientific processes by Lucretius must of course not be overstressed. Some of the large gains of formal logic have never been more highly valued than by him. In Epicurus and his predecessors, for instance, the concept of infinity had been arrived at deductively and skilfully employed in order to provide time, space, and material for the evolutionary assumption. Lucretius fully appreciated the value of that concept, realized indeed that the creative process of natural evolution could not for a moment be assumed, for the amazingly intricate Nature which had to be explained, except on the hypothesis of infinity. And infinity was to him not merely a logical necessity, it was a stimulating concept that lifted the imagination of man into the realms of high poetry:[12] For my mind-of-man Now seeks the nature of the vast Beyond There on the other side, the boundless sum Which lies without the ramparts of the world, Toward which the spirit longs to peer afar, Toward which indeed the swift élan of thought Flies unencumbered forth.