The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [3]
4. The winds lash our face and frame, unseen, and swamp ships at sea when the waves rage, and rend the clouds,
5. Or, eddying wildly down, strew the plains with broken branches, or scour the mountaintops with forest-rending blasts.
6. The winds are invisible, yet they sweep sea, lands, the clouds along the sky, vexing and whirling all amain;
7. Invisible, yet mighty as the river flood that dashes houses and trees headlong down its raging course,
8. So that even a solid bridge cannot bide the shock when floods overwhelm: the turbulent stream,
9. Strong with a hundred rains, beats round the piers, crashes with havoc, and rolls beneath its waves down-toppled masonry and ponderous stone,
10. Hurling away whatever opposes it. Even so the blasts of the hurricane, like a mighty flood hither or thither driving all before,
11. Or sometimes in their circling vortex seizing and bearing helpless objects in whirlwinds down the world:
12. Yet these invisible winds are real, both in works and ways rivalling mighty rivers whose waters we can see.
Chapter 7
1. Consider, too, we know the varied perfumes of things, yet never see the scent touch our nostrils;
2. With eyes we do not see heat, nor cold, yet we feel them; nor do we see men’s voices, yet we hear them: everything is corporeal,
3. All things are body or arise from it; the real is the corporeal, visible and invisible alike.
4. Raiment, hung by the surf-beaten shore, grows moist; the same, spread before the sun, then dries;
5. No one saw how the moisture sank in, nor how it was lifted by heat. Thus we know that moisture is dispersed in parts too small to see.
6. A ring upon the finger thins away along the under side, with the passing of the years;
7. Raindrops dripping from our roof’s eaves will scoop the stone;
8. The hooked ploughshare, though of iron, wastes insidiously amid the furrows of the fields.
9. We see the rock-paved highways worn by many feet, and the gates’ bronze statues show right hands leaner from the greeting touch of wayfarers.
10. We see how wearing-down diminishes these, but what tiny parts depart, the envious nature of vision bars from our sight.
11. Lastly whatever days and nature add little by little, constraining things to grow in due proportion,
12. No unaided gaze, however keen, sees. No more can we observe what time steals, when things wane with age and decay,
13. Or when salt seas eat away the beetling cliffs. Thus nature by unseen bodies and forces works;
14. Thus the elements and seeds of nature lie far beneath the ordinary gaze of eyes,
15. Needing instead the mind’s gaze, the eye of science and reason’s eye, to penetrate and understand;
16. And at last the instruments that man’s ingenuity has devised, to see and record the minute parts of things,
17. And nature’s ultimates, from which its infinite variety is built.
Chapter 8
1. Bodies are unions of the primal atoms. And these no power can quench; they live by their own powers, and endure.
2. Though it is hard to think that anything is solid; for lightnings pass, like sound, through walls,
3. And iron liquefies in fire, and rocks burn with fierce exhalations in the volcano’s heart, and burst asunder;
4. Rigid gold dissolves in heat; cold bronze melts, conquered by the flame;
5. Warmth and the piercing cold seep through silver, since, with cup in hand, we often feel either, when liquid pours in;
6. It seems that nothing truly solid can be found, other than the world’s foundation of elements.
7. But if nature had given scope for things to be dissolved for ever, no more rejoined or renewed in being,
8. By now all bodies that once existed would be reduced to ultimate parts alone, nothing returned or built from them again.
9. For each thing is quicker marred than made; whatever the long infinitude of days and all fore-passed time dissolved,
10. That same could never refurnish the world, no matter how much time remained.
11. Yet we see things renewed, in their seasons and after their kind: renewed or new made,