Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason.  For there is also an anti-theological advocacy, and an odium anti-theologicum.

Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.

The rationalist acts rationally—­that is to say, he does not speak out of his part—­so long as he confines himself to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the odium anti-theologicum, and exclaims with the Pharisees:  “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.”  There is much truth in these words of Soloviev:  “I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the persecution of the faith—­a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that of Nero’s day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies.”

The anti-theological hate, the scientificist—­I do not say scientific—­fury, is manifest.  Consider, not the more detached scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of faith.  Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet of those of Buechner; even Virchow is not free from them.  And others work with more subtilty.  There are people who seem not to be content with not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in it or even should wish that it might exist.  And this attitude is as contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who, though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are unable to believe.  But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of despair, we will speak later on.

And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist.  And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy—­a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.