quidve mali fuerat nobis non esse creatis? an, credo, in tenebris vita ac maerore iacebat, donec diluxit rerum genitalis origo? natus enim debet quicumque est velle manere in vita, donec retinebit blanda voluptas; qui numquam vero vitae gustavit amorem nec fuit in numero, quid obest non esse creatum? Exemplum porro gignundis rebus et ipsa notities hominum dis unde est insita primum, quid vellent facere ut scirent animoque viderent, quove modost umquam vis cognita principiorum, quidque inter sese permutato ordine possent, si non ipsa dedit specimen natura creandi? namque ita multa modis multis primordia rerum ex infinito iam tempore percita plagis ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri omnimodisque coire atque omnia pertemptare, quaecumque inter se possent congressa creare, ut non sit mirum si in talis disposituras deciderunt quoque et in talis venere meatus, qualibus haec rerum geritur nunc summa novando.
Or what evil had there been for us, had we not been made? Was our life presumably wallowing in darkness and grief, until the light of the first creation shone forth? For whoever is born must wish to remain in life, so long as soothing pleasure shall keep him there; but he who has never tasted the love of life, never been enrolled on the lists, how does it hurt him never to have been made? Again, whence was a pattern for making things first implanted in the gods, or even a conception of mankind, so as to know what they wished to make and to see it in the minds eye? Or in what manner was the power of the first-beginnings ever known, and what they could do together by change of order, if nature herself did not provide a model for creation? For so many first-beginnings of things in so many ways, smitten with blows and carried by their own weight from infinite time up to the present, have been accustomed to move and meet together in all manner of ways, and to try all combinations, whatsoever they could produce by coming together, that it is no wonder if they fell also into such arrangements, and came into such movements, as this sum of things now shows in its course of perpetual renovation.
final_alignments\Lucretius_De_Rerum_Natura_Book5.json