An unsourced Lucretius quote
Hi everyone, my mother is writing a PhD on an unrelated subject discipline - medical stuff - but she has various philosophical wandering in it. Anyway she has a quote:
"The nature of knowledge cannot be understood by the eyes" Lucretius
without a reference. I have looked through the Perseus for On the Nature of Things and oud some likely culprits who may have been casually reworded, but I am really not sure. Any vaguely Lucretian scholars around? I have already tried googling and google books and google scholar. I am lost!
Here were my tenuous findings:
in book 2: So, too, since we behold not all with eyes,
in book 3:
Or, to say that eyes
Themselves can see no thing, but through the same
The mind looks forth, as out of opened doors,
Is- a hard saying; since the feel in eyes
Says the reverse. For this itself draws on
And forces into the pupils of our eyes
Our consciousness. And note the case when often
We lack the power to see refulgent things,
Because our eyes are hampered by their light-
With a mere doorway this would happen not;
For, since it is our very selves that see,
No open portals undertake the toil.
Besides, if eyes of ours but act as doors,
Methinks that, were our sight removed, the mind
Ought then still better to behold a thing-
and book 4:
Now then, learn
How tenuous is the nature of an image.
And in the first place, since primordials be
So far beneath our senses, and much less
E'en than those objects which begin to grow
Too small for eyes to note,
Thanks for any help which you could give.
"The nature of knowledge cannot be understood by the eyes" Lucretius
without a reference. I have looked through the Perseus for On the Nature of Things and oud some likely culprits who may have been casually reworded, but I am really not sure. Any vaguely Lucretian scholars around? I have already tried googling and google books and google scholar. I am lost!
Here were my tenuous findings:
in book 2: So, too, since we behold not all with eyes,
in book 3:
Or, to say that eyes
Themselves can see no thing, but through the same
The mind looks forth, as out of opened doors,
Is- a hard saying; since the feel in eyes
Says the reverse. For this itself draws on
And forces into the pupils of our eyes
Our consciousness. And note the case when often
We lack the power to see refulgent things,
Because our eyes are hampered by their light-
With a mere doorway this would happen not;
For, since it is our very selves that see,
No open portals undertake the toil.
Besides, if eyes of ours but act as doors,
Methinks that, were our sight removed, the mind
Ought then still better to behold a thing-
and book 4:
Now then, learn
How tenuous is the nature of an image.
And in the first place, since primordials be
So far beneath our senses, and much less
E'en than those objects which begin to grow
Too small for eyes to note,
Thanks for any help which you could give.