Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/129

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ACADEMIC QUESTIONS.

the contrary, to those men who say that they do not even understand the name of honour, unless we call that honourable which is accounted reputable by the multitude; that the source of all good is in the body; that this is the law, and rule, and command of nature; and that he who departs from it will never have any object in life to follow. Do you think, then, that I am not moved when I hear these and innumerable other statements of the same kind? I am moved as much as you are, Lucullus; and you need not think me less a man than yourself. The only difference is that you, when you are agitated, acquiesce, assent, and approve; you consider the impression which you have received true, certain, comprehended, perceived, established, firm, and unalterable; and you cannot be moved or driven from it by any means whatever. I think that there is nothing of such a kind that, if I assent to it, I shall not often be assenting to what is false; since there is no distinct line of demarcation between what is true and what is false, especially as the science of dialectics has no power of judging on this subject.

I come now to the third part of philosophy. There is an idea advanced by Protagoras, who thinks that that is true to each individual which seems so to him; and a completely different one put forward by the Cyrenaics, who think that there is no such thing as certain judgment about anything except the inner feelings: and a third, different from either, maintained by Epicurus, who places all judgment in the senses, and in our notions of things, and in pleasure. But Plato considered that the whole judgment of truth, and that truth itself, being abstracted from opinions and from the senses, belonged to the province of thought and of the intellect. Does our friend Antiochus approve of any of these principles? He does not even approve of those who may be called his own ancestors in philosophy: for where does he follow Xenocrates, who has written a great many books on the method of speaking, which are highly esteemed?—or Aristotle himself, than whom there is no more acute or elegant writer? He never goes one step without Chrysippus.

XLVII. Do we then, who are called Academics, misuse the glory of this name? or why are we to be compelled to follow those men who differ from one another? In this very thing, which the dialecticians teach among the elements of their art,