as many thunders and lightnings as you please, and you will know what calm[1] and serenity there is in the ruling faculty. But if you have once been defeated and say that you will conquer hereafter, and then say the same again, be assured that you will at last be in so wretched a condition and so weak that you will not even know afterwards that you are doing wrong, but you will even begin to make apologies (defences) for your wrong doing, and then you will confirm the saying of Hesiod[2] to be true,
With constant ills the dilatory strives.
CHAPTER XIX.
against those who embrace philosophical opinions only in words.[3]
The argument called the ruling argument (ὁ κυριεύων λόγος)[4] appears to have been proposed from such principles as these: there is in fact a common contradiction between one another in these three propositions, each two being in contradiction to the third. The propositions are, that every thing past must of necessity be true; that an impossibility does not follow a possibility; and that a thing is possible which neither is nor will be true. Diodorus[5] observing this contradiction employed the probative force of the first two for the demonstration of this proposition, That nothing is possible which is not true and never will
- ↑ 'Consider that every thing is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner, who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, every thing stable, and a waveless pay.' Antoninus, xii. 22.
- ↑ Hesiod, Works and Days, v. 411.
- ↑ Compare Gellius xvii. c. 19.
- ↑ See the long note communicated to Upton by James Harris; and Schweighaeuser's note.
- ↑ Diodorus, surnamed Cronus, lived at Alexandria in the time of Ptolemaeus Soter. He was of the school named the Megaric, and distinguished in dialectic.
