Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/521

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466
GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

being of much greater dimensions would regard as small. Nor is anything small in itself, because, what a large being thinks small, will appear large to a very diminutive creature. These may be accepted as illustrations of the manner in which the Sceptics deprived the qualities of things of all objective reality, and made them merely relative, or dependent on the different sentient or intellectual structures of the beings to whom they were presented. What the reality of things was in itself, and out of relation to sentient observers, or whether there was any such in-dependent reality at all, the Sceptic held that all men were for ever debarred from knowing, or from even remotely conjecturing. I may just remind you parenthetically, and in passing, that the division of the qualities of matter into primary and secondary, was devised chiefly as a means of overruling the conclusions of the Sceptics. It was thought that the primary qualities, extension, figure, and solidity, were objective, and belonged to things themselves; while the secondary, such as colour, heat, cold, sound, and so forth, were mere subjective sensations. Opinions, however, have differed as to the value and importance of this distinction. It may be doubted whether it has accomplished the purpose which it had in view.

12. The arguments by which Pyrrho, as expounded by Sextus, enforced the conclusions of Scepticism, were called τρόποι, a word sometimes translated tropes, although that term is more frequently employed to