When Tully's turn to speak came, he rudely disturbed his brother's reliance upon tradition. "I think it not the part of a philosopher to employ witnesses, who are only haply true, often purposely false and deceiving. He ought to show why a thing is so by arguments and reasons, not by events, especially those I cannot credit."[1] "Antiquity," Cicero declared later, "has erred in many respects."[2] The existence of the art of divination in every age and nation had little effect upon him. There is nothing, he asserted, so widespread as ignorance.[3]
Both brothers distinguished divination from the natural sciences and assigned it a place by itself.[4] Quintus said that medical men, pilots and farmers foresee many things, yet their arts are not divination. "Not even Pherecydes, that famous Pythagorean master, who prophesied an earthquake when he saw there was no water in a well usually full, should be regarded as a diviner rather than a physicist."[5] In like manner Tully pointed out that the sick seek a doctor, not a soothsayer, that diviners cannot instruct us in astron-
- ↑ Bk. ii, ch. 11. "Hoc ego philosophi non arbitror, testibus uti, qui aut casu veri aut malitia falsi fictique esse possunt. Argumentis et rationibus oportet quare quidque ita sit docere, non eventis, iis praesertim quibus mihi liceat non credere."
- ↑ Bk. ii, ch. 33. "Errabat enim multis in rebus antiquitas."
- ↑ Bk. ii, ch. 36.
- ↑ As Tully (bk. ii, ch. 5) puts it, "Quae enim praesentiri aut arte aut ratione aut usu aut conjectura possunt, ea non divinis tribuenda putas sed peritis."
- ↑ Bk, i, ch. 50.
inventa est, hac de re communis vita dubitavit; et postea, quam philosophia processit, nemo aliter philosophus sensit, in quo modo esset auctoritas. Dixi de Pythagora, de Democrite, de Socrate; excepi de antiquis praeter Xenophanem neminem; adiunxi veterem academiam, peripateticos, stoicos. Unus dissentit Epicurus." This trust in tradition, it may be here observed, formed one of the chief grounds for mediæval belief in magic as well.
