De Communibus Notitiis Adversus Stoicos

Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

LAMPRIAS. It is natural enough, Diadoumenus, that you should not much mind if people think that you philosophize contrary to the common conceptions, since you openly profess also to look down on the senses, from which almost all our conceptions have arisen, since it is their grasp of appearances that gives conceptions their foundation and security. But as for me, I have come to you full of much strange confusion, or so it seems to me, and if you know some argument

or incantation or some other means of consolation, you should lose no time in treating me — that is how thoroughly I have been shaken and unsettled by certain Stoic gentlemen, in other respects the best of men, and, I assure you, my intimates and friends, but who press their case against the Academy far too bitterly and with real hostility. For while they blamed the small things I said, and did so with a kind of grudging respect and gravity — I will not lie, they were not gentle about it —

they accused the older members with real anger, calling them sophists and destroyers of the doctrines of philosophy who walk the straight road [and "common notions"], overturners, and saying many things even more outlandish than this, believing that the Academics have set their whole purpose upon the common conceptions, as though bringing upon them a kind of confusion and redistribution. Then one of them said that it was not by chance but by the providence

of the gods, as he supposed, that Chrysippus came into being after Arcesilaus and before Carneades — of whom the one was the originator of the outrage and lawlessness against ordinary belief, while the other flourished as the ablest of the Academics: so Chrysippus, coming in between them, blocked up Carneades' formidable skill by his replies to Arcesilaus, leaving to sense-perception many defenses, as it were, for a siege, and removing altogether

the confusion regarding preconceptions and conceptions, setting each one right and placing it in its proper place — so that those who afterwards wished to dislodge these matters and force their way through would accomplish nothing, but would be refuted as wrongdoers and sophists. Scorched by such arguments, I need, first thing in the morning, some fire-extinguishing remedy, as it were, to take away this inflammation, this perplexity of the soul, Diadoumenus. Perhaps you have suffered something like many others have. But if the poets

persuade you, when they say that by the providence of the gods ancient Sipylus suffered its overthrow because they were punishing Tantalus, then believe our friends from the Stoa as well, that it was not by chance but by providence that nature produced Chrysippus too, since life needed someone to turn everything upside down and back again: for there has never been anyone by nature better suited to this than he, but, just as Cato used to say

that before that Caesar no one came to the conduct of public affairs sober and in his right mind for the confusion of the state, so it seems to me that this man, with the greatest care and cleverness, overturns and casts down ordinary belief — as even those who exalt him themselves testify in some places, whenever they dispute with him about the Liar paradox. For, my excellent friend, to say that a compound proposition made of contradictories cannot

be false, and then in turn to say that there are some arguments which, having true premises and sound inferences, nevertheless also have true conclusions that are the opposite of one another — what conception of demonstration, or what preconception of proof, does this not overturn? They say that the octopus gnaws away its own tentacles in the season of winter; but the dialectic of Chrysippus, by destroying and cutting away its own most authoritative parts and its very first principles,

has it left any of the other conceptions free from suspicion? For surely it is not possible for the things built upon a foundation to remain firm and stable when the first principles themselves do not remain fixed, but hold such great perplexities and confusions. But just as those who have mud or dust upon their body seem, to one who touches them and gets smeared in turn, not to be the one setting the roughness in motion but rather the one applying it —

so too some people blame the Academics and think they are the cause of the very perplexities of which they show them to be full; since who distorts the common conceptions more than these men do? But if you like, let us leave off accusing them and instead defend ourselves against what they charge us with. LAMPRIAS. I seem to myself, Diadoumenus, to have become today a many-sided and versatile fellow: for a moment ago I came forward humbled and troubled, in need of a defense,

but now I am changing over to the prosecution, and I want to enjoy the pleasure of counterattack, having caught sight of these men refuted on the very same point — namely, that it is they who philosophize contrary to the conceptions and the common preconceptions from which, they say, their school more than any other, as they suppose in the case of certain other things, alone agrees with nature. DIADOUMENUS. Should we, then, proceed first to the common and much-talked-of paradoxes,

which they themselves readily accept as paradoxical and call by that very name — that only they are kings, only they are rich and handsome, and citizens, and judges, and they alone? Or shall we pass these over, if you like, to the marketplace of stale and cold jokes, and instead make our examination of the argument among the matters treated as seriously and practically as possible? LAMPRIAS. I for my part

prefer it that way; for who is not already sated with the refutations that have been made against those other paradoxes? DIADOUMENUS. Then consider this very point first: whether it is in accordance with the common conceptions to agree with nature for those who hold that the things in accordance with nature are indifferent, and who think that neither health nor good condition of body nor beauty nor strength are to be chosen or beneficial or profitable or contributory to the completeness that is in accordance with

nature; nor, on the other hand, that the opposite things — mutilations, pains, disfigurements, diseases — are to be avoided or harmful; things from which, as they themselves say, nature estranges us in some cases and makes us akin in others — even though this itself is quite contrary to the common conception, that nature should make us akin to things that are not advantageous or good, and should estrange us from things that are not bad or harmful; and, what is more important,

that nature makes us akin to and estranged from these things to such a degree that when we fail to obtain the one and fall into the other, it is reasonable for us to remove ourselves from life and renounce our existence. And I think that this too is said contrary to the conception — that nature itself is indifferent, while agreeing with nature is the greatest good. Nor is it refined to follow, nor serious to obey, unless the law and the reason

one is following and obeying are themselves serious and refined — and this point is of lesser importance. But if, as Chrysippus writes in the first book of his work On Exhortation, living happily consists only in living in accordance with virtue, since none of the other things, he says, are anything to us nor contribute to this end, then nature is not merely not indifferent but senseless and deranged, making us akin

to things that are nothing to us; and we too are senseless if we think that happiness consists in agreeing with a nature that leads us toward things that contribute nothing to happiness. And yet what is more in accordance with the common conception than this: just as the things that are choiceworthy are related to what is beneficial, so the things in accordance with nature are related to living in accordance with nature? But they do not speak in this way; rather, positing that living in accordance with

nature is the end, they hold that the things in accordance with nature are indifferent. And no less contrary to the common conception than this is the claim that a sensible and prudent man does not regard equal goods equally, but rather counts some of them as of no account at all, while for the sake of others he would endure and suffer absolutely anything — even though these goods differ from one another in no way, whether in smallness or greatness, but they themselves say the same thing

of both, comparing it to an old woman shaking off death with self-control: for both alike achieve success equally. But because of some things, being splendid and great, men might even die for them, whereas to pride oneself on these other trifling matters is shameful and laughable. And indeed Chrysippus himself says, in his treatise On Zeus and in the third book On the Gods, that "it is chilling and absurd and alien

to praise such things among the consequences of virtue — that a man bravely endured the bite of a fly, and prudently refrained from an old woman near death." Do they not, then, philosophize contrary to the common conception, when they are ashamed to praise the very actions which they themselves admit are no less noble than others? For how can a thing be choiceworthy, or how can it be acceptable, which it is not fitting either to praise or to admire, but which they consider even those who praise or admire it to be absurd and chilling people? And you will find it seem

still more contrary to the common conception, I think, if the wise man, when it comes to the greatest goods, takes no thought either for their absence or for whether they are present to him, but is, in this matter too, just such as he is in the case of indifferent things and in his practical dealings and management of them. For surely all of us who reap the fruit of the bounteous earth think of a thing as choiceworthy, good, and beneficial when its presence brings some benefit and its absence brings

a kind of want and longing; but that for which no one would trouble himself except for play or relaxation, this we call indifferent. For by nothing else do we distinguish the industrious man from the idler who is often busy at his tasks, than by this: that the one labors at things unprofitable and indifferently, while the other labors for the sake of something advantageous and beneficial. But these men, on the contrary: for the wise and prudent man among them, having come to possess many acts of comprehension and memories of acts of comprehension,

considers that he has gained little for himself, and thinks that, having taken no further thought for the rest, he has neither less nor more, remembering that last year he obtained a comprehension of Dio sneezing or Theon playing ball. And yet every act of comprehension in the wise man, and every memory that holds what is secure and certain, is at once knowledge, and a good thing, and a very great one.

Is it, then, likewise true that when health fails, or a sense-organ is ailing, or property is being lost, the wise man is unconcerned and considers none of these things as touching himself — or does he, while sick, pay fees in money to doctors, and for the sake of money sail to Leucon, the ruler in the Bosporus, and travel abroad to Idanthyrsus the Scythian, as Chrysippus says, while as for his senses,

there are some of which, if he lost them, he would not even consent to go on living? How, then, do they not admit that they philosophize contrary to the conceptions, when they busy themselves and take such great pains over indifferent things, while remaining indifferent to great goods whether present or absent? But this too is contrary to the common conceptions: that a human being, when in the presence of the greatest goods, should not rejoice, having come to be free of the greatest evils — and yet this is exactly what

happens to their wise man. For having changed from the extreme of vice to the extreme of virtue, and having at once escaped the most wretched life and acquired the most blessed one, he has no perceptible sign of joy, nor was he elated or moved by so great a change, though he has been delivered from misery and every kind of depravity, and has arrived at a certain secure and stable completeness of goods. Further, it is contrary to the conception

that the greatest of goods should be unshakeable and firm in one's judgments, and yet that the man who is making progress to the highest degree should have no need of this, and should take no thought of it even when it is often present, and should not even stretch out a finger for the sake of this very security and firmness, which they consider a perfect and great good. And it is not only these things that these men say, but also, in addition to them, that "time does not

increase a good by its accumulation, but even if a man becomes prudent in the merest instant of an hour, he will be left behind in nothing as regards happiness by the man who has used virtue for his whole life and lived out his life blessedly in it." Having asserted this so vehemently, they in turn say that "virtue of short duration is of no benefit at all — for what good would it do if prudence should come upon a man who is about to be shipwrecked, or about to be hurled from a cliff, this very instant? Or what good would it do Lichas, as he is being flung by Heracles,

to change from vice to virtue?" These claims, then, are contrary not only to the common conceptions of those who philosophize, but also throw their own private doctrines into confusion, if they think that to acquire virtue for a brief time falls short in nothing from the height of happiness, and yet is at the same time worth nothing at all. And you would not wonder so much at this in their case as at the fact that, when virtue and happiness come to a person, often they think that

the one who has acquired it does not even perceive it, and is unaware of himself — that a moment before he was most wretched and most foolish, and now has become at once prudent and blessed. For it is not merely, they say, that a man possessing prudence fails to be aware that he is prudent, nor to recognize that he has escaped ignorance — as if this were merely a clever paradox — but they go so far, generally speaking, as to make the good itself something inert and dim, if its arrival produces no perception

of itself at all. For, according to them, nothing is by nature imperceptible; indeed Chrysippus expressly says, in his work On the End, that the good is perceptible by sense — or so he believes, and so he tries to prove. It remains, then, that it is by weakness and smallness that it escapes perception, whenever, though present, it goes unrecognized and remains hidden from those who possess it. Further, then, it is absurd that vision, which perceives things faintly white and moderately so,

should fail to detect things extremely white, and that touch, which grasps things gently and mildly warm, should be insensible to things intensely hot; but it is more absurd still if a man, in grasping what is commonly in accordance with nature — such as health and good condition of body — fails to recognize the presence of virtue, which they hold to be in accordance with nature most of all and to the highest degree. For how is it not contrary to the conception

to grasp the difference between health and disease, but not to grasp that between prudence and folly — but rather to suppose that the one who has been freed of disease is present, while remaining ignorant that the one who has acquired prudence has it present within him? And since they hold that men change from the height of moral progress into happiness and virtue, one of two things must necessarily follow: either that moral progress is not vice nor unhappiness, or that virtue does not differ greatly from vice, nor happiness from unhappiness, but

the difference between good things and bad is small and imperceptible — for otherwise men would not fail to notice themselves possessing the one instead of the other. So then, whenever they are willing to abandon none of these conflicting positions but wish to affirm and maintain them all at once — that those who are making progress are foolish and wicked, that those who have become prudent and good are unaware of themselves, and that there is a great difference between prudence and folly —

do they truly seem to you to secure their consistency admirably in their doctrines? And still more so in their actions, whenever, having declared all who are not wise to be equally wicked and unjust and faithless and foolish, they then in turn avoid and loathe some of them, while others they meet and do not even greet — yet to some of these same men they entrust money, hand over positions of authority, and give their daughters in marriage. For all this,

if they say it in jest, let them relax their frowning brows; but if they say it in earnest and as philosophers, it is contrary to the common conceptions to censure and revile all men equally, and yet treat some of them as moderate and others as utterly base — and to be utterly astounded at Chrysippus while laughing at Alexinus, though supposing that the two men are no more or less foolish than one another. "Yes," they say, "but

...just as a man who is a cubit's depth below the surface in the sea drowns no less than one who has sunk five hundred fathoms, so too those who are drawing near to virtue are no less in vice than those far from it; and just as the blind are blind even if they are about to regain their sight a little later, so those who are making progress remain foolish and wicked until they take hold of virtue." That, then, those making progress resemble neither the blind, but rather see less keenly, nor drowning men, but swimmers — and swimmers near a harbor at that — they themselves testify by their actions. For they would not employ advisers and generals and lawgivers as guides for the blind, nor would they emulate the deeds and actions and words and lives of certain men, if they saw everyone alike drowning in folly and wickedness. But leaving this aside,

marvel at these men, if not even from their own examples they can be taught to release those unnoticed sages, failing to understand or perceive that, having stopped drowning, they see the light and, having risen above vice, have caught their breath. Further, it is contrary to common conception that a man who has all good things present to him and lacks nothing for happiness and blessedness should be obliged to remove himself from life;

and still more, that a man for whom there is no good and never will be, but for whom all terrible and grievous and evil things are present and will remain present to the end, should not be obliged to renounce life — unless, by Zeus, some indifferent thing should accrue to him. These, then, are the rules laid down in the Stoa: they lead many of the wise out of life, on the ground that it is better for them, even while happy, to have ceased; and they detain many of the base, as though it were their duty to go on living though wretched. And yet the wise man is prosperous, blessed, entirely happy, secure, and free from danger, while the base and foolish man is, so to speak, so full of evils that there is no longer any room left to put more in; yet nevertheless they think that for these men remaining alive is fitting, and for those men — the wise — departure. "And reasonably so," says Chrysippus, "for life ought not to be measured by goods and evils, but

by what accords with nature and what is contrary to nature." Such is the way men preserve consistency and philosophize in line with the common conceptions! What are you saying? That a man deliberating about life and death need not consider "what evil and what good has been wrought in his halls," nor weigh, as on a scale, what tends toward happiness and unhappiness — the harmful against the beneficial — but must instead reason from things that neither

benefit nor harm, in calculating whether one ought to live or not? Is it not likely, on such premises and starting points, that a man will duly choose the life in which none of the things to be shunned is absent, and shun the life in which all the things to be chosen are present? And yet it is paradoxical, my friend, even to flee from life when one has fallen into no evil; but more paradoxical still, if someone, failing to obtain the

indifferent thing, gives up the good. And this is exactly what these men do, casting away happiness and virtue, which are present to them, in exchange for health and bodily wholeness, which they do not even possess. "There again Zeus, son of Cronus, took away Glaucus' wits, in that he was about to exchange golden armor for bronze, worth a hundred oxen for worth nine." And yet bronze weapons furnished no less use to men in battle than golden ones, whereas bodily comeliness and health provide, for the Stoics,

neither use nor benefit whatever toward happiness; and yet these men trade away health for wisdom. Indeed, they say that it would have been fitting for Heraclitus and Pherecydes, had they been able, to give up virtue and wisdom, so as to be rid of their lice and their dropsy; and that if Circe had poured out two potions, one turning wise men into fools and the other turning fools into wise donkeys,

Odysseus should not have drunk the potion of folly rather than change his outward form into that of a beast, so long as he kept his wisdom and, with wisdom, obviously, his happiness. And they say that Wisdom herself urges and exhorts this: "Let me go, and disdain me as I perish and am destroyed into the face of an ass." But surely, someone will say, this is the wisdom of an ass, this wisdom that gives such instructions,

if being wise and being happy is a good, while carrying about the face of an ass is a matter of indifference. They say there is a nation of Ethiopians among whom a dog is king, is addressed as king, and holds the privileges and honors of a king, while the men do what belongs to the leaders and rulers of cities. Is it not the same, then, among the Stoics — the name and outward form of the good belong

to virtue, and virtue alone they call choiceworthy, beneficial, and advantageous, and yet they act, philosophize, live, and die as though under orders from the indifferents? And yet no Ethiopian kills that dog of theirs; rather it sits in solemn state, receiving worship. But these men destroy and corrupt their own virtue, clinging instead to health and freedom from pain. It seems we are relieved

of saying anything more on this subject by the very capstone Chrysippus himself has set upon his own doctrines. For since in nature some things are good, some bad, and some in between, called indifferent, there is no human being who does not wish to have the good rather than the indifferent, and the indifferent rather than the bad. Why, we even make the gods

our witnesses of this, asking of them in our prayers, above all, the possession of goods, or, failing that, escape from evils — wishing to have the thing that is neither good nor bad not in place of the good, but in place of the bad. But he who reverses nature and overturns this order transfers the middle thing from its middle position to the last place, and the

last thing he raises back up and resettles in the middle position — like a tyrant giving the evils the seat of honor — legislating that one should pursue the good first, the bad second, and reckon last and worst the thing that is neither good nor bad: as if someone were to set the things of Hades after the things of heaven, and thrust the earth and the region around it down into Tartarus, far

away, where the deepest pit lies beneath the ground. So, having said in the third book On Nature that "it is profitable to live foolishly rather than not to live at all, even if one is never going to become wise," he adds, word for word: "such are the goods that belong to men that in a sense even the evils among the rest take precedence over living; yet it is not these that take precedence, but rather the reasoning by which one is to live

that is more incumbent on us, even if we are to be foolish." It is clear, then, that even if we are unjust, and lawless, and hateful to the gods, and wretched, none of this is absent from those who live foolishly. Is it, then, incumbent on us to be wretched rather than not wretched, to be harmed rather than not harmed, to act unjustly rather than not act unjustly, and to break the law rather than not break it? That is to say, is it incumbent on us to do the things that are not incumbent, and

to live in a manner contrary to duty? "Yes, for it is worse to be irrational and without perception than to be foolish" — well then, what has come over them, that they do not admit to be an evil that which is worse than an evil? Why do they declare only folly a thing to be avoided, if it is no less, but even more, incumbent to avoid the disposition that does not even admit of folly? But what

fault could one find with this, remembering what Chrysippus has written in the second book On Nature, declaring that vice has come into being not uselessly, in relation to the whole? It is worth taking up the doctrine in his own words, so that you may also learn just how the men who accuse Xenocrates and Speusippus for not regarding health as indifferent, nor wealth as unprofitable, themselves in what position they place vice,

and what arguments they set forth about it. "Vice, in relation to the other collateral phenomena, has its own rationale; for it too comes about in a certain way according to the reasoned order of nature, and, so to speak, does not arise uselessly with respect to the whole; for otherwise the good itself would not exist." Then there is no good among the gods, since there is no evil either; nor, when Zeus,

having consumed all matter into himself, becomes one and does away with all other distinctions, is there any good then either, since no evil at all is present. But while there is such a thing as the concord of a chorus with no one singing out of tune in it, and the health of a body with no part diseased, virtue does not come into being apart from vice; rather, just as for some medicinal powers snake venom and hyena's gall are necessary,

so too there is a peculiar fitness between Meletus's wickedness and Socrates's justice, and between Cleon's boorishness and Pericles's nobility of character. How, indeed, could Zeus have contrived to beget Heracles and Lycurgus, if he had not also begotten for us Sardanapalus and Phalaris? It is time to tell them that consumption too came into being for man in relation to good bodily condition, and gout in relation to swiftness of foot, and that

Achilles would not have had flowing hair, had Thersites not been bald. For how do those who prattle and drivel such nonsense differ from those who say that intemperance came into being, not uselessly, in relation to self-control, and injustice in relation to justice? So that we should pray the gods that there always be wickedness, and lies, and wheedling speech, and a thievish character — on the ground that, were these removed, virtue too would vanish outright and perish along with them.

Or would you like to hear the most delightful specimen of his cleverness and persuasiveness? "For just as comedies," he says, "contain ridiculous lines, which in themselves are poor but add a certain charm to the poem as a whole, so too you might find fault with vice taken by itself; but toward the whole it is not without use." In the first place, then, the claim that vice has come into being in accordance with the

providence of god — just as the poor line came into being in accordance with the poet's intention — surpasses every conceivable absurdity. For why, then, should the gods any longer be givers of goods rather than of evils? And how, further, is vice still hateful to the gods and abhorred by them? Or what shall we say against such blasphemies as "god plants the cause in mortals, whenever he wishes to destroy a house utterly," and "who then, of

the gods, brought these two together to fight in strife"? Moreover, the poor line adorns the comedy and contributes to its purpose, since comedy aims at what is ridiculous or pleasing to its audience; but Zeus, ancestral and supreme and guardian of law and, in Pindar's phrase, "best of craftsmen," is surely not fashioning the cosmos as some great, elaborate, many-parted drama, but rather a city common

to gods and men, in which they will share together, in agreement and blessedness, according to justice and virtue. What need, toward this most beautiful and most solemn end, did he have of robbers and murderers and parricides and tyrants? For vice has not come into being as a pleasant and clever episode for the divine, nor has injustice been rubbed into the fabric of things for the sake of wit and laughter and buffoonery, by beings in whom one cannot glimpse, even in a dream, the

celebrated harmony he speaks of. Further, the poor line is only a tiny fraction of the poem and occupies altogether a small space within the comedy; such lines neither proliferate nor destroy and spoil the charm of the parts that seem well composed. But vice has filled up the whole of human affairs, and the whole of life, from its entrance and beginning right to its very last line, is disgraceful, forever stumbling, and

in turmoil, with no part clean or blameless — and is, as they themselves would say, the most shameful and joyless of all dramas. Hence I would gladly ask them for what purpose vice has proved useful to the whole. Surely not in relation to the heavenly and divine, he will say. For it would be absurd if, had vice and greed and lying never come to exist among men, and had we never

driven off and plundered and slandered and murdered one another, the sun would not have kept to its ordered course, nor would the cosmos have had its seasons and the cycles of its times, nor would the earth, holding the middle position of the universe, have furnished the beginnings of winds and rains. It remains, then, that vice has come into being for our benefit, in relation to us and our affairs — and this, perhaps, is what these men mean.

Are we, then, healthier for being bad? Or are we better supplied with necessities? Has vice proved useful for our beauty, or for our strength? They say not. And if virtue is "only a name and a night-visioned semblance" belonging to sophists who work in the dark, and does not, like vice, lie open to all as a waking reality plain to everyone, then there will be no share for us in anything good, least of all in virtue, O

gods, for the sake of which we have come into being! Is it not, then, monstrous, that for the farmer and the helmsman and the charioteer the things that are useful are appropriate to, and cooperate toward, their proper end, while that which came into being by god's design for the sake of virtue has destroyed virtue and corrupted it? But perhaps it is already time to turn to another subject and let this one go. Lamprias: By no means, my friend — not for my sake, at least, for I am eager

to learn in just what way these men bring evils in before goods, and vice before virtue. Diadoumenos: Certainly, and it is a question worth asking, my friend, for their stammering on this point is considerable. In the end they say that practical wisdom, being the knowledge of goods and evils, would, if the evils were removed, be done away with entirely as well; and just as, if true things exist, it is impossible that some false things should not also exist,

in a similar way, they think it fitting that, since goods exist, evils too must exist. Lamprias: Well, that point is not badly made; but the other matter, I think, does not escape me either. For I see a difference: what is not true is at once false, but what is not good is not at once evil. Hence between the true and the false there is nothing intermediate, but between the good and the evil there is the indifferent. And there is no

necessity that these coexist with those; it would have sufficed for nature to have the good without needing the evil, and instead to have that which is neither good nor evil. But as to the earlier argument, if anything is said on your side, it should be heard. Diadoumenos: Well, much is said, but for now we must make use of what is essential. In the first place, then, it is foolish to suppose that the coming into being of evils and goods took place for the sake of practical wisdom.

For when goods and evils exist, practical wisdom supervenes upon them, just as medicine supervenes where sick and healthy conditions already underlie it. The good and the evil do not come into existence so that practical wisdom might arise; rather, the capacity by which we judge the good and the evil, once these exist and are established, was named "practical wisdom" — just as sight is the perception of white and black things, which did not come into being so that we might have sight, but rather sight came into being because we needed to judge such things

...having need of sight. Second, whenever these people set the universe ablaze, no evil whatsoever is left, and the whole is at that time wise and prudent; there is, then, wisdom, though no evil exists — so it is not necessary for evil to exist if wisdom is present. And if it is indeed altogether necessary that wisdom be a knowledge of both goods and evils, what is so terrible if, once evils have been removed, there will be no wisdom, but we shall have another virtue in its place — one that is a knowledge not of goods and evils but of goods alone? It is just as if black were entirely destroyed among the colors, and someone then insisted that sight too had been destroyed, on the ground that there could be no perception of white and black things — what is to stop us from saying to him: there is nothing terrible in this, if we no longer have the sort of sight you speak of, but another perception and faculty is present to us in its place, by which we apprehend white and non-white colors?

For my own part, I do not think that taste would perish once bitter things had failed, nor touch once pain had been removed, nor wisdom once evil were no longer present; rather, those senses would remain, apprehending sweet and pleasant things and things not of that kind, and this wisdom would remain a knowledge of goods and non-goods. But those who do not think so may keep the name and leave the reality to us. Apart from this, what was to prevent there being a conception of evil while there was actual existence only of the good? Just as, I think, the gods too have the presence of health but only a conception of fever and pleurisy. Since we ourselves, though evils are present to all in abundance and no good is present, as these men say, have not been deprived of the very act of conceiving of the good, of happiness.

And it is astonishing, too, if — while virtue is not present — there are those who teach what sort of thing it is and produce a grasp of it, yet, vice not having come into being, it would not have been possible to acquire a conception of it. See what sort of things those who philosophize by way of common conceptions persuade us of: that we grasp wisdom by means of folly, while wisdom apart from folly is by nature able to grasp neither itself nor folly. But if indeed nature absolutely needed the generation of evil, surely one example of vice would have sufficed, or a second; or if you like, ten bad men, or a thousand, or ten thousand needed to come to be — and not such a mass of vice that its multitude is not sand or dust,

"or the plumage of the many-voiced birds, so great a number could you pour out" — while of virtue there is not even a dream of an example. The men in charge of the public messes at Sparta bring in two or three helots deliberately gorged with unmixed wine and made drunk, and display them publicly to the young, to show what drunkenness is like, so that they may guard against it and be sober; but in life the greater part of these have become examples of vice — for not a single man is sober with regard to virtue, but we all wander about, behaving disgracefully and living in misery. So this argument gets us drunk and fills us with such confusion and derangement that we come to resemble in nothing those dogs of which Aesop speaks, which, when some hides were floating by, longed for them and rushed to drink up the sea, but burst before they could seize the hides. For in just this way the argument, while we hope through it to attain happiness

and to arrive at virtue, has corrupted and destroyed us before we could reach it, having first gorged us with much unmixed and bitter vice — if indeed, as these men say, not even for those who make progress to the highest point is there any lightening or relief or breathing-space from folly and misery. So the man who says that vice has not come into being uselessly — see again what sort of thing, what sort of possession, he shows it to be for those who have it, writing in his work On Right Actions that "the base man needs nothing, has need of nothing; nothing is useful to him, nothing his own, nothing fitting."

How, then, is vice of any use, when along with it not even health is useful, nor abundance of wealth, nor moral progress? "But one does not need those things," they say — "the preferred and acceptable things, and, by Zeus, the useful ones, and those in accordance with nature, as they themselves call them; for none of these does one have need, unless one becomes wise. So the base man does not even have need of becoming wise. Nor do men thirst or hunger before becoming wise: so thirsty men have no need of water, nor hungry men of bread." "You are like gentle strangers, in want only of shelter and fire" — did this man have no need of lodging? Nor did the man who said,

"Give a cloak to Hipponax, for I am terribly cold," have need of a cloak? But do you wish to say something paradoxical and extraordinary and peculiar to yourselves? Say that the wise man has need of nothing and lacks nothing — that man is blessed, that man is free of want, that man is self-sufficient, happy, perfect. But as things now stand, what is this dizzying confusion, that the man who lacks nothing should need the goods he already has, while the base man, lacking many things, should need none of them? For this is what Chrysippus says: that "the base do not need but do lack," shuffling the common conceptions this way and that like pieces on a board. For all men consider needing to come before lacking, holding that the man who is in want of things not ready to hand nor easily procured is the one who lacks. No one, at any rate, is deficient in horns or wings, because he has no need of these; but

we say men are deficient in weapons and money and clothing, when, being in need of them, they fail to obtain or do not have them. But these men are so eager always to appear to be saying something contrary to the common conceptions, that they often depart even from their own positions out of a desire for novelty of speech, as here. Consider a little further back, taking yourself up to it. One of the things said contrary to the common conceptions is that "no base man is benefited" —

and yet many, while being educated, make progress; and slaves are set free; and the besieged are saved; and the sick are cured by being purged and led by the hand and treated. "But they are not benefited in obtaining these things, nor do they experience anything, nor do they have benefactors, nor do they neglect their benefactors" — so then the base are not ungrateful either, nor indeed are the sensible; ingratitude, then, does not exist. For some do not defraud people of gratitude, since they receive it; others

are simply not naturally disposed to receive gratitude. See now what they say in reply to this: that "gratitude extends to intermediate things, and while benefiting and being benefited belong to the wise, even the base obtain gratitude." Then do those who have a share in gratitude have no share in benefit? And where gratitude extends, is nothing there useful or fitting? What else makes a service a favor, except that the one who provides it proves useful in some respect to the one in need?

But let us leave these matters aside. What is this highly prized "benefit" which they guard as something great and exclusive to the wise, not even leaving its name to those who are not wise? If one wise man anywhere in the world extends his finger sensibly, all the wise men throughout the inhabited world are benefited. This is the

work of "benefit" among them; to this the virtues of the wise, in their common benefits, come to an end. Aristotle talked nonsense, Xenocrates talked nonsense, in declaring that men are benefited by the gods, benefited by their parents, benefited by their teachers — being ignorant of that marvelous benefit whereby the wise are benefited by one another's motions in accordance with virtue, even if they are not together and do not happen to know of one another. And yet all men

suppose that selections and observances and management of affairs are useful and beneficial precisely when they are useful and beneficial, and hold them to be so on that basis; and a moneyed man buys keys and guards storehouses, opening with his hand the most delightful chamber of wealth — but to select things that are useful for nothing, and to guard them carefully and laboriously, is not dignified or admirable but actually ridiculous. So if Odysseus,

having learned that knot from Circe, had used it to bind up not the gifts of Alcinous — tripods and cauldrons and garments and gold — but instead some rubbish and stones, and had regarded the trouble of gathering, acquiring, and guarding such things as a task productive of happiness and blessedness, who would have envied this senseless foresight and vain-glorious diligence? And yet

this is precisely what is noble and dignified and blessed in the Stoic creed — nothing else but the selection and safekeeping of useless and indifferent things; for such are the things in accordance with nature, and the external things still more so — seeing that they compare the greatest wealth to fringed garments and gold chamber-pots and, by Zeus, oil-flasks, whenever it happens to suit them. Then, like men who, having seemed to insult and abuse arrogantly the shrines of some gods or spirits, repent at once and grovel and sit humbly, praising and magnifying the divine,

so these men, falling by a kind of retribution into the consequence of this great boasting and empty talk, find themselves once more caught up in these very "indifferent" things that mean nothing to them, crying loudly that there is one single good and noble and dignified thing — the selection of these and the management concerning them — and

that for those who fail to obtain them it is not worth living, but they should cut their own throats or starve themselves, having bidden virtue a long farewell. So they themselves regard Theognis as utterly ignoble and petty for saying that one fleeing poverty should throw oneself into the monster-filled sea, and down from sheer cliffs, Cyrnus — thus showing cowardice before poverty, which is supposedly "indifferent"; and yet they themselves, in plain prose, urge and

say the very same things: that one fleeing a great disease and severe, unrelenting pain should, if no sword or hemlock is at hand, throw oneself into the sea and hurl oneself down from cliffs — though neither of these things is harmful or bad or disadvantageous, nor does it make those who fall into it unhappy. "Where then," one of them asks, "am I to begin? And what starting-point and material for virtue am I to take, if I abandon nature and

what accords with nature?" But where, my good sir, do Aristotle and Theophrastus begin? What starting-points do Xenocrates and Polemo take? Did not Zeno himself follow these men, who laid down as the elements of happiness nature and what accords with nature? But they remained faithful to these as things choiceworthy and good and beneficial, and, having added virtue acting upon them and dealing fittingly with each, they thought that out of these

they completed and brought to fulfillment a perfect and whole life, rendering an agreement truly suited and harmonious with nature. For they were not troubled, like men who leap up from the earth and are borne back down onto it again, calling the same things at once acceptable but not choiceworthy, one's own but not good, unbeneficial yet useful, and nothing to us yet the starting-points of our proper duties —

nor did they, once naming things thus, contradict themselves: rather, such as their reasoning was, such too was the life of those men, their deeds furnishing things consonant and in tune with their words. But the choice of these men here is like the woman in Archilochus, who carried water in one guile-scheming hand and fire in the other: by their deeds and actions they cling to nature as choiceworthy and good, but by their names and words they reject and abuse the very things in accordance with nature as indifferent and useless and irrelevant to happiness.

Since, moreover, all men universally conceive of the good, taken as a whole, as something to rejoice in, to be prayed for, fortunate, of the greatest worth, self-sufficient, free of want — see, setting this alongside what these men call good, whether it makes one rejoice to extend one's finger sensibly. Well then?

Is torture, sensibly endured, something to be prayed for? Does the man who hurls himself off a cliff for good reason do so fortunately? Does that have the greatest worth which reason often chooses in preference to giving up what is not good? And is that complete and self-sufficient, in the presence of which, should they fail to obtain the indifferent things, men neither endure nor wish to go on living? But there has arisen another doctrine, by which ordinary usage has been still further violated: one which

steals away and tears out, like children, the genuine conceptions, and thrusts in their place other, bastard ones, monstrous and strange, compelling us to rear and cherish these instead of the true ones — and this in matters concerning goods and evils, things to be chosen and things to be avoided, what is one's own and what is alien, matters which ought to have a clarity even more evident than that of hot and cold, white and black, since

the latter are impressions coming from outside, incidental to the senses, whereas the former have their origin innately, growing out of the goods within us. But these men, as though hurling themselves, together with dialectic, into the "Liar" or the "Master Argument," have plunged into the subject of happiness and resolved not a single ambiguity in it, but have created countless new ones. And indeed that of two goods, one being an end and the other a means to the end,

the end is greater and more perfect, is unknown to no one. Chrysippus too recognizes the distinction, as is clear in the third book On Goods; for he disagrees with those who hold knowledge to be an end, and lays it down, in his work On Justice, that if one supposes pleasure to be the end, he does not think justice can be preserved;

but if it is not an end but simply a good, he thinks it can. I do not suppose you need me now to recite the actual wording, for the third book On Justice can be obtained from anywhere. So whenever, my friend, they again say that no good is greater than any other good, nor lesser, but that what is not an end is equal to the end, they are found to be at odds not only with the common conceptions but

with their own arguments as well. And again, if of two evils, one is such that we become worse when it is present, while the other harms without making us worse, it is contrary to the common conception not to call that a greater evil under which we become worse when it is present, than that which harms without making us worse — nor to call the harm that renders us worse a lesser harm.

Yet Chrysippus himself admits that there are certain fears and griefs and deceptions which harm us but do not make us worse. Consult the first book of his treatise Against Plato, On Justice; for other reasons too it is worth examining the man's resourceful hair-splitting there, which spares nothing at all, of matters and doctrines alike, whether one's own or another's. It is contrary to the common conception

that two ends and goals should be set before life, and that not everything we do should have its reference to some one thing; and it is even more contrary to the common conception that one thing should be the end, while each of our actions is referred to something else. Of these two alternatives they are compelled to accept one or the other. For if the primary things in accordance with nature are not themselves good, then...

...and the reasonable selection and acquisition of them, and the doing of everything in one's power for the sake of obtaining the primary things according to nature — to that end all actions must be referred: the obtaining of the primary things according to nature. For if they suppose that those who neither aim at nor desire the attainment of those things nonetheless have the end, but that what must be referred to those things is rather the selection of them and not the things themselves — since the end, they say, is to select and take those things prudently, while the things themselves, and the attaining of them, is not the end, but underlies it like a kind of matter possessing selective value (for this, I think, is what they mean, both in the term they use and in what they write, to mark the distinction).

Lamprias: You have recalled both what they say and how they say it, like a man. Diadoumenos: Now observe that they suffer the very thing that happens to those who desire to jump over their own shadow: they do not leave the absurdity behind but carry it along with their argument, removing it ever further from our conceptions. For just as, if someone said of an archer that he does not do everything in his power for the sake of hitting the mark, but rather for the sake of doing everything in his power, this would seem to be uttering riddles and monstrosities,

so too these wretched triflers, in their insistence, would seem to be concluding that the end is not the attaining of things according to nature by aiming at them, but rather the taking, the selecting — as though the desire and pursuit of health did not, for each person, terminate in being healthy, but on the contrary being healthy were itself referred to the desire and pursuit of it — so that, by Zeus, they make their walks, their exclamations, their incisions, and their carefully-reasoned medications the ends of health, and not health the end of these. In doing so they talk as absurdly as the man who said, "Let us dine, so that we may sacrifice, so that we may bathe."

Except that such a man merely alters and disturbs some customary and established order, whereas what these men say involves the complete overturning and confusion of the facts: "We do not take a timely walk for the sake of digesting our food, but digest our food for the sake of taking a timely walk" — as if nature had made health for the sake of hellebore, and not hellebore for the sake of health! What else is left to them, in their excess of paradox-mongering, but to babble such nonsense? How does this differ from saying that health came to be for the sake of medicines, and not the medicines for the sake of health — the very move made by one who holds the selection concerning medicines, their composition and use, to be more choiceworthy than health itself, considering health not choiceworthy at all, but placing the end in the business concerned with those medicines, and declaring the end to be the end of the striving, not the striving's end to be the attainment?

"For indeed," they will say, "to the striving belongs the quality of being reasonable and prudent." Quite so, we shall answer — provided it regards as its end the attainment and acquisition of what it pursues; but if not, its reasonableness is taken away from it, since it does everything for the sake of attaining something whose attainment is neither solemn nor blessed. Since we have arrived at this point in the argument, what would you say is more contrary to our common conception than this: that, without having grasped or possessed any conception of the good, one nevertheless desires and pursues the good? For you see that Chrysippus too drives Ariston all the more into this very difficulty, arguing that the facts do not allow us to conceive of an indifference toward what is neither good nor bad unless the good and the bad have first been conceived; for in that case the indifference would appear to presuppose itself — since it is impossible to grasp a notion of it without the good having first been conceived, and yet nothing else but the indifference itself is, on their view, the good.

Come now, consider also this: the Stoa, in denying this thing called indifference — and calling it instead "agreement" — see how, and from where, it has managed to have itself conceived as good. For if it is impossible to conceive of indifference toward what is not good apart from the good, still less does prudence regarding goods yield any conception of itself to those who have not first conceived the good. But just as no notion arises of an art concerned with healthful and harmful things for those to whom no prior notion of those very things has arisen, so too it is impossible to form a conception of the science of goods and evils without having first conceived goods and evils themselves. Lamprias: What, then, is the good? Diadoumenos: Nothing but prudence. Lamprias: And what is prudence? Diadoumenos: Nothing but the knowledge of goods. Lamprias: Then their argument has arrived at quite a "Zeus's Corinth" indeed.

As for the turning of the pestle, let it pass, lest you think I am mocking — and yet their argument has truly been seized by a condition much like that image. For it appears that, in order to conceive the good itself, one must first conceive prudence, while prudence in turn is sought within the conception of the good — so that, being forced always to pursue the one before grasping the other, they fall short of both, since what must be conceived prior to each requires the other, which cannot be conceived apart from it. Diadoumenos: And there is another way, too, in which one might show that their reasoning is not merely a distortion but a complete inversion — a total diversion leading to the understanding of nothing whatsoever. They posit that the substance of the good is the reasonable selection of things according to nature; but a selection is not reasonable unless it is made with reference to some end, as has already been said. What, then, is this end? Nothing else, they say, than reasoning well in the selection of things according to nature.

So, in the first place, the conception of the good has slipped away and vanished entirely: for reasoning well in one's selections is presumably a byproduct arising from the disposition of good reasoning; and since we are forced to conceive this disposition by reference to the end, while the end cannot be conceived apart from this disposition, we fall short of conceiving either of them. Then — and this is more serious — by the most just reckoning, the reasonable selection ought to be a selection of things good, beneficial, and cooperative toward the end: for how can it be reasonable to select things that are neither advantageous, nor valuable, nor choiceworthy at all? But let it be, as they themselves say, a reasonable selection of things possessing value with a view to happiness — observe, then, to what a splendid and solemn conclusion their argument comes.

For the end, it seems, on their view, is to reason well in the selection of things possessing value with a view to reasoning well. Lamprias: But to one who merely hears the words put this way, my friend, what is being said appears terribly strange; I still need to learn how this comes about. Diadoumenos: Then you must pay closer attention, for grasping this riddle is no task for just anyone. Listen, then, and answer. Is it not their view that the end is to reason well in the selections of things according to nature? Lamprias: So they say. Diadoumenos: And do they select the things according to nature as goods, or as possessing certain values or advantages tending toward the end, or toward something else that exists? Lamprias: I do not think so — rather, toward the end.

Diadoumenos: Now then, having uncovered it, see what follows for them: that the end is to reason well in the selection of things possessing value with a view to reasoning well. For these men neither have nor conceive any other substance of the good and of happiness than this highly prized "good reasoning" concerning the selection of things possessing value. But there are those who think this criticism applies to Antipater, and not to the school's fundamental position: for Antipater, hard pressed by Carneades, sank into these subtle evasions.

As for their philosophizing about love within the Stoa, contrary to the common conceptions, the absurdity is shared by all of them alike. "The young," they say, "are ugly so long as they are base and foolish, but beautiful once they become wise; yet none of those who are beautiful is either loved or worthy of love." And this is not yet the outrageous part: they also say that "those who have fallen in love with the ugly cease to love them once they become beautiful" — and who recognizes a love of this sort, one that arises and persists together with a vice of the soul when the body's condition is bad, yet is quenched and withers away just when prudence, justice, and temperance come to be present? Such men, I think, differ in no way from gnats, who delight in filth and vinegar, yet fly off and flee from wholesome and good wine.

And as for the "radiance of beauty" which they speak of and name as what draws love to itself, in the first place it lacks plausibility: for there could be no radiance of beauty in what is most ugly and most base, if indeed, as they say, vice of character infects and pollutes the outward form. Then, too, it is entirely contrary to common conception that the ugly should be worthy of love because he is going to have beauty someday and it is expected of him — yet once he has acquired it, and has become beautiful and good, he is loved by no one. Lamprias: For love, they say, is a kind of hunt for an imperfect but naturally gifted youth, aiming at virtue. Diadoumenos: Then, my excellent friend, are we doing anything now but refuting their fundamental position, since it distorts and does violence to our common conceptions with arguments that are neither plausible nor expressed in familiar terms?

For who was there to prevent them from calling the wise man's zeal for the young — if no passion attends it — a "hunt," or a "love of boys"? But "love" ought to be the name for that which all human beings alike conceive and name: such as, "all men prayed to lie beside her," and, "never yet has such desire for goddess or woman so overwhelmed and mastered the heart within my breast."

By casting the ethical branch of philosophy into such matters — tortuous and unsound through and through — they trivialize and tear apart everything around them, as though they alone were setting nature and custom aright in the way one must, and establishing reason correctly: reason, which at once turns us away from and draws us toward, in our desires, pursuits, and impulses, what is proper to each of us. But their habitual practice of dialectic, having become a mere sieve, has reaped from it nothing wholesome or sound, but, like a diseased sense of hearing, has been filled with empty noises, with deafness and obscurity — a matter about which, if you wish, we shall converse again another time, taking a fresh starting point. For now, let us run quickly through their physical doctrine, in its most authoritative and fundamental points, which disturbs the common preconceptions no less than their doctrine of ends does.

In general it is absurd, and contrary to common conception, that something should both be and not be — that it should exist, and yet not exist; but most absurd of all is what they say concerning the universe. For having set an infinite void outside the world, they say that the universe is neither body nor incorporeal. And it follows from this that the universe is not a being at all: for they call only bodies existent, since to exist is to act and be acted upon, while the universe is not a being — so that the universe will neither act nor be acted upon in any way.

Nor, further, will it be in any place: for what occupies a place is presumably a body, and the universe is not a body, so that the universe is nowhere. And yet that which happens to occupy the same place is precisely what is "at rest"; so the universe does not remain at rest either, since it occupies no place. But neither does it move — first, because what moves needs a place and an underlying space; and further, because what moves is by nature either self-moved or acted upon by something else. Now what is moved by itself has certain inclinations of its own, tendencies according to weight or lightness; and lightness and weight are, in every case, either conditions, or powers, or differentiae of body — but the universe is not a body.

So the universe must be neither heavy nor light, nor possess within itself any source of motion. But surely it will not be moved by something else either, for there is nothing else besides the universe. So they are forced to say precisely what they do say: that the universe is neither at rest nor in motion. And in general, since to call the universe a body is, on their own view, improper — while heaven and earth, animals and plants, men and stones, are bodies — the not-being will have bodies as its parts, the parts of what does not exist will themselves be existent things, and the not-heavy will make use of heavy and light parts while itself being not-light: things which not even dreams could conceive, let alone hold consistent with the common conceptions.

And yet nothing is so self-evident, and so bound up with the common conceptions, as this: that whatever is not ensouled is soulless, and again, whatever is not soulless is ensouled; and this self-evident truth, too, they overturn, when they agree that the universe is neither ensouled nor soulless. Apart from these points, no one conceives of the universe as incomplete, seeing that no part of it is missing; yet these men say the universe is not complete either — for the complete is something definite, while the universe, owing to its infinity, is indefinite. Is there then, on their view, something that is neither incomplete nor complete? But surely the universe is not a part either, for nothing is greater than it — nor is it a whole, as they themselves say: for "whole" is predicated of what is ordered, while the universe, owing to its infinity, is both indefinite and disordered.

A cause, then, it is not: not of the universe is there anything else, since there is nothing besides the universe, nor is the universe the cause of anything else — nor even of itself, for it is not by nature capable of acting, and it is by acting that a cause is recognized. Come, then: suppose all human beings were asked what they conceive by "nothing," and what notion they form of it — would they not say that it is that which has no cause and is the cause of nothing; that is neither whole nor part; neither complete nor incomplete; neither ensouled nor soulless; neither moving nor at rest anywhere; that neither exists, nor is body, nor incorporeal? This, and nothing else, is what "nothing" is.

So then, whenever the rest of mankind predicate all these things of nothing, these men alone predicate them of the universe — and thus they appear, it seems, to be making the universe identical with nothing. There is no further need, then, to speak of time, of predicate, of proposition, of the conditional, of the conjunctive statement — things which they, more than any other philosophers, make the greatest use of, and yet say do not exist as beings. And yet is it not true that what is real need not exist or subsist at all, but can be apprehended and be a trustworthy object of cognition to one who has no share whatever in the substance of being? How, then, has this not surpassed every kind of absurdity?

But — lest these points seem to belong more to the domain of logic — let us take hold of the more properly physical difficulties. Since, then, "Zeus is the beginning, Zeus the middle, and from Zeus all things have been made," as they themselves say, then above all it was necessary that our conceptions concerning the gods, if any confusion or wandering has crept into them,

...healing them and directing them toward the best; but if not, then that each people be simply left, as it stands, under the sway of its own law and custom regarding the divine. For these beliefs are not of today or yesterday, but have always existed, and no one knows from what source they first appeared. But those who, as though beginning from the very hearth, set about disturbing what is established and the ancestral belief about the gods have left, one may fairly say, no sound and unimpaired conception whatsoever.

For what other man is there, or has there ever been, who does not think the divine to be indestructible and eternal? Or what, among the common preconceptions about the gods, has been more universally proclaimed than sayings such as: "the blessed gods take their delight all their days," and "of the immortal gods and of men who walk the earth..." and "for those gods are free from sickness and old age and untouched by toil, having escaped the deep-roaring stream of Acheron"? One might perhaps find barbarian and savage peoples who have no conception of god at all, but no human being has ever existed who, while conceiving of a god, conceived him as neither indestructible nor eternal. At any rate those called atheists — the Theodoruses, the Diagorases, the Hippos — did not dare say that the divine is perishable; rather, they simply did not believe that anything indestructible exists, without thereby abandoning the notion of the indestructible as such while withholding the preconception of god.

But Chrysippus and Cleanthes, having filled — one might almost say — heaven, earth, air, and sea with gods by their reasoning, have left not one of all these as indestructible or eternal, except Zeus alone, into whom they make all the others dissolve away; so that even he has no advantage over them in the matter of destroying rather than being destroyed. For it is a form of weakness both when a thing is destroyed by changing into something else, and when a thing is preserved only by feeding on other things as they are destroyed into it. And these are not conclusions we draw, as with many other absurdities of theirs, merely from their premises by following out their doctrines — no, they themselves, shouting it aloud in their own treatises on the Gods, on Providence, on Fate, and on Nature, say explicitly that all the other gods have come into being and will be destroyed by fire, being, according to them, fusible like figures of wax or tin.

It is therefore contrary to the common conception — on a par with saying that a man is immortal — to say that a god is mortal; or rather, I do not see what difference there will be left between god and man, if god too is a rational and destructible living being. Or if, in turn, they set up this clever and elegant distinction — that man is mortal, but god is not mortal, only destructible — look what follows for them: either they will have to say that god is at once immortal and destructible, or that he is neither mortal nor immortal. And there is no way, even for people deliberately inventing paradoxes, to surpass this absurdity — I mean other people; since for these men nothing among the most absurd things has been left unsaid or untried.

Further, Cleanthes, straining to defend the conflagration, says that the moon and the rest of the stars make the sun assimilate everything to itself and change it into itself. But if the stars, being gods, cooperate toward their own destruction — cooperating with the sun, contributing something to the general conflagration — it would be a great absurdity for us to pray to them for our safety and to regard them as saviors of men, when it is in accordance with their own nature to hasten toward their own destruction and annihilation.

And indeed, they themselves leave nothing undone in their attacks on Epicurus, crying "alas, alas! woe, woe!" as though he were confounding the preconception of the gods by doing away with providence: "for it is preconceived and understood," they say, "that god is not only immortal and blessed, but also benevolent toward mankind, solicitous, and beneficial" — which is true. But if those who do not abandon providence are, on their view, doing away with the preconception about god, what are we to say of those who claim that the gods exercise providence over us but do not benefit us, and are not "givers of good things" but of things indifferent — not giving virtue, but giving wealth, and health, and the begetting of children, and such things, none of which is beneficial or profitable or choiceworthy or advantageous?

Is it not rather that the Epicureans do not abolish the conceptions about the gods, while these men both insult and mock them — calling one a god "Giver of Fruits," another "Giver of Birth," another "Healer," another "Giver of Oracles," when health, and birth, and abundance of fruit are, on their own view, not good things at all, but things indifferent and unprofitable to those who receive them?

The third element, then, of the conception of the gods is that the gods differ from men in nothing so much as in happiness and virtue. But according to Chrysippus not even this is left to them: "for Zeus does not surpass Dion in virtue, and Zeus and Dion, both being wise, are benefited equally by one another whenever the one happens to be in motion while the other..." — for this, they say, is precisely what constitutes the good that passes from gods to men and from men to gods: the motion of a wise man, and nothing else. And they say that a man who falls short of virtue in nothing lacks nothing of happiness either, but that even the unfortunate man is equally blessed with Zeus the Savior — even one who, on account of diseases and bodily mutilations, takes himself out of life by his own hand, provided only that he is wise.

But such a man exists nowhere on earth, nor has he ever existed; while countless myriads of men live in the depths of misery under the very government and rule of Zeus, which is said to administer all things in the best possible way. And yet what could be more contrary to the common conception than that, while Zeus administers in the best possible way, we should fare in the worst possible way? At any rate, if — what it is not even permitted to say — he should wish to be neither Savior, nor Gentle, nor Averter-of-Evil, but the very opposite of these fine titles, there would be nothing left to add to the sum of existing evils, either in number or in magnitude, according to what these men themselves say — since all men already live in the extreme of wretchedness and misery, and evil admits of no further increase, nor unhappiness of any further excess. And yet this is not the most terrible part of it.

Rather, whereas Menander, speaking in the manner of the stage, said, "the greatest source of evils among men is that they chafe at having too much good," and this, they say, is contrary to the common conception — they themselves make god, who is good, the very source of evils. "For matter itself did not furnish evil out of itself," they say, "since it is without quality, and has received all the differentiations it possesses from that which moves and shapes it."

But it is Reason, indwelling in matter, that moves and shapes it, matter itself being by nature incapable of moving or shaping itself. It follows, then, of necessity, that evil, if it comes from nothing, comes from what does not exist; but if it comes through the moving principle, it must exist as having come to be from god. And indeed, if they suppose that Zeus does not have mastery over his own parts, nor employs each of them according to his own reason...

...that too is contrary to the common conception, and amounts to imagining a living creature many of whose parts escape its will, exercising their own private activities and actions, to which the whole gives no impulse and does not initiate the motion. For nothing possessed of soul is so badly put together that, against its will, its feet move forward, or its tongue speaks, or its horn butts, or its teeth bite — and most of these things god would necessarily have to suffer, if the wicked, being parts of him, lie, and act unscrupulously, and break into houses, and murder one another, against his will.

But if, as Chrysippus says, it is not possible for even the smallest of his parts to be disposed otherwise than according to the will of Zeus, but every ensouled thing is by nature so constituted and so moved as he leads it, and he turns it, and he restrains it, and he arranges it — then this doctrine of his own is even more outrageous. For it would be countless times more reasonable that his parts, forced by some weakness and incapacity on the part of Zeus, should do many things contrary to his nature and will, than that there should be neither lack of self-control nor wrongdoing at all, of which Zeus is not the cause.

But indeed, that the universe is a city, and the stars its citizens — and if this is so, then obviously also tribesmen, and magistrates, and the sun a councillor, and the evening star a president or a market-overseer — I do not know whether those who refute such notions do not thereby show themselves more absurd than the very people who propound and assert them.

But among the more "physical" of their doctrines, is it not contrary to the common conception that a seed should be greater and more than what is generated from it? At any rate, we observe that nature, in every kind of animal and plant, both tame and wild, takes as the starting-points for the generation of the greatest things, things that are small, meager, and scarcely visible. For not only does an ear of wheat come from a grain of wheat, or a vine from a single grape-seed, but from the stone of some acorn that a bird has let slip, kindling and fanning its growth, as it were, from some tiny spark, there springs up a shoot of bramble, or oak, or palm, or pine, that grows to an enormous height.

And they say: "the term 'seed' [sperma] is named from the 'sowing' [speirein] of a small mass out of a larger one, while 'nature' [physis] is a kind of inflation [emphysēsis] and diffusion of the rational principles, or numbers, that are being opened up and released by it." But again, in the case of the universe, the fire which they call its seed — after the conflagration — changed the world into seed, from a smaller body and mass, though possessing a great nature and taking in addition, for its growth, an immense region of the void spreading out around it; while, when it is generated once more, its magnitude withdraws and shrinks together again, as matter contracts and gathers itself back into itself in the process of generation.

One can hear them, and meet with many of their writings, disputing against the Academics and crying out that "they confound everything by their doctrine of the 'indistinguishables,' forcing upon two distinct substances a single qualified thing." And yet there is no human being who does not think this way already, and who, on the contrary, would not consider it astonishing and paradoxical if it turned out that, in the whole of time, no dove has ever been indistinguishable from another dove, nor bee from bee, nor grain of wheat from grain of wheat, or, as the saying goes, fig from fig. It is, rather, the things these men themselves say and imagine that are truly contrary to the common conception —

namely, "that upon a single substance two individually qualified things should come to be, and that the same substance, while possessing one particular quality of its own, should, when another quality supervenes upon it, receive that quality too and preserve both alike." For if two, then there will also be three, and four, and five, and as many as one could not even number, subsisting about a single substance — I mean not distributed among different parts, but all of them alike pervading the whole, infinite in number. At any rate Chrysippus says:

"Zeus is like a man, and the universe is like Zeus, while Providence is like the soul; so that, when the conflagration occurs, Zeus, being the only one of the gods who is indestructible, withdraws into Providence, and then, the two having become one, they continue together thereafter within the single substance of the aether." Having, then, now dismissed the gods — and having prayed that they grant us common sense and a common mind — let us see how matters stand for them regarding the elements.

It is contrary to the common conception that body should be the place of another body, and that body should pass through body, with neither containing any void, but the full entering into the full, and receiving what is mixed into it, though it has no interval and no room within itself, owing to its own continuity. But these men do not merely press one thing into another, or two, or three, or ten; rather, once the world has been divided up into all its parts, they throw all of them together into any one thing that happens along, and, while claiming that the smallest perceptible particle will run short when the largest thing enters into it, they play the reckless young hothead — turning their own refutation into a dogma, as in many other cases, since they are forever adopting hypotheses that fight against the common conceptions.

For instance, by this very argument, those who mix whole bodies with whole bodies must accept many monstrous and bizarre consequences. Among these is the claim that "three is four": for other people cite this as an extreme example of the unthinkable, but for these men it actually follows — that when one ladleful of wine is mixed with two ladlefuls of water, if it is not to fall short but to become equal to them, then, by spreading itself throughout and thoroughly commingling, the one that is one becomes two, through the equalizing of the mixture with the two —

for to remain one, and yet to extend over two, and to make itself equal to the double, is absurd. Further, in order that it may, through the mixture, reach as far as the two, it must take on a twofold measure in the diffusion; and this same measure is at once the measure both of three and of four: of three, because to the two, one has been mixed in; of four, because, having been mixed with the two, it has come to possess a quantity equal to that with which it is mixed.

This, then, is the fine result that comes about for them when they throw bodies into bodies — and the very notion of "containing" becomes unthinkable as well. For it is necessary, when things pass into one another through mixing, that it not be the case that the one contains while the other is contained, and that the one receives while the other is received within it — for in that case there would be no blending at all, but only contact and mere touching of surfaces, with the one slipping in beneath and the other containing it from outside, while all the other parts remain unmixed and pure, kept apart from one another.

But it is necessary, if the commingling occurs as they claim, that the things mixed together become, in and among one another, one and the same thing at once — by being contained through being within, and by containing through receiving the other — and yet it is impossible for either of them, again, to be so; and yet both must occur, since the mixture forces its way through both alike, leaving no part of either unfilled, but rather filling everything completely with everything.

At this point, no doubt, comes in — trampling with laughter on their absurdities — the famous "leg" bandied about in the lecture-halls of Arcesilaus. For if blendings occur throughout entire wholes, what prevents — once a leg has been cut off, and has rotted, and been thrown into the sea, and dissolved — not merely the fleet of Antigonus from sailing straight through it, as Arcesilaus used to say, but the twelve hundred ships of Xerxes, together with the three hundred Greek triremes, from fighting a sea-battle all within that leg?

For surely, as it proceeds, the mixture will not run short, nor will it stop or come to a limit while the lesser is contained within the greater; nor will its final extent, wherever it stops, having made contact, fail to pervade the whole — rather, it will refuse to mix any further. But if it is indeed to be mixed throughout the whole, then, by Zeus, the leg will hardly provide the Greeks a place to fight their sea-battle — no, this would require putrefaction and transformation first.

A single ladleful, or even a single drop, falling straight from that spot into the Aegean Sea or the Cretan Sea, will reach all the way to the Ocean and the Atlantic Sea, touching it not merely on the surface, but spreading everywhere through its depth, in breadth and length together. And these very consequences Chrysippus himself accepts, right at the start of the first book of his Physical Questions: "nothing..."

...saying that it lacks nothing—a single drop of wine mixes with the sea." And, so that we should not marvel even at this, he says that "the drop extends its blending through the entire cosmos." I do not know what could be found more absurd than this. Moreover, it is contrary to our common conception that there is, among bodies in nature, neither an extreme, nor a first, nor a last part—nothing at which the magnitude of a body comes to an end,

but that always something appears beyond whatever has been taken, so that the subject casts itself into the infinite and indeterminate. For it will not be possible to conceive one magnitude as greater or less than another, if progression to infinity by parts happens to both alike; rather, the very nature of inequality is abolished. For when unequal things are conceived, the one falls short in its outermost parts while the other exceeds and surpasses it; but if there is no inequality,

it follows that there is neither unevenness nor roughness in a body—for unevenness is the inequality of a single surface relative to itself, and roughness is unevenness combined with hardness. Yet those who carry bodies through to a final part leave out none of this, while those who extend everything to infinity by a multitude of parts abolish it all. And yet how is it not evident that a man is composed of more parts than a man's finger, and again

that the cosmos is composed of more parts than a man? These things everyone understands and thinks—unless they become Stoics; but once they become Stoics they say and hold the opposite, namely that a man is not composed of more parts than a finger, nor the cosmos of more parts than a man, since the division of bodies proceeds to infinity, and among infinities none is greater or less,

nor does any quantity exceed another at all—or else the parts of what remains will stop being divided and yielding any quantity out of themselves. How, then, do they ward off these difficulties? Most resourcefully and boldly indeed. For Chrysippus says: "When we are asked whether we have parts, and how many, and out of what and how many parts each of those is composed, we shall employ a distinction, positing the general answer, that

we are composed of head and chest and legs"—for this was the whole of what was being asked and raised as a puzzle—"but if they press the questioning on to the ultimate parts," he says, "none of these things is to be assumed; rather one must say that we are composed neither out of certain parts, nor out of any number whatsoever, nor out of infinite parts, nor out of finite parts." And I think it worth using his very own words,

so that you may see the manner in which he kept guarding the common conceptions, bidding us to conceive of each of bodies as composed neither out of certain parts, nor out of any number of parts, nor out of infinite parts, nor out of finite parts. For if, just as the indifferent is a mean between good and bad, so too there is something intermediate between the finite and the infinite, he ought to have said what this is and so resolved the difficulty; but if, as

the unequal is at once the not-equal, and the imperishable the not-perishable, so we are to conceive the infinite as the not-finite, then this is, I think, similar to saying that a body is neither out of finite nor out of infinite parts, and that an argument is neither out of true premises nor out of false ones nor out of— . And on top of this, indulging in a bit of youthful bravado, he says: "since a pyramid is composed of triangles, the sides that incline together at

the point of contact are unequal, yet not exceeding one another in that they are greater"—this is how he kept guard over the common conceptions! For if there is something greater that does not exceed, there will be something smaller that does not fall short; so that the unequal neither exceeds nor falls short—that is, the unequal is equal, and the greater is not greater, nor the smaller smaller. Further, then, observe in what manner he met

Democritus, who raised a natural and apt puzzle: if a cone is cut by a plane parallel to the base, what should we think about the surfaces of the sections—are they equal or unequal? For if unequal, they will make the cone uneven, taking on many step-like notches and roughnesses; but if equal, the sections will be equal, and the cone will appear to have the property of a cylinder, being composed of equal

and not unequal circles—which is most absurd. At this point, declaring Democritus ignorant, he says: "the surfaces are neither equal nor unequal, but the bodies are unequal because their surfaces are neither equal nor unequal." To legislate that, the surfaces being neither equal nor unequal, it follows that the bodies are unequal, is to grant oneself a marvelous license to write whatever

comes to mind. For, on the contrary, reason together with plain evidence allows us to conceive that of unequal bodies the surfaces are unequal, and that the surface of the greater is greater—since, unless the excess is to be deprived of surface, the greater must have it. For if the surfaces of the greater bodies do not exceed those of the lesser but instead fall short of them, there will be a part of a body having a limit

that itself has no limit and is unbounded. For if he says that, since the notches he suspects around the cone are being forced upon us in this way, it is the inequality of the bodies—not that of the surfaces—that produces them, that is absurd: to remove the surfaces from consideration and yet leave the unevenness that was being contested still present within the bodies. But even if we stay with his hypothesis, what is more contrary to the common conception than to fabricate such things?

For if we shall posit that one surface is neither equal nor unequal to another surface, then we shall also have to say that one magnitude is neither equal nor unequal to another magnitude, and one number neither equal nor unequal to another number, being some mean between the equal and the unequal that is neither of the two—something they cannot state nor even conceive. Further, if surfaces exist that are neither equal nor unequal, what prevents circles too from being conceived as neither equal

nor unequal? For the very surfaces of the conic sections are of course circles; and if circles, then the diameters of circles too must be posited as neither equal nor unequal; and if this, then angles and triangles and parallelograms and parallelepipeds and solids as well. And indeed, if there are lengths that are neither equal nor unequal to one another, then there will also be weight and impact and bodies of that kind. Then how

do they dare to censure those who introduce voids and certain partless entities that fight against the possibility of either moving or remaining at rest, while they themselves call such assertions false: "if certain things are not equal to one another, those things are unequal to one another," and "these things, while not equal to one another, are not unequal to one another either"? Since he says there is something greater that does not exceed,

it is worth asking whether such things will coincide with one another. For if they will coincide, how is the one greater than the other? And if they will not coincide, how is it not necessary that the one exceed and the other fall short? And yet, for it to have neither—neither to fail to coincide because it is greater, nor to coincide because it is not greater—is impossible for one of the two to hold. For necessity compels those who do not safeguard the common conceptions into just such difficulties as these.

Furthermore, it is contrary to the common conception that nothing touches anything at all; and no less contrary to it is this: that bodies touch one another yet touch nothing. But this latter is what those who leave no least parts of a body are compelled to accept, since they always take some further point beyond what seemed to be the point of contact, and never stop advancing beyond it. Indeed, the very argument that they themselves most often bring against those who champion

partless entities is this: "that there is neither contact of wholes with wholes nor of parts with parts"—for the former produces not contact but blending, and the latter is not possible, since partless things have no parts." How, then, do they not fall into the very same difficulty themselves, since they leave no part that is last or first? Because, by Zeus, they say, "bodies touch at a limit—not as wholes touching wholes, nor as

parts touching parts; and the limit is not itself a body." So then body will touch body by means of something incorporeal; and again it will not touch it, since something incorporeal lies between. But if it does touch, then the body will both act upon and be acted upon by the incorporeal; for it is the nature of bodies to act and be acted upon by one another, and to touch, through mutual contact. And if a body has contact with something incorporeal, it will also have union with it,

and blending, and organic growth. Further, in cases of union and blending, either the limits of the bodies must remain, or they must not remain but be destroyed. Either alternative is contrary to the common conception: for they themselves do not allow that incorporeal things come to be or perish; yet a blending and union of bodies that each retain their own limits could not occur—for the limit defines and fixes

the nature of the body; whereas blendings, unless they are juxtapositions of part alongside part but rather cases where the things mixed pour together whole with whole (as these men say), require us to grant that the limits perish in the mixtures and then come to be again when the bodies separate—and no one could easily conceive of that. But indeed, precisely where bodies touch one another, at that very point they also press and squeeze

and crush one another; and it is not possible for incorporeal things to undergo or produce such effects—indeed it is not even conceivable. Yet this is what they force us to think. For if a sphere touches a plane at a point, clearly it also drags along the point across the plane as it moves; and if it has been smeared with red ochre on its surface, it will leave a red-ochre line upon the plane; and if it has been heated red-hot, it will heat the plane red-hot too. But that a body

should be colored by something incorporeal, or heated by something incorporeal, is contrary to the common conception. And if we imagine an earthenware or crystal sphere borne from a height onto a stone pavement, it would be unreasonable for it not to be shattered, given the impact against a resisting surface; and it is still more absurd that it should be shattered at a limit and point that is incorporeal when it strikes. So that in every way their preconceptions concerning incorporeal things and bodies are thrown into confusion—or rather

utterly destroyed—as they set forth many impossibilities. It is contrary to the common conception to say that there is a time that is future and a time that is past, but that there is no present time; rather, that the recent and the just-now have subsistence, while the now is nothing at all. And yet this is exactly what happens to the Stoics, who leave no least time and yet do not want the now to be partless; instead, whatever one takes and thinks of as present,

they claim that part of it is future and part past, so that nothing at all remains as present, and no portion of time is left over as "now"; rather, of the time said to be present, part is distributed to the future and part to the past. One of two things follows, then: either, by positing "there was time" and "there will be time," they abolish "there is

time"; or else there is a present time, part of which has already begun and part of which will begin, and one must say that of what exists, part is future and part past, and of the now, part is earlier and part later—so that what is now is what is not yet now and what is no longer now, since the past is no longer now, and the future is not yet

now. And necessarily, dividing things this way, they must say that of today part is yesterday and part tomorrow, and of this year part is last year and part next year, and of "at the same time" part is earlier and part later. For they muddle these no less, doing the very same thing with "not yet" and "already" and "no longer" and "now" and

"not now"—whereas all other people posit and conceive and believe that "just now" and "in a little while" are different portions from the now, placing the one after the now and the other before it. Of these, Archedemus, saying that the "now" is a certain starting point and joining-place of the past and the coming time, has, it seems,

without realizing it, abolished time altogether. For if the now is not time but a limit of time, and every portion of time is of the same kind as the now, then the whole of time turns out to have no parts at all, but is resolved entirely into limits and joining-points and impulses. Chrysippus, wishing to be clever about the division, in his work On the Void

and in certain others says that the past and future portions of time do not exist but merely subsist, and that only the present exists; yet in the third and fourth and fifth books On Parts he holds that "of the present time, part is future and part past." So it turns out that he divides what exists, in his own account, into things that do not exist—

or rather, that he leaves nothing at all of time as existing, if the present has no part that is not either future or past. Their conception of time, then, is like grasping at water: the more tightly it is squeezed, the more it runs through and slips away. And their account of actions and motions carries the same utter confusion of plain evidence, for it is necessary, if of the now

part is divided off into the past and part into the future, and of what is in motion at the now part has already moved and part is going to move, that the limit and starting point of motion be abolished, and that of no deed has anything ever been first, nor will anything be last, since deeds are distributed along with time. For just as they say that of the present time part is already past and part is going to be,

so too of what is being done, part has already been done and part will be done. When, then, did eating breakfast, or writing, or walking begin, and when will it end, if everyone who breakfasts has breakfasted and will breakfast, and everyone who walks has walked and will walk? But the most terrible of terrible things, they say, is that if for the one who is alive, having-lived and being-going-to-live both apply, then living has

neither had a beginning nor will have an end; rather each of us, it seems, has come to be without having begun to live, and will die without having ceased. For if there is no last part, but always some part of what is present for the living passes over into the future, then the statement "Socrates will live" never becomes false; rather, for as long as "Socrates is living" is true, for just as long "Socrates has died" is false,

so that, if "Socrates will live" is true in infinitely many parts of time, in no part of time will "Socrates has died" be true. And yet what limit could there be to a deed? Where could that which is being done ever come to an end, if, as many times as "it is being done" is true, just so many times "it will be done" is also true? For the one speaking of Plato as writing and conversing will be lying,

...that Plato will at some time stop conversing, if it is never false to say ‘he will converse’ of one who is conversing, and ‘he will write’ of one who is writing. Furthermore, there is no part of what is coming-to-be that is not either already come-to-be or about-to-come-to-be — that is, either past or future; but there is no perception of what has come to be, of what is past, or of what is future; therefore there is, absolutely, perception of nothing. For we neither see nor hear the past or the future, nor do we get any other perception of things that have happened or are going to happen; so nothing is perceptible, even if something is present, if of the present one part is always still future and another already past, one part already come to be and another still going to come to be.

And yet these same men say that Epicurus does outrageous things and does violence to our common notions, in making bodies move at equal speed and allowing nothing to be swifter than anything else. But far more outrageous than this, and far more removed from our common notions, is the claim that nothing can ever be overtaken by anything else — not even if, as the saying goes, ‘the swift horse of Adrastus should pursue the tortoise from behind.’ Yet this must follow, if things move according to a before and an after, while the distances they traverse are divisible to infinity, as these men maintain. For if the tortoise had only a hundred-foot head start on the horse, those who cut this distance to infinity, while making both move according to a before and an after, will never bring the fastest thing up to the slowest, since the slower always keeps some interval ahead, an interval divisible into infinite intervals.

And how is it not contrary to common notion that water poured out of a bowl or cup should never be entirely poured out — or how does this not follow from what these men say? For no one could conceive of a motion proceeding, according to a before, through things divisible to infinity, as ever completing the whole; rather, since it always leaves some divisible remainder, it will render every pouring-out, every trickling and flowing of liquid, every movement of a solid, and every fall of a released weight, incomplete. I pass over many of their absurdities, touching only on those that run contrary to common notion.

Now the argument concerning growth is an old one; it was posed, as Chrysippus says, by Epicharmus. But when the members of the Academy held that the puzzle was not at all easy or ready-to-hand, these men loudly denounced them on many counts, as though they were doing away with our preconceptions and holding views contrary to our common notions — indeed, as even perverting our very perception. For the argument is a simple one, and these men themselves grant its premises: that all particular substances flow and are in motion, releasing some things from themselves and receiving others that come upon them from elsewhere; and that the things to which additions and subtractions accrue in number or in quantity do not remain the same, but become different through the aforesaid accretions, since their substance undergoes alteration.

And that these changes are called ‘growth’ and ‘decline’ not rightly but by the prevailing force of custom, whereas it would be more fitting to call them ‘comings-to-be’ and ‘perishings,’ because they carry what exists out of its established state into something else; whereas ‘growing’ and ‘diminishing’ are properly affections of a body that underlies and persists.

Now, when these things are said and laid down in this way, what do these self-appointed champions of clarity and canons of common notion go on to demand? That each of us is twin, of double nature, and two-fold — not as the poets made the sons of Molione, joined in some parts and separate in others, but two bodies having the same color, the same shape, the same weight and place, never before seen by any human being; yet these men alone have discerned this compounding, doubling, and ambiguity — that each of us is really two underlying substrata, the one substance and the other quality. The one is ever flowing and in motion, neither growing nor diminishing, nor remaining in any way as it is; the other remains, and grows, and diminishes, and undergoes in every respect the opposite of the first — yet grown together, fitted together, and fused with it, so that it nowhere allows perception to grasp the difference.

And yet the famous Lynceus is said to have seen through rock and through oak; and someone sitting on a watchtower in Sicily could see the Carthaginians’ ships sailing out of harbor, a day and a night’s sail away; and Callicrates and Myrmecides, they say, fashioned chariots covered by the wings of a fly and engraved verses of Homer, in letters, upon a sesame seed — yet this otherness and difference within us no one has ever discerned or distinguished; nor have we ourselves perceived that we have become double, flowing in one part, while in the other remaining the same from birth until death.

I am putting the argument more simply than it stands, since they actually make four substrata for each thing — or rather, four for each one of us; but even the two are enough to show the absurdity, if indeed, when we hear Pentheus in the tragedy saying that he ‘sees two suns, and Thebes doubled,’ we say that he is not seeing but hallucinating, deranged and disturbed in his reasoning — while we do not dismiss these men, who set down not one city but all men, all animals, all trees, all implements, tools, and garments as double and of double nature, as forcing us to be deranged rather than to understand?

Here, then, perhaps they should be forgiven for inventing different natures of underlying things, since no other device seems available to men eager to preserve and safeguard the phenomenon of growth. But in the case of the soul, what has come over them, or what other assumptions are they dressing up, that they manufacture differences and forms of bodies well-nigh infinite in number, one could not say; except that, banishing our common and familiar notions — or rather doing away with and destroying them altogether — they bring in others, strange and alien.

For it is thoroughly absurd, having made the virtues and vices — and besides these all the arts and all the memories, and further the impressions, passions, impulses, and assents — into bodies, then to say that they occupy no place and that there is no room to hold them, but to leave a single point-sized passage in the heart, where they confine the ruling faculty of the soul, occupied by so many bodies that their sheer multitude escapes even those who claim to be quite capable of marking off and distinguishing one from another.

And to make these not merely bodies, but rational living creatures, and a swarm of so many creatures neither friendly nor tame, but a hostile mob arrayed against the vices and possessed of a warlike mind — to declare that each of us is a park, or a pen, or a wooden horse — what could one even think to call these fabrications of theirs? It is a kind of extreme contempt and lawlessness toward what is self-evident and toward ordinary usage.

And they say not only that the virtues and vices are living creatures, nor only that the passions — anger, envy, grief, malicious joy — are, nor only that graspings, impressions, and states of ignorance are, nor that the arts — cobblery, bronze-working — are living creatures; but beyond all this they even make the very activities into bodies and living creatures: walking a living creature, dancing, putting on shoes, addressing someone, abusing someone. And it follows from this that laughter too is a living creature, and weeping; and if these, then also coughing, sneezing, groaning, spitting altogether, and nose-blowing, and the rest — for these consequences are obvious.

And let them not be annoyed at being led to these conclusions by an argument proceeding step by step, remembering that Chrysippus himself, in the first book of his Physical Questions, argues in just this fashion: ‘It is not the case that night is a body while evening and dawn and midnight are not bodies; nor that day is a body while the new moon is not also a body, and the tenth, and the fifteenth, and the thirtieth of the month; the month too is a body, and summer, and autumn, and the year.’

But while these claims do violence to our common preconceptions, the following do violence even to their own private ones: they generate the hottest thing by cooling, and the finest-grained thing by condensation. For the soul, presumably, is the hottest and finest-grained of things; yet they produce it by the cooling and condensation of the body — as though by a kind of tempering — the breath changing from vegetative into psychic. They also say that the sun has come to be ensouled, moisture changing into intelligent fire. It is high time, then, that the sun too should be thought to be generated by cooling! Xenophanes, indeed, when someone told him he had seen eels living in hot water, said, ‘Well then, we shall boil them in cold water.’ The same consequence would follow for them: if they generate the hottest things by cooling and the lightest things by condensation, then, in turn, they should generate cold things by heat, dense things by dispersal, and heavy things by separation — thereby preserving a kind of consistency in their inconsistency.

And do they not also posit the very substance and origin of the ‘notion’ itself contrary to our common notions? For a notion is a kind of impression, and an impression is an imprinting upon the soul; but the soul’s nature is exhalation, which is difficult to imprint at all, owing to its rarity, and which, even if it does receive an imprint, is incapable of retaining it — for its nourishment and its very generation, being from moist matter, involve a continuous inflow and expenditure; and its intermixture with the air through breathing constantly produces a fresh exhalation, one that is displaced and altered by the channel that pours in from outside and again flows out. For one could more readily conceive of a flowing stream of water preserving shapes, imprints, and forms than of a breath moving amid vapors and moist exhalations, continually being mixed from outside with another breath that is, as it were, inert and alien to it.

Yet so thoroughly do they misconstrue their own doctrine that they define notions as certain stored-up conceptions, memories as fixed and retained imprints, and knowledge as something altogether solidified, possessing what is unchanging and secure — and then they go on to posit as the base and seat of these things a substance that is slippery, scattering, ever in motion, and flowing.

As for the notion of an element and a first principle, it is, one might say, innate and common to all human beings, that it should be simple, unmixed, and uncompounded; for what is compounded is not an element or a first principle, but rather the things out of which it is compounded are. And yet these men, in making god, who is a first principle, an intelligent body and an intellect within matter, declare him to be not pure, not simple, not uncompounded, but composed of one thing by means of another; whereas matter, in itself irrational and without quality, possesses simplicity and the character of a first principle. But god, if indeed he is not incorporeal or immaterial, has thereby partaken of matter as a first principle. For if matter and reason are one and the same, they were wrong to represent matter as irrational; but if they are distinct, then god would be a steward of both, and not a simple but a composite thing, having added to his intelligent nature the corporeal element derived from matter.

As for the four bodies — earth, water, air, and fire — which they call the primary elements, I do not know how they make some of them simple and pure and others composite and mixed. For they say that earth and water are, forever, unable to hold either themselves or other things together, but preserve their unity only by a share in pneumatic and fiery power; whereas air and fire, thanks to their inherent tension, are capable of extending both themselves and other things, and, being blended into those other two, supply them with tension, stability, and substantiality.

How, then, is earth or water still an element, if it is neither simple, nor primary, nor sufficient to itself, but forever in need, from outside, of that which holds it together in existence and preserves it? For they have not even left us any conception of their substance; rather, the account, put this way, of some ‘earth in itself’ involves great confusion and obscurity. Then again, how can earth, being earth in itself, need air to constitute and hold it together? But in fact there is no such thing as earth in itself, nor water; rather, air, by gathering matter together and condensing it in one way, made earth, and by dissolving and softening it again in another way, made water. Neither of these, then, is an element, since something else has furnished both of them with their substance and their coming-to-be.

Further, they say that substance and matter underlie the qualities — this being, more or less, how they render the definition — and yet, in turn, they make the qualities themselves substances and bodies. This involves great confusion. For if the qualities have their own proper substance, in virtue of which they are called, and are, bodies, then they have no need of another substance, since they possess their own. But if what underlies them is only this common thing which they call substance and matter, then clearly they merely partake of body — for they are not themselves bodies; and what underlies and receives must necessarily differ from the things it receives and from that in which it underlies.

But they see only half of the picture: they call matter ‘without quality,’ yet they are no longer willing to call the qualities ‘without matter.’ And yet how is it possible to make a body without quality, when they do not conceive of quality without body? For the very argument that binds body to every quality allows the mind to grasp no body except together with some quality. So then, whoever fights against the incorporeality of quality seems bound also to fight against the qualitylessness of matter, or else, by separating the one from the other, to divide both from each other.

And the argument some of them put forward — that they call substance ‘without quality’ not because it is deprived of every quality but because it possesses all qualities — is especially contrary to common notion. For no one conceives of ‘without quality’ as meaning that which possesses no share of quality, nor of ‘unaffected’ as meaning that which is by nature always undergoing every affection, nor of ‘unmoved’ as meaning that which is movable in every way. And this problem remains unresolved, even if matter is always conceived together with quality: that it is still conceived as something other than, and different from, quality.

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