Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/115

 confine it within such narrow straits, and drive it into the thickets of the Stoics? For if I were arguing with a Peripatetic, who said “that everything could be perceived which was an impression originating in the truth,” and who did not employ that additional clause,—“in such a way as it could not originate in what was false,” I should then deal plainly with a plain man, and should not be very disputatious. And even if, when I said that nothing could be comprehended, he was to say that a wise man was sometimes guided by opinion, I should not contradict him; especially as even Carneades is not very hostile to this idea. As it is, what can I do? For I am asking what there is that can be comprehended; and I am answered, not by Aristotle, or Theophrastus, or even Xenocrates or Polemo, but by one who is of much later date than they,—“A truth of such a nature as what is false cannot be.” I find nothing of the sort. Therefore I will, in truth, assent to what is unknown;—that is to say, I will be guided by opinion. This I am allowed to do both by the Peripatetics and by the Old Academy; but you refuse me such indulgence, and in this refusal Antiochus is the foremost, who has great weight with me, either because I loved the man, as he did me, or because I consider him the most refined and acute of all the philosophers of our age.

And, first of all, I will ask him how it is that he is a follower of that Academy to which he professes to belong? For, to pass over other points, who is there, either of the Old Academy or of the Peripatetics, who has ever made these two assertions which are the subject of discussion,—either that that alone could be perceived which was a truth of such a nature, as what was false could not be; or that a wise man was never guided by opinion? Certainly no one of them ever said so. Neither of these propositions was much maintained before Zeno's time. But I consider both of them true; and I do not say so just to serve the present turn, but it is my honest opinion.

XXXVI. This is what I cannot bear. When you forbid me to assent to what I do not know, and say such a proceeding is most discreditable, and full of rashness,—when you, at the same time, arrogate so much to yourself, as to take upon yourself to explain the whole system of wisdom, to unfold the nature of all things, to form men's manners, to fix the limits of good and evil, to describe men's duties, and also to under-