Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/171

 motion, (for this is the distinction he draws, that this agreeable pleasure is pleasure in motion, but the pleasure of him who is free from pain is a state of pleasure,) then why does he appear to aim at what is impossible, namely, to make any one who knows himself—that is to say, who has any proper comprehension of his own nature and sensations—think freedom from pain, and pleasure, the same thing?

This, O Torquatus, is doing violence to one's senses; it is wresting out of our minds the understanding of words with which we are imbued; for who can avoid seeing that these three states exist in the nature of things: first, the state of being in pleasure; secondly, that of being in pain; thirdly, that of being in such a condition as we are at this moment, and you too, I imagine, that is to say, neither in pleasure nor in pain; in such pleasure, I mean, as a man who is at a banquet, or in such pain as a man who is being tortured. What! do you not see a vast multitude of men who are neither rejoicing nor suffering, but in an intermediate state between these two conditions? No, indeed, said he; I say that all men who are free from pain are in pleasure, and in the greatest pleasure too. Do you, then, say that the man who, not being thirsty himself, mingles some wine for another, and the thirsty man who drinks it when mixed, are both enjoying the same pleasure?

VI. Then, said he, a truce, if you please, to all your questions; and, indeed, I said at the beginning that I would rather have none of them, for I had a provident dread of these captious dialectics. Would you rather, then, said I, that we should argue rhetorically than dialectically? As if, said he, a continuous discourse belonged solely to orators, and not to philosophers also! I will tell you, said I, what Zeno the Stoic said; he said, as Aristotle had said before him, that all speaking was divided into two kinds, and that rhetoric resembled the open palm, dialectics the closed fist, because orators usually spoke in a rather diffuse, and dialecticians in a somewhat compressed style. I will comply, then, with your desires, and will speak, if I can, in an oratorical style, but still with the oratory of the philosophers, and not that which we use in the forum; which is forced at times, when it is speaking so as to suit the multitude, to submit to a very ordinary style. But while Epicurus, O Torquatus, is