Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/88

 them out to be actually the same, and not merely alike; and that is quite impossible.

Then you have recourse to those natural philosophers who are so greatly ridiculed in the Academy, but whom you will not even now desist from quoting. And you tell us that Democritus says that there are a countless number of worlds, and that there are some which are not only so like one another, but so completely and absolutely equal in every point, that there is no difference whatever between them, and that they are quite innumerable; and so also are men. Then you require that, if the world be so entirely equal to another world that there is absolutely not the slightest difference between them, we should grant to you that in this world of ours also there must be something exactly equal to something else, so that there is no difference whatever or distinction between them. For why, you will say, since there not only can be, but actually are innumerable Quinti Lutatii Catuli formed out of those atoms, from which Democritus affirms that everything is produced, in all the other worlds, which are likewise innumerable,—why may not there be a second Catulus formed in this identical world of ours, since it is of such a size as we see it?

XVIII. First of all I reply, that you are bringing me to the arguments of Democritus, with whom I do not agree. And I will the more readily refute them, on account of that doctrine which is laid down very clearly by the more refined natural philosophers, that everything has its own separate property. For grant that those ancient Servilii who were twins were as much alike as they are said to have been, do you think that that would have made them the same? They were not distinguished from one another out of doors, but they were at home. They were not distinguished from one another by strangers, but they were by their own family. Do we not see that this is frequently the case, that those people whom we should never have expected to be able to know from one another, we do by practice distinguish so easily that they do not appear to be even in the least alike?

Here, however, you may struggle; I will not oppose you. Moreover, I will grant that that very wise man who is the subject of all this discussion, when things like one another come under his notice, in which he has not remarked any ACAD. ETC.