If Acatalepsy[65], the doxy of the Pyrrhonists, has been somewhat more fortunate in one way than her close connection [Sidenote: _The Pyrrhonists: Sextus Empiricus._] the Ataraxia of the Garden, she has paid for that fortune in another. Except in the magnificent poem of Lucretius, we have no complete document of Epicurean philosophy, and there the philosophy is utterly eclipsed, burnt up, washed away, by the blaze and the torrent of the poetry. No such disturbing element enters into the two very businesslike expositions of philosophic doubt which we possess in the _Pyrrhonic Sketches_ and the _Against the Dogmatists_ of Sextus Empiricus.[66] But, if the one writer is almost too much of a poet, the other is very much too little of a prose writer. Scepticism has assuredly no necessary connection with dulness, though it may have a good deal with levity. But Sextus Empiricus is one of the dullest writers of antiquity. There is not a spark, not a glimmer even, in his phrase, which is chiefly made up of the most damnable iteration of technical terms; his arrangement is desultory; and beyond a raking together of all the arguments, good, bad, and indifferent, for general or particular agnosticism, that he has read or can think of, he seems to find it impossible to go. At the same time, modern writers have found by no means a bad subject for such handling in the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the ineptitudes of literary critics: the eighteenth century especially, from the writings of the great Scriblerus to the _Pursuits of Literature_, is full of such things. And if there is little of the kind (for there is something) in Sextus, we may not improperly set it down to the fact that he found little to fasten upon. Footnote 65: The incomprehensibleness of things; the impossibility of certain knowledge. Footnote 66: Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1842. What he gives is contained in three of the four last sections of _Against the Dogmatists_, those dealing with Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Musicians respectively. In the last, which is the shortest, I do not know that the example of childish cavilling quoted by Egger—that a bard was set to look after Clytæmnestra, and Clytæmnestra murdered her husband—is more or less childish than the solemn sophism (not quoted by him) with which the chapter and the book closes, to the effect that as there is no “time”[67] in the wide sense, so there can be no “time”—feet, rhythms, measures—in the narrow. Footnote 67: This is proved in the usual fallacy-fashion: Time must be past, present, or future. Admittedly, neither past nor future time _is_; present time is either divisible or indivisible, to each of which there is an objection. The section on Rhetoric is also short, and turns almost wholly upon the old _aporia_ whether Rhetoric is an art or not, with others of a similar kind.