The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T. Cicero, With a Sketch of the Greek Philosophers Mentioned by CiceroCicero, Marcus Tullius
Philosophy
The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T. Cicero, With a Sketch of the Greek Philosophers Mentioned by Cicero
Cicero, Marcus Tullius
Ethics -- Early works to 1800; Happiness -- Early works to 1800
But when practice and skill are added, so that one’s eyes are charmed by a
picture, and one’s ears by songs, who is there who can fail to see what
great power there is in the senses? How many things do painters see in
shadows and in projections which we do not see? How many beauties which
escape us in music are perceived by those who are practised in that kind
of accomplishment? men who, at the first note of the flute-player,
say,—That is the Antiope, or the Andromache, when we have not even a
suspicion of it. There is no need for me to speak of the faculties of
taste or smell; organs in which there is a degree of intelligence, however
faulty it may be. Why should I speak of touch, and of that kind of touch
which philosophers call the inner one, I mean the touch of pleasure or
pain? in which alone the Cyrenaics think that there is any judgment of the
truth, because pleasure or pain are felt. Can any one then say that there
is no difference between a man who is in pain and a man who is in
pleasure? or can any one think that a man who entertains this opinion is
not flagrantly mad?
But such as those things are which we say are perceived by the senses,
such also are those things which are said to be perceived, not by the
senses themselves, but by the senses after a fashion; as these things—that
is white, this is sweet, that is tuneful, this is fragrant, that is rough.
We have these ideas already comprehended by the mind, not by the senses.
Again, this is a house, that is a dog. Then the rest of the series
follows, connecting the more important links; such as these, which
embrace, as it were, the full comprehension of things;—If he is a man, he
is a mortal animal partaking of reason:—from which class of arguments the
notions of things are impressed upon us, without which nothing can be
understood, nor inquired into, nor discussed. But if those notions were
false, (for you seemed to me to translate ἔννοιαι _notions_,) if, I say,
they were false, or impressed, or perceptions of such a kind as not to be
able to be distinguished from false ones; then I should like to know how
we were to use them? and how we were to see what was consistent with each
thing and what was inconsistent with it? Certainly no room at all is here
left for memory, which of all qualities is the one that most completely
contains, not only philosophy, but the whole practice of life, and all the
arts. For what memory can there be of what is false? or what does any one
remember which he does not comprehend and hold in his mind? And what art
can there be except that which consists not of one, nor of two, but of
many perceptions of the mind? and if you take these away, how are you to
distinguish the artist from the ignorant man? For we must not say at
random that this man is an artist, and deny that that man is; but we must
only do so when we see that the one retains the things which he has
perceived and comprehended, and that the other does not. And as some arts
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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