These philosophers attached the highest value to virtue; they rejected all other disciplines except morals; nevertheless, they attributed ultimate authority, above any law, to the decisions of their Sage: they decreed no restraints on pleasure [A] except moderation and the respect for the freedom of others.
Heraclitus and Protagoras noted that wine tastes bitter when you are sick, delightful when you are well, and that an oar looks crooked in the water but straight out of it; from these and similar contradictory appearances they argued that every object contains within itself the causes of such appearances: that there was a bitterness in wine which was related to the taste of the sick man; a quality of bentness in the oar which was related to whoever was looking at it in the water; and so on, for all the rest. That is equivalent to saying that everything is in everything; from which it follows that nothing is in anything: for where everything is, nothing is.417
It was this opinion which reminded me of an experience which we have all had, that once you start digging down into a piece of writing there is simply no slant or meaning – straight, bitter, sweet or bent – which the human mind cannot find there.
Take that clearest, purest and most perfect Word there can ever be: how much falsehood and error have men made it give birth to! Is there any heresy which has not discovered ample evidence there for its foundation and continuance? That is why there is one proof which the founders of such erroneous doctrines will never give up: evidence based upon exegesis of words.
A man of some rank, deeply immersed in the quest for the philosopher’s stone, wanted to justify it to me recently on authority: he cited five or six Biblical texts which he said were the ones he chiefly relied on to salve his conscience (for he is in holy orders). The choice of texts he produced was not only amusing but most applicable to the defence of that egregious science.
That is how divinatory nonsense comes to be believed in. Provided that a writer of almanacs has already gained enough authority for people to bother to read his books, examining his words for implications and shades of meaning, he can be made to say anything whatever – like Sybils. There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind not to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. [C] That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue. All an author needs to do is to attract the concern and attention of posterity. (He may achieve that not so much by merit as by some chance interest in his subject-matter.) Then, whether out of subtlety or stupidity, he can contradict himself or express himself obscurely: no matter! Numerous minds will get out their sieves, sifting and forcing any number of ideas through them, some of them relevant, some off the point, some flat contradictory to his intentions, but all of them doing him honour. He will grow rich out of his students’ resources – like dons being paid their midsummer fees at the Lendit fair.
[A] This has lent value to many a worthless piece, making several books seem valuable by loading on to them anything at all; one and the same work is susceptible to thousands upon thousands of diverse senses and nuances – as many as we like. [C] Is it possible that Homer really wanted to say all that people have made him say,418 and that he really did provide us with so many and so varied figurative meanings that theologians, military leaders, philosophers and all sorts of learned authors (no matter how different or contradictory their treaties) can refer to him and cite his authority as the Master General of all duties, works and craftsmen, the Counsellor General of all enterprises?
[A] Anyone on the lookout for oracles and predictions has found plenty of material there! I have a learned friend who is astonishingly good at producing wonderfully apt passages from Homer in favour of our religion: he cannot be easily prised from the opinion that Homer actually intended them (yet he knows Homer as well as any man alive). [C] And the very things he finds favouring our religion were thought in ancient times to favour theirs.
See how Plato is tossed and turned about. All are honoured to have his support, so they couch him on their own side. They trot him out and slip him into any new opinion which fashion will accept. When matters take a different turn, then they make him disagree with himself. They force him to condemn forms of behaviour which were quite licit in his own century, just because they are illicit in ours. The more powerful and vigorous the mind of his interpreters, the more vigorously and powerfully they do it.
[A] Democritus took the very foundations of Heraclitus – his assertion that things bear within themselves all the features we find in them – and drew the contrary conclusion, namely, that objects have none of the qualities we find in them: from the fact that honey is sweet to some and bitter to others, he concluded that it was neither sweet nor bitter. The Pyrrhonists said that they did not know whether it is sweet or bitter or neither or both, for they always reach the highest summit of doubt.419 [C] The Cyrenaics held that nothing is perceptible which comes from without: the only things perceptible are those which affect us inwardly, such as pain and pleasure. They did not even recognize the existence of tones or colours, but only certain emotional impulses produced by them; on these alone Man must base his judgement: Protagoras thought that whatever appears true is true for the man concerned; the Epicureans place judgement – in the case of both knowledge and pleasure – in the senses. Plato wanted judgements about Truth, and Truth herself, to be independent of opinion and the senses, belonging only to the mind and thought.420
[A] Such discussion has brought me to the point where I must consider the senses: they are the proof as well as the main foundation of our ignorance.
Without a doubt, anything that is known is known by the faculty of the knower; for, since judgement proceeds from the activity of a judge, it is reasonable that he perform that activity by his own means and by his will, not by outside constraint (as would be the case if the essence of an object were such that it forced us to know it). Now knowledge is conveyed through the senses: they are our Masters:
[B] via qua munita fidei
Proxima fert humanum in pectus templaque mentis.
[the highway by which conviction penetrates straight to men’s hearts and to the temple of their minds.]421
[A] Knowledge begins with them and can be reduced to them. After all, we would have no more knowledge than a stone if we did not know that there exist sound, smell, light, taste, measure, weight, softness, hardness, roughness, colour, sheen, breadth, depth. They form the foundations and principles on which our knowledge is built. [C] Indeed, for some thinkers, knowledge is sensation. [A] Anyone who can force me to contradict the evidence of the senses has got me by the throat: he cannot make me retreat any further. The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge.
Invenies primis ab sensibus esse creatam
Notitiam veri, neque sensus posse refelli.
Quid majore fide porro quam sensus haberi
Debet?
[You realize that the conception of truth is produced by the basic senses; the senses cannot be refuted. What should we trust more than our senses, then?]422
Attribute as little to them as you can, but you will have to grant them this: that all the instruction we receive is conveyed by them and through them. Cicero says that when Chrysippus assayed denying their force and power, so many contrary arguments and overwhelming objections occurred to him that he could not answer them. Whereupon Carneades, who maintained the opposite side, boasted of fighting him with his own words and weapons, exclaiming, ‘Wretch! You have been defeated by your own strength!’423
For us there is absolutely nothing more absurd than to say that fire is not hot; that light does not illuminate; that iron has no weight or resistance. Those are notions conveyed to us by our senses. There is no belief or knowledge in man of comparable certainty.
Now, on the subject of the senses, my first point is that I doubt that Man is provided with all the natural senses.424 I note that several creatures live full, complete lives without sight; others, without heari
ng. Who can tell whether we, also, lack one, two, three or more senses? If we do lack any, our reason cannot even discover that we do so. Our senses are privileged to be the ultimate frontiers of our perception: beyond them there is nothing which could serve to reveal the existence of the senses we lack. One sense cannot reveal another:
[B] An poterunt oculos aures reprehendere, an aures
Tactus, an hunc porro tactum sapor arguet oris,
An confutabunt nares, oculive revincent?
[Can the ears correct the eyes; the ears the touch? Can the tastes in our mouths correct the touch? Or will our nostrils and our eyes prove touch to be wrong?]
[A] They all form, each one of them, the ultimate boundary of our faculty of knowledge:
seorsum cuique potestas
Divisa est, sua vis cuique est.
[For each has received its share and power, quite separate from the others.]425
A man born blind cannot be made to understand what it is not to see; he cannot be made to wish he had sight and to regret what he is lacking. (Therefore we ought not to take comfort from our souls’ being happy and satisfied with the senses we do have; if we are deprived and imperfect, our souls have no way of sensing it.) It is impossible to say anything to that blind man by reason, argument or comparison, which will fix in his understanding what light, colour and sight really are. There is nothing beyond the senses which can supply evidence of them. We do find people who are born blind expressing a wish to see: that does not mean that they know what they are asking for. They have learned from us that they lack something which we have, and they wish that they had it; [C] they name it all right, as well as its effects and its consequences; [A] but they do not know what it is, for all that; they cannot even get near to grasping what it is.
I have met a nobleman of good family who was born blind, or, at least, blind enough not to know what sight is. He has so little knowledge of what he is lacking that he is always using words appropriate to seeing, just as we do; he applies them in his own peculiar way. When he was presented with one of his own godchildren, he took him in his arms and said: ‘My God, what a handsome child. How nice to see him! What a happy face he has.’ He will say (like one of us): ‘What a lovely view there is from this room! What a clear day. How bright the sun is.’ And that is not all. Hearing how much we enjoy the sports of hunting, tennis and shooting, he likes them, too; he tries to join in and believes that he can take part like us. He gets carried away, has a great deal of fun and yet has no knowledge at all of these sports, except through the ears. On open ground, where he can use his spurs, somebody shouts, ‘There goes a hare.’ Then somebody says, ‘Look, the hare has been caught.’ You will see him as proud of the kill as other men he has heard.
At tennis he takes the ball in his left hand and hits it with his racket. As for the harquebus, he shoots at random, and is delighted when his men tell him he has shot too high or too wide.
How do we know that the whole human race is not doing something just as silly? We may all lack some sense or other; because of that defect, most of the features of objects may be concealed from us. How can we know that the difficulties we have in understanding many of the works of Nature do not derive from this, or that several of the actions of animals which exceed our powers of understanding are produced by a sense-faculty which we do not possess? Perhaps some of them, by such means, enjoy a fuller life, a more complete life than we do.
We need virtually all our senses merely to recognize an apple: we recognize redness in it, sheen, smell and sweetness. An apple may well have other qualities than that: for example powers of desiccation or astringency, for which we have no corresponding senses.426
Take what we call the occult properties of many objects (such as the magnet attracting iron).427 Is it not likely that there are certain senses known to Nature which furnish the faculties necessary for perceiving them and understanding them, and that the lack of such faculties entails our ignorance of their true essence? There may be some peculiar sense which tells cocks when it is midday or midnight and makes them crow, [C] or which teaches hens (before any practical experience) to fear the sparrow-hawk but not larger animals like geese or peacocks; which warns chickens of the innate hostility of cats but tells them not to fear dogs; which puts them on their guard against a miaou (quite a pleasing sound, really) but not against a bark (a harsh and aggressive sound);428 which tells hornets, ants and rats how to select the best cheese and the best pear, before they even taste them; [A] which leads stags [C] elephants and snakes [A] to recognize herbs necessary to cure them.
There is no sense which is not dominant and which does not have the means of contributing vast amounts of knowledge. If we had no comprehension of sounds, harmony and the spoken word, that would throw all the rest of our knowledge into inconceivable confusion. For, quite apart from all that arises from the properties of each individual sense, think of the arguments, consequences and conclusions which we infer by comparing one sense with another. Let an intelligent man imagine human nature created, from the beginning, without sight; let him reflect how much ignorance and confusion such a defect would entail, how much darkness and blindness there would be in our minds. We can see from that how vital it would be for our knowledge of truth if we lacked another sense, or two or three senses. We have fashioned a truth by questioning our five senses working together; but perhaps we need to harmonize the contributions of eight or ten senses if we are ever to know, with certainty, what Truth is in essence.
Those schools which attack Man’s claim to possess knowledge base themselves mainly on the fallibility and weakness of our senses: for, since all knowledge comes to us through them and by them, we have nothing left to hold on to if they fail in their reports to us, if they change and corrupt what they convey to us from outside, or if the light which filters through to our mind from them is darkened in the process.
This ultimate difficulty has given rise to many strange notions: that a given object does have all the qualities we find in it; that it has none of the qualities which we think we find in it;429 or, as the Epicureans contend, that the Sun is no bigger than our sight judges it to be –
[B] Quicquid id est, nihilo fertur majore figura
Quam nostris oculis quam cernimus, esse videtur
[Be that as it may, its size is no bigger than it seems when we behold it]430
[A] – or, that those appearances which make an object look big when you are close to it and smaller when you are farther from it, are both true –
[B] Nec tamen hic oculis falli concedimus hilum
Proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli
[We do not at all concede that the eyes can be deceived. Do not attribute to the eyes the errors of the mind]431
[A] – or, conclusively, that there is no deception whatsoever in our senses, so that we must throw ourselves on their mercy and seek elsewhere the justification for any differences and contradictions which we find in them: that, indeed, we should invent some lie or raving lunacy (yes, they get as far as that!) rather than condemn our senses.
[C] Timagoras said that he did not really see the candle-flame double when he squeezed his eye-ball sideways, but that this appearance arose from a defect of opinion not of vision.432 [A] The absurdest of all absurdities [C] for Epicureans [A] is to deny [C] the effective power of [A] the senses:
Proinde quod in quoque est his visum tempore, verum est.
Et, si non potuit ratio dissolvere causam,
Cur ea quae fuerint juxtim quadrata, procul sint
Visa rotunda, tamen praestat rationis egentem
Reddere mendose causas utriusque figurae,
Quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quoquam,
Et violare fidem primam, et convellere tota
Fundamenta quibus nixatur vita salusque.
Non modo enim ratio ruat omnis, vita quoque ipsa
Concidat extemplo, nisi credere sensibus ausis,
Praecipitesque locos vitare, et caetera quae sint
&
nbsp; In genere hoc fugienda.
[Consequently, whatever, at any time, has seemed to the senses to be true, is in fact true. If reason cannot unravel the causes which explain why things that are square when you are close to them appear round at a distance, it is better to find some untrue explanation of these two different impressions than to let the evidence of our senses slip through our fingers, violate first principles and shake the foundations on which our lives and their preservation are built. For, if we could no longer trust our senses and so avoid the giddy heights and other dangers Man must shun, not only would our Reason collapse in ruins but our lives as well.]433
[C] That is a counsel of despair. It is quite unphilosophical. It reveals that human knowledge can only be supported by an unreasonable Reason, by mad lunatic ravings; that, if Man is to make himself worth anything, it is better to exploit ‘Reason’ such as this or any other remedy, no matter how fantastic it may be, rather than to admit so unflattering a truth that he is, of necessity, as stupid as a beast. Man cannot avoid the fact that his senses are both the sovereign regents of his knowledge, and yet, in all circumstances, uncertain and fallible. So here they must fight to a finish; if legitimate weapons fail us – and they do – they must use stubbornness, foolhardiness or cheek!
The Complete Essays Page 81