I answer, you are like the mole who desires not
the light because he is blind. Yet I would not so much reproach the god
because my vision is narrow, as because it deceives me (80, 81). If you
want something greater than the bent oar, what can be greater than the
sun? Still he seems to us a foot broad, and Epicurus thinks he may be a
little broader or narrower than he seems. With all his enormous speed,
too, he appears to us to stand still (82). The whole question lies in a
nutshell; of four propositions which prove my point only one is
disputed viz. that every true sensation has side by side with it a
false one indistinguishable from it (83). A man who has mistaken P. for
Q. Geminus could have no infallible mode of recognising Cotta. You say
that no such indistinguishable resemblances _exist_. Never mind, they
_seem_ to exist and that is enough. One mistaken sensation will throw
all the others into uncertainty (84). You say everything belongs to its
own _genus_ this I will not contest. I am not concerned to show that
two sensations _are_ absolutely similar, it is enough that human
faculties cannot distinguish between them. How about the impressions of
signet rings? (85) Can you find a ring merchant to rival your chicken
rearer of Delos? But, you say, art aids the senses. So we cannot see or
hear without art, which so few can have! What an idea this gives us of
the art with which nature has constructed the senses! (86) But about
physics I will speak afterwards. I am going now to advance against the
senses arguments drawn from Chrysippus himself (87). You said that the
sensations of dreamers, drunkards and madmen were feebler than those of
the waking, the sober and the sane. The cases of Ennius and his
Alcmaeon, of your own relative Tuditanus, of the Hercules of Euripides
disprove your point (88, 89). In their case at least 'mind and eyes
agreed. It is no good to talk about the saner moments of such people;
the question is, what was the nature of their sensations at the time
they were affected? (90)

Sec.79. _Communi loco_: [Greek: topo], that of blinking facts which cannot be
disproved, see 19. _Quod ne_ [_id_]: I have bracketed _id_ with most edd.
since Manut. If, however, _quod_ be taken as the conjunction, and not as
the pronoun, _id_ is not altogether insupportable. _Heri_: cf. Introd. 55.
_Infracto remo_