manner? And how do you assume
that if one thing may be like another, it follows that it may also be
difficult to distinguish between them? And then, that one cannot
distinguish between them at all? And lastly, that they are identical? So
that if wolves are like dogs, you will come at last to asserting that they
are the same animals. And indeed there are some things not honourable,
which are like things that are honourable; some things not good, like
those that are good; some things proceeding on no system, like others
which are regulated by system. Why then do we hesitate to affirm that
there is no difference between all these things? Do we not even see that
they are inconsistent? For there is nothing that can be transferred from
its own genus to another. But if such a conclusion did follow, as that
there was no difference between perceptions of different genera, but that
some could be found which were both in their own genus and in one which
did not belong to them, how could that be possible?

There is then one means of getting rid of all unreal perceptions, whether
they be formed in the ideas, which we grant to be usually the case, or
whether they be owing to idleness, or to wine, or to madness. For we say
that clearness, which we ought to hold with the greatest tenacity, is
absent from all visions of that kind. For who is there who, when he
imagines something and pictures it to himself in his thoughts, does not,
as soon as he has stirred up himself, and recovered himself, feel how much
difference there is between what is evident and what is unreal? The case
of dreams is the same. Do you think that Ennius, when he had been walking
in his garden with Sergius Galba, his neighbour, said to himself,--I have
seemed to myself to be walking with Galba? But when he had a dream, he
related it in this way,--

The poet Homer seem'd to stand before me.

And again in his Epicharmus he says--

For I seem'd to be dreaming, and laid in the tomb.

Therefore, as soon as we are awakened, we despise those things which we
have seen, and do not regard them as we do the things which we have done
in the forum.

XVII. But while these visions are being beheld, they assume the same
appearance as those things which we see while awake. There is a good deal
of real difference between them; but we may pass over that. For what we
assert is, that there is not the same power or soundness in people when
asleep that there is in th