you do speak the truth, therefore you are a liar." How can you
avoid approving of this conclusion, when you approved of the previous one
of the same kind?

These are the arguments of Chrysippus, which even he himself did not
refute. For what could he do with such a conclusion as this,--"If it
shines, it shines: but it does shine, therefore it does shine?" He must
give in; for the principle of the connexion compels you to grant the last
proposition after you have once granted the first. And in what does this
conclusion differ from the other,--"If you lie, you lie; but you do lie,
therefore you do lie?" You assert that it is impossible for you either to
approve or disapprove of this: if so, how can you any more approve or
disapprove of the other? If the art, or the principle, or the method, or
the force of the one conclusion avails, they exist in exactly the same
degree in both.

This, however, is their last resource. They demand that one should make an
exception with regard to these points which are inexplicable. I give my
vote for their going to some tribune of the people; for they shall never
obtain this exception from me. In truth, when they cannot prevail on
Epicurus, who despises and ridicules the whole science of dialectics, to
grant this proposition to be true, which we may express thus--"Hermachus
will either be alive to-morrow or he will not;" when the dialecticians lay
it down that every disjunctive proposition, such as "either yes or no" is
not only true but necessary; you may see how cautious he is, whom they
think slow. For, says he, if I should grant that one of the two
alternatives is necessary, it will then be necessary either that Hermachus
should be alive to-morrow, or not. But there is no such necessity in the
nature of things. Let the dialecticians then, that is to say, Antiochus
and the Stoics, contend with him, for he upsets the whole science of
dialectics.

For if a disjunctive proposition made up of contraries, (I call those
propositions contraries when one affirms and the other denies,) if, I say,
such a disjunctive can be false, then no one is ever true. But what
quarrel have they with me who am following their system? When anything of
that kind happened, Carneades used to joke in this way:--"If I have drawn
my conclusion correctly, I gain the cause: if incorrectly, Diogenes shall
pay back a mina;" for he had learnt dialectics of that Stoic, and a mina
was the pay of the dialecticians.

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