nly people who know everything? I
do not, says he, assert that I, but that the wise man knows everything.
Exactly so; that he knows those things which are the principles of your
school. Now, in the first place, what an assertion it is that wisdom
cannot be explained by a wise man.--But let us leave off speaking of
ourselves; let us speak of the wise man, about whom, as I have often said
before, the whole of this discussion is.

Wisdom, then, is distributed by most people, and indeed by us, into three
parts. First therefore, if you please, let us consider the researches that
have been made into the nature of things. Is there any one so puffed up
with a false opinion of himself as to have persuaded himself that he knows
those things? I am not asking about those reasons which depend on
conjecture, which are dragged every way by discussions, and which do not
admit any necessity of persuasion. Let the geometricians look to that, who
profess not to persuade men to believe them, but to compel them to do so;
and who prove to you everything that they describe. I am not asking these
men for those principles of the mathematicians, which, if they be not
granted, they cannot advance a single step; such as that a point is a
thing which has no magnitude,--that an extremity or levelness, as it were,
is a space which has no thickness,--that a line is length without breadth.
Though I should grant that all these axioms are true, if I were to add an
oath, do you think a wise man would swear that the sun is many degrees
greater than the earth, before Archimedes had, before his eyes, made out
all those calculations by which it is proved? If he does, then he will be
despising the sun which he considers a god. But if he will not believe the
mathematical calculations which employ a sort of constraint in
teaching,--as you yourselves say,--surely he will be very far from believing
the arguments of philosophers; or, if he does believe any such, which
school will he believe? One may explain all the principles of natural
philosophers, but it would take a long time: I ask, however, whom he will
follow? Suppose for a moment that some one is now being made a wise man,
but is not one yet,--what system and what school shall he select above all
others? For, whatever one he selects, he will select while he is still
unwise. But grant that he is a man of godlike genius, which of all the
natural philosophers will he approve of above all others? For he cannot
a