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CH. III.]
NOTES.
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those; and this made Democritus say, that either nothing is true, or else that truth is for us uncertain (ἄδηλον). From their assuming, as a general proposition, that reflection is sensation, they maintained that reflection is change, and that the apparent, through sensation, is, of necessity, true; and it is from such conclusions, Aristotle adds, that Empedocles and Democritus as well as their followers became fettered by those opinions. For Em-
pedocles affirmed, that men, by changing their habit (ἕξις) change also their judgment, "for man's wisdom is enlarged," &c.; and elsewhere he says, that "in so far as men are capable of change, in so far they are capable of forming different judgments." The opinion of Parmenides is to the same purport; and there is a recorded saying of Anaxagoras to some of his followers, that "beings will be to them such as they may suppose them to be." These writers attribute the same opinion to Homer, (but it was shewn in a former note that this reference is faulty,) because he made "Hector, as if beside himself under the blow, to lie thinking differently," (ἀλλοφρονέοντα). But it was incumbent upon these writers, as is observed in the text, to have dwelt upon the liability to error to which we are all ever subject through the senses; for if all appearances are to be held as true, then the same impres-
sion may be at once true and false; which is to admit an impossibility. The doctrine, in fine, of this school, as given in the text was, that the power by which animals move is corporeal, and like to the faculty which thinks,