“How indeed perception is effected, whether through the whole body or any part, perhaps I cannot explain; for both opinions perplex me. But that you and I are not the same, I know with perfect certainty. How do you know it? When I intend to swallow anything, I never carry it to your mouth, but to my own. And you yourselves (the Pyrrhonists), who take away the evidence of the senses, do you act otherwise? Who among you, when he intended to enter a bath, ever went into a mill?” He also says (ii. c. 20) that “the propositions which are true and evident are of necessity used even by those who contradict them; and a man might perhaps consider it to be the greatest proof of a thing being evident that it is found to be necessary even for him who denies it to make use of it at the same time. For instance, if a man should deny that anything is universally true, it is plain that he must make the contradictory negation, that nothing is universally true.”
Epictetus did not undervalue Dialectic or Logic, and the solution of what are called Sophistical and Hypothetical arguments (i. c. 7); but he considered the handling of all such arguments as a thing relating to the duties of life, and as a means towards Ethic, or the practice of morals. Rufus said, “for a man to use the appearances presented to him rashly and foolishly and carelessly, and not to understand argument nor demonstration nor sophism, nor, in a word, to see in questioning and answering what is consistent with that which we have granted or is not consistent: is there no error in this"? Accordingly Dialectic is not the object of our life, but it is a means for distinguishing between true and false appearances, and for ascertaining the validity of evidence, and it gives us security in our judgments. It is the application of these things to the purposes of life which is the first and necessary part of philosophy. So he says in the Encheiridion
