The Complete Essays (106 page)

Bina lucernarum florentia lumina flammis,
Et duplices hominum facies, et corpora bina
.

[The lamp has twin flowerings of light, men have twin faces and twin bodies.]
⁴⁵⁴

[A] If our ears are blocked up or if the auricular passage is constricted we hear sounds differently from normal: animals have hairy ears or, in some
cases, merely a little hole instead of an ear: consequently, they do not hear what we hear and the sound is perceived differently.
⁴⁵⁵

At banquets or in the theatre, when various shades of coloured glass are placed in front of the torches, we know that they can make everything appear green, yellow or violet:

[B]
Et vulgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela
Et ferruginea, cum magnis intenta theatris
Per malos volgata trabesque trementia pendent:
Namque ibi consessum caveai subter, et omnem
Scenai speciem, patrum, matrumque, deorumque
Inficiunt, coguntque suo volitare colore
.

[When yellow, red or rust-brown awnings are stretched over our vast theatres, flapping about in the wind on their poles and their frames, it is quite usual for them to impart their colours to the stage and to the whole assembly seated in their seats, to senators and matrons and to the statues of the gods, as their colours dance about.]
⁴⁵⁶

[A] It seems likely that the different coloured eyes which we can notice in some animals may impart corresponding colours to what the animals see.

If we want to judge the activities of the senses we should agree with the animals and then among ourselves. We are far from doing that. Quarrels are constantly arising because one person hears, sees or tastes something differently from another. As much as anything, we quarrel over, the diversity of the images conveyed to us by our senses.
⁴⁵⁷

A child, a man of thirty, a sexagenarian, each hears and sees things differently: that is a normal law of Nature. Similarly for taste. Some people’s senses are dullish and dimmer: others are more open and acute. We perceive objects to be like this or that in accordance with our own state and how they seem to us.
⁴⁵⁸
But
seeming
, for human beings, is so uncertain and so controvertible that it is no miracle if we are told that we may acknowledge that snow seems white to us but cannot guarantee to establish that it is truly so in essence. And once you shake that first principle, all the knowledge in the world is inevitably swept away.

What about our very senses hampering each other? A painting may seem to have depth, but feels flat. Musk is pleasant to the smell but offensive to the taste: should we call it pleasant or not? There are herbs and ointments suitable to one part of the body but injurious to another; honey is pleasant to taste, unpleasant to look at.
⁴⁵⁹
Take those rings wrought in the shape of plumes which are called in heraldry
Feathers without Ends
. Can any eye ever be sure how wide they are and avoid being taken in by the optical illusion? For they seem to get wider on one side, narrower and more pointed on the other, especially if you turn them round your finger; yet to your touch they all appear to have the same width all the way round.

– [C] (In the ancient world some men increased their lust by the use of distorting mirrors which enlarged whatever was put before them, so that the organs used on the job pleased them more, because they looked as though they had grown bigger. But which sense did they allow to win? Was it their sight, which showed them their members as thick and big as they liked, or was it their touch, which showed the same members to be tiny and despicable?) –
⁴⁶⁰

[A] Is it our senses which endow the object with these diverse attributes, whereas, in reality, objects only have one? Rather like bread when we eat it; it is one thing, bread, but we turn it into several: bones, blood, flesh, hair and nails.

[B]
Ut cibus, in membra atque artus cum diditur omnes,
Disperit, atque aliam naturam sufficit ex se
.

[Like food, which spreads to all our limbs and joints, destroys itself and produces another substance.]
⁴⁶¹

[A] Moisture is sucked up by the roots of a tree: it becomes trunk, leaf and fruit; air is one, but when applied to a trumpet it is diversified into a thousand kinds of sound: is it our senses (I say) which similarly fashion such objects with diverse qualities or do they really have such qualities? Then, given that doubt, what conclusion can we reach about their true essence?

And then, to go further still: the attributes of illness, madness or sleep make things appear different from what they do to the healthy, the sane
and the waking man:
⁴⁶²
is it not likely therefore that our rightful state and our natural humours also have attributes which can endow an object with a mode of being corresponding to their own characteristics, making it conform to themselves, just as our disordered humours do? [C] Why should a temperate complexion not endow objects with a form corresponding to itself just as our distempers can, stamping its own imprint upon them?
⁴⁶³
On to his wine the queasy man loads tastelessness; the healthy man, a bouquet; the thirsty man, sheer delight.

[A] Now, since our state makes things correspond to itself and transforms them in conformity with itself, we can no longer claim to know what anything truly is: nothing reaches us except as altered and falsified by our senses. When the compasses, the set-square and the ruler are askew, all the calculations made with them and all the structures raised according to their measurements, are necessarily out of true and ready to collapse.

The unreliability of our senses renders unreliable everything which they put forward:

Denique ut in fabrica, si prava est regula prima,
Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit,
Et libella aliqua si exparte claudicat hilum,
Omnia mendose fieri atque obstipa necessum est,
Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona tecta,
Jam ruere ut quaedam videantur velle, ruantque
Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis.
Hic igitur ratio tibi rerum prava necesse est
Falsaque sit, falsis quaecumque a sensibus orta est
.

[It is as when a building is erected: if the ruler is false from the outset, or the set-square deceptive and out of true, if the level limps a bit to one side, then the building is necessarily wrong and crooked; it is deformed, pot-bellied, toppling forwards or backwards and quite disjointed; some parts seem about to fall down now: all will fall down soon, betrayed by the original mistakes of calculation; similarly every argument that you base on facts will prove wrong and false, if the facts themselves are based on senses which prove false.]
⁴⁶⁴

And meanwhile who will be a proper judge of such differences? It is like saying that we could do with a judge who is not bound to either party in our religious strife, who is dispassionate and without prejudice. Among Christians that cannot be.
⁴⁶⁵
The same applies here: if the judge is old, he cannot judge the sense-impressions of old age, since he is a party to the dispute; so too if he is young; so too if he is well; so too if he is unwell, asleep or awake.
⁴⁶⁶
We would need a man exempt from all these qualities, so that, without preconception, he could judge those propositions as matters indifferent to him.

On this reckoning we would need such a judge as never was.

We register the appearance of objects; to judge them we need an instrument of judgement; to test the veracity of that instrument we need practical proof; to test that proof we need an instrument. We are going round in circles.
⁴⁶⁷

The senses themselves being full of uncertainty cannot decide the issue of our dispute. It will have to be Reason, then. But no Reason can be established except by another Reason. We retreat into infinity.
⁴⁶⁸
Our mental faculty of perception is never directly in touch with outside objects – which are perceived via the senses, and the senses do not embrace an outside object but only their own impressions of it; therefore the thought and the appearance are not properties of the object but only the impressions and feelings of the senses. Those impressions and that object are different things. So whoever judges from appearances judges from something quite different from the object itself.

If you say that these sense-impressions convey the quality of outside objects to our souls by means of resemblances, how can our rational soul make sure that they are resemblances, since it has no direct contact of its own with the outside objects? It is like a man who does not know Socrates; if he sees a portrait of him he cannot say whether it resembles him or not.
⁴⁶⁹

But supposing, nevertheless, that anyone did wish to judge from appearances, he cannot do so from all of them, since (as we know from experience) they all mutually impede each other because of contradictions and discrepancies. Will he select only some appearances to control the
others? But the first one selected will have to be tested for truth against another one selected, and that one against a third: the end will therefore never be reached.
⁴⁷⁰

To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly: nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing.
⁴⁷¹

‘We have no communication with Being;
⁴⁷²
as human nature is wholly ‘situated, for ever, between birth and death, it shows itself only as a dark ‘shadowy appearance, an unstable weak opinion. And if you should ‘determine to try and grasp what Man’s
being
is, it would be exactly like ‘trying to hold a fistful of water: the more tightly you squeeze anything the ‘nature of which is always to flow, the more you will lose what you try to ‘retain in your grasp. So, because all things are subject to pass from change ‘to change, Reason is baffled if it looks for a substantial existence in them, ‘since it cannot apprehend a single thing which subsists permanently, ‘because everything is either coming into existence (and so not fully ‘existing yet) or beginning to die before it is born.’ Plato said that bodies never have existence, though they certainly have birth, [C] believing that Homer made Oceanus Father of the Gods and Thetis their Mother, to show that all things are in a state of never-ending inconstancy, change and flux (an opinion, as he says, common to all the philosophers before his time, with the sole exception of Parmenides, who denied that anything has motion – attaching great importance to the force of that idea).
⁴⁷³

[A] Pythagoras taught that all matter is labile and flowing;
⁴⁷⁴
the
Stoics, that there is no such thing as the present (which is but the joining and the coupling together of the future and past);
⁴⁷⁵
‘Heraclitus, that no man ever stepped twice into the same river’ –([B] Epicharmus, that a man who borrowed money in the past does not owe it now, and that a man invited to breakfast yesterday evening turns up this morning uninvited, both having become different people).
⁴⁷⁶
– [A] Heraclitus ‘that no ‘mortal substance can ever be found twice in an identical state because the ‘rapidity and ease of its changes make it constantly disperse and reassemble; ‘it is coming and going, so that whatever begins to be born never achieves ‘perfect existence, since its delivery is never complete and never stops as ‘though it had come to the end; but, ever since the seeds of it were sown, it ‘is continually modifying and changing from one thing to another; just as ‘from the human seed there first springs a shapeless embryo in the mother’s ‘womb, then a human shape, then, once out of the womb, a suckling child, ‘then a boy, then, in due course, a youth, a mature man, an elderly and ‘then a decrepit, aged man, so that each subsequent age to which birth is ‘given is for ever undoing and destroying the previous one.’

[B]
Mutat enim mundi naturam totius aetas,
Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet,
Nec manet ulla sui similis res: omnia migrant,
Omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit
.

[For Time changes the nature of all things in the world; each stage must be succeeded by another, nothing remains as it was; all things depart and Nature modifies all things and compels them to change.]
⁴⁷⁷

[A] ‘And after that we men stupidly fear one species of death, when we ‘have already passed through so many other deaths and do so still; yet, as ‘Heraclitus said, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death ‘of air the birth of water, but we may see it even more clearly in ourselves: ‘the flower of our life withers and dies into old age; but youth ended in that ‘adult flower, as childhood in youth and as that embryonic stage died into ‘childhood; yesterday dies into today, and this day will die into tomorrow. ‘Nothing lasts; nothing remains forever one.’
⁴⁷⁸

To prove that this is so: ‘if we remained forever one and the same, how ‘is it that we can delight in one thing now and later in another? How can ‘we each be
one
if we love or hate contradictory things, first praising them, ‘then condemning them?
⁴⁷⁹
How can we have different emotions, no ‘longer retaining the same sentiment within the same thought? For it is not ‘likely that we can experience different reactions unless we ourselves have ‘changed; but whoever suffers change is no longer the same
one:
he no ‘longer is. For his
being
, as such, changes when his
being one
changes, as each ‘personality ever succeeds another. And, consequently, it is of the nature of ‘our senses to be misled and deceived. Because they do not know what
being
‘is, they take
appears to be
for
is
.