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instance, he is in the habit of calling the void itself 'the nature of void'
and, by Zeus, the totality [of things] the 'nature of the totality'.
... ( 1114a) Yet by saying that the totality is one he somehow prevented
us from living. For when Epicurus says that the totality is unlimited
and ungenerated and indestructible and neither grows nor shrinks, he
discourses about the totality as though it were some one thing. In the
beginning of his treatise [On Nature] he suggests that the nature of
existing things is bodies and void, and though it is one nature, he yet
divided it into two. One of these is really nothing, but you call it intangible
and void and incorporeal.
... (1118d) ... For if, as they think, a man is the product of both, a
body of this sort and a soul, then he who investigates the nature of soul
is investigating the nature of man by way of its more important principle.
And let us not learn from Socrates, that sophistical boaster, that the soul
is hard to understand by reason and ungraspable by sense-perception,
but rather let us learn it from these wise men who get only as far as the
corporeal powers of the soul, by virtue of which it provides the body
with warmth and softness and tension, (1118e) when they cobble together
its substance out of something hot and something breathlike and some-
thing airy, and they do not get to the most important part, but give up.
For that in virtue of which it judges and remembers and loves and hates
and in general the intelligent and reasoning part, this they say comes to
be from a kind of 'nameless' quality.
.. (1119£) ... Who makes worse mistakes in dialectic than you [Epicu-
reans], who completely abolish the class of things said [lekta], which give
substance to discourse and leave only [mere] utterances and the external
things, saying that the intermediate class of 'signified things' (by means
of which learning, (1120a) teaching, basic grasps, conceptions, impulses,
and assents all occur) does not exist at all?
... (1121a) For he [i.e., Colotes] is satisfied with and welcomes argu-
ments when they are used in Epicurus' writings, but does not understand
or recognize them when they are used by others. For those who say that
when a round image strikes us, or another which is bent, the sense
receives a true imprint, and who do not allow the further claim that the
tower is round and that the oar is bent-these men affirm their own
experiences and impressions but are unwilling to agree that external
objects are like this. But just as that group must refer to 'being affected
horsewise or wallwise' but not to a horse or a wall, (1121b) in the same
way they must say that the visual organ is 'affected roundly or anglewise'
but not that the oar is bent or that the tower is round. For the image
by which the visual organ is affected is bent, but the oar from which the