was in fact unattainable. Scepticism was a lazy man's consolation, since it showed the ignorant
to be as wise as the reputed men of learning. To men who, by temperament, required a gospel, it
might seem unsatisfying, but like every doctrine of the Hellenistic period it recommended itself
as an antidote to worry. Why trouble about the future? It is wholly uncertain. You may as well
enjoy the present; "What's to come is still unsure." For these reasons, Scepticism enjoyed a
considerable popular success.
It should be observed that Scepticism as a philosophy is not merely doubt, but what may be
called dogmatic doubt. The man of science says "I think it is so-and-so, but I am not sure." The
man of intellectual curiosity says "I don't know how it is, but I hope to find out." The
philosophical Sceptic says "nobody knows, and nobody ever can know." It is this element of
dogmatism that makes the system vulnerable. Sceptics, of course, deny that they assert the
impossibility of knowledge dogmatically, but their denials are not very convincing.
Pyrrho's disciple Timon, however, advanced some intellectual arguments which, from the
standpoint of Greek logic, were very hard to answer. The only logic admitted by the Greeks was
deductive, and all deduction had to start, like Euclid, from general principles regarded as self-
evident. Timon denied the possibility of finding such principles. Everything, therefore, will
have to be proved by means of something else, and all argument will be either circular or an
endless chain hanging from nothing. In either case nothing can be proved. This argument, as we
can see, cut at the root of the Aristotelian philosophy which dominated the Middle Ages.
Some forms of Scepticism which, in our own day, are advocated by men who are by no means
wholly sceptical, had not occurred to the Sceptics of antiquity. They did not doubt phenomena,
or question propositions which, in their opinion, only expressed what we know directly
concerning phenomena. Most of Timon's work is lost, but two surviving fragments will
illustrate this point. One says "The phenomenon is always valid." The other says: "That honey is
sweet I refuse to assert; that it appears sweet, I fully grant." * A modern Sceptic would point out
that the phenomenon merely occurs, and is not either valid or invalid; what is valid or invalid
must be a state-
* Quoted by Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 126.