ment, and no statement can be so closely linked to the phenomenon as to be incapable of
falsehood. For the same reason, he would say that the statement "honey appears sweet" is only
highly probable, not absolutely certain.
In some respects, the doctrine of Timon was very similar to that of Hume. He maintained that
something which had never been observed--atoms, for instance--could not be validly inferred; but
when two phenomena had been frequently observed together, one could be inferred from the
other.
Timon lived at Athens throughout the later years of his long life, and died there in 235 B.C. With
his death, the school of Pyrrho, as a school, came to an end, but his doctrines, somewhat modified,
were taken up, strange as it may seem, by the Academy, which represented the Platonic tradition.
The man who effected this surprising philosophic revolution was Arcesilaus, a contemporary of T
imon, who died as an old man about 240 B.C. What most men have taken from Plato is belief in a
supersensible intellectual world and in the superiority of the immortal soul to the mortal body. But
Plato was many-sided, and in some respects could be regarded as teaching scepticism. The
Platonic Socrates professes to know nothing; we naturally treat this as irony, but it could be taken
seriously. Many of the dialogues reach no positive conclusion, and aim at leaving the reader in a
state of doubt. Some--the latter half of the Parmenides, for instance--might seem to have no
purpose except to show that either side of any question can be maintained with equal plausibility.
The Platonic dialectic could be treated as an end, rather than a means, and if so treated it lent itself
admirably to the advocacy of Scepticism. This seems to have been the way in which Arcesilaus
interpreted the man whom he still professed to follow. He had decapitated Plato, but at any rate
the torso that remained was genuine.
The manner in which Arcesilaus taught would have had much to commend it, if the young men
who learnt from him had been able to avoid being paralysed by it. He maintained no thesis, but
would refute any thesis set up by a pupil. Sometimes he would himself advance two contradictory
propositions on successive occasions, showing how to argue convincingly in favour of either. A
pupil sufficiently vigourous to rebel might have learnt dexterity and the avoidance of fallacies;