The contradictions of the Stoics (29)

Moreover, in his Natural Positions having warned us not to trouble ourselves but to be at quiet about such things as require experience and investigation, he says: Let us not think after the same manner with Plato, that liquid nourishment is conveyed to the lungs, and dry to the stomach; nor let us embrace other errors like to these. Now it is my opinion, that to reprehend others, and then

not to keep one’s self from falling into those things which one has reprehended, is the greatest of contradictions and shamefullest of errors. But he says, that the connections made by ten axioms amount to above a million in number, having neither searched diligently into it by himself nor attained to the truth by men experienced in it. Yet Plato had to testify for him the most renowned of the physicians, Hippocrates, Philistion, and Dioxippus the disciple of Hippocrates; and of the poets, Euripides, Alcaeus, Eupolis, and Eratosthenes, who all say that the drink passes through the lungs. But all the arithmeticians refel Chrysippus, amongst whom also is Hipparchus, demonstrating that the error of his computation is very great; since the affirmative makes of the ten axioms one hundred and three. thousand forty and nine connections, and the negative three hundred and ten thousand nine hundred fifty and two.