The Scythian or Consul (66)

How could that be possible?

In this way. Suppose our true number to be twenty. Now let someone take twenty beans in his hand, and then close it and ask any ten people how many beans he has in his hand. Suppose one man

Yes.

Yet it is not at all impossible for everyone to guess different numbers and for all these numbers to be wrong and untrue, and for not one of them to say that the man has twenty beans. Do you agree?

It is not impossible.

In the same way, then, all those who study philosophy are trying to find out what happiness is, and each one says it is something different—pleasure, beauty, and all the other things they say about it. Very likely one of these things is happiness, but it is not unlikely that it is something quite different from every one of them. We seem to have gone in the wrong direction, hastening to the end before we have found the beginning. We should first, I think, have ascertained that the truth has been discovered, and that one or other of the philosophers really has knowledge of it. Then the next step would be to find out whom to believe.

This is what you are saying, then, Lycinus, that even if we go through all philosophy, we shall not even then really be able to discover the truth.

Don’t ask me, my good sir. Again, ask the argument. Perhaps it would answer you that we cannot as yet discover the truth, as long as it is uncertain whether truth is one of the things they say it is.