1 It was the habit of the Epicureans, says Proclus (p. 322), to ridicule this theorem as being evident even to an ass and requiring no proof, and their allegation that the theorem was “known” (γνώριμον) even to an ass was based on the fact that, if fodder is placed at one angular point and the ass at another, he does not, in order to get to his food, traverse the two sides of the triangle but only the one side separating them (an argument which makes Savile exclaim that its authors were “digni ipsi, qui cum Asino foenum essent,” p. 78). Proclus replies truly that a mere perception of the truth of the theorem is a different thing from a scientific proof of it and a knowledge of the reason why it is true. Moreover, as Simson says, the number of axioms should not be increased without necessity.
The National Science Foundation provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.
