[41]
Why
then do you Stoics involve yourselves in these
sophistries, which you can never explain? Members
of your school, when they are more hurried than
usual, generally give us this syllogism: 'If there
are gods, there is divination; but there are gods,
therefore there is divination.' A more logical one
would be this: 'There is no divination, therefore
there are no gods.' Observe how rashly they
[p. 417]
commit themselves to the proposition, 'if there is
no divination, there are no gods.' I say 'rashly,'
for it is evident that divination has been destroyed
and yet we must hold on to the gods.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.