Cicero's Five Books De Finibus Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ClCIERO MORAL ENDS. BOOK II. they both turned their eyes upon me; and when I observed them expecting, I told them in the first place I would hot be guil... more »ty of that which I had condemned in the philosophers ; of reading a lecture upon a question. Did ever Socrates, that great master in the faculty, take such a course? It was an abuse brought in by the sophistSi as they were called. Leontinus Gor- gias, one of that tribe, was the first man that presumed to frequent the public exercises and challenge a question; I mean, demand a subject to be disputed upon off-hand. This was bold, or rather impudent; if our philosophers, that afterwards trod in Gorgias's steps, can forgive the term. Though, as we learn from Plato, Socrates routed the sophists as he pleased, and particularly the challenger aforesaid. His way was to put questions and receive answers, and to make the person he conferred with explain his own opinions; nd then he spoke again to those answers, as hesaw convenient. This manner of disputing in process of time grew quite out of use, till it was revived by Arcesilas, who made his auditors open their minds to him instead of inquiring what was his, and afterwards he came in with his animadversions upon their propositions, which nevertheless they were permitted to defend as long as they were able. The general and ordinary procedure was, and is still, among the academics, to have the question proposed, and then the proposers keep silence. As thus ; Pleasure, say you, is according to mg sense of things, the summum bonum: whereupon immediately follows the disproof at large, in a fair and full dissertation ; the assigner of the question being not conceived to hold it as he has been pleased to state it, but to call for such reasons as any body else can object It happens our af...« less