Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...still a third quality for some other group. For the figure cannot possibly be a subjective effect, nor can one and the same figure be spherical for certain persons and of another shape for others (although such an assumption were perhaps inevitable if what is sweet for some is bitter for others), nor can the shapes of atoms change according to differences of state in us. And, in general, the atomic figure has an absolute existence, while sweetness and the sensuous object generally, as he says, is relative and existent in something beyond itself. It is strange, furthermore, to insist that to all those who perceive the same things there comes the same subjective appearance,162 and to examine the true character of these things, when he has already said that to persons in different conditions there come different subjective appearances, and again that no one attains the truth of things better than does another. For it is 70 probable that in the attainment of truth the better surpasses the worse, and the well the sick; since the better and healthier are more in accord with the reality of things.l63 But if there be no objective reality in sensory objects because they do not appear the same to all, there is manifestly none in animals or other bodies; for men disagree about these things, too. And yet even if the cause of sweet and bitter is not the same for us all, at least the bitterness t64 and sweetness appear the same for all. Democritus himself seems a witness to this; for how could that which is bitter for us be sweet or astringent for others, unless these very qualities had a definite nature? This he makes even more explicit in 71 those passages where he says that the being of anything and the process by which it originated are real; l6s...