veretur ne si hoc concesserit, concedendum sit, fato fieri quaecunque fiant; si enim alterum ex aeternitate verum sit, esse id etiam certum; si certum, etiam necessarium; ita et necessitatem et fatum confirmari putat; sic Chrysippus metuit ne non, si non obtinuerit omne[230] quod enuncietur aut verum esse aut falsum, omnia fato fieri possint ex causis aeternis rerum futurarum.’  M. Bayle observes (Dictionary, article ‘Epicurus’, let.  T, p. 1141) ’that neither of these two great philosophers [Epicurus and Chrysippus] understood that the truth of this maxim, every proposition is true or false, is independent of what is called fatum:  it could not therefore serve as proof of the existence of the fatum, as Chrysippus maintained and as Epicurus feared.  Chrysippus could not have conceded, without damaging his own position, that there are propositions which are neither true nor false.  But he gained nothing by asserting the contrary:  for, whether there be free causes or not, it is equally true that this proposition, The Grand Mogul will go hunting to-morrow, is true or false.  Men rightly regarded as ridiculous this speech of Tiresias:  All that I shall say will happen or not, for great Apollo confers on me the faculty of prophesying.  If, assuming the impossible, there were no God, it would yet be certain that everything the greatest fool in the world should predict would happen or would not happen.  That is what neither Chrysippus nor Epicurus has taken into consideration.’  Cicero, lib.  I, De Nat.  Deorum, with regard to the evasions of the Epicureans expressed the sound opinion (as M. Bayle observes towards the end of the same page) that it would be much less shameful to admit that one cannot answer one’s opponent, than to have recourse to such answers.  Yet we shall see that M. Bayle himself confused the certain with the necessary, when he maintained that the choice of the best rendered things necessary.

170.  Let us come now to the possibility of things that do not happen, and I will give the very words of M. Bayle, albeit they are somewhat discursive.  This is what he says on the matter in his Dictionary (article ‘Chrysippus’, let.  S, p. 929):  ’The celebrated dispute on things possible and things impossible owed its origin to the doctrine of the Stoics concerning fate.  The question was to know whether, among the things which have never been and never will be, there are some possible; or whether all that is not, all that has never been, all that will never be, was impossible.  A famous dialectician of the Megaric Sect, named Diodorus, gave a negative answer to the first of these two questions and an affirmative to the second; but Chrysippus vehemently opposed him.  Here are two passages of Cicero (epist. 4, lib. 9, Ad Familiar.):  “[Greek:  peri dynaton] me scito [Greek:  kata Diodoron krinein].  Quapropter si venturus es, scito [231] necesse esse te venire.  Sin autem non es, [Greek:  ton adynaton] est te venire.