“One man enjoys this, another enjoys that.”

Sextus also quotes the beautiful lines of Pindar,[3]

“One delights in getting honours and crowns through
stormfooted horses,
Others in passing life in rooms rich in gold,
Another safe travelling enjoys, in a swift ship,
on a wave of the sea.”

[1] Hyp. I. 85.

[2] Hyp. I. 87-89.

[3] Hyp. I. 86.

The Third Trope.  The third Trope limits the argument to the sense-perceptions of one man, a Dogmatic, if preferred, or to one whom the Dogmatics consider wise,[1] and states that as the ideas given by the different sense organs differ radically in a way that does not admit of their being compared with each other, they furnish no reliable testimony regarding the nature of objects.[2] “Each of the phenomena perceived by us seems to present itself in many forms, as the apple, smooth, fragrant brown and sweet.”  The apple was evidently the ordinary example given for this Trope, for Diogenes uses the same, but in a much more condensed form, and not with equal understanding of the results to be deduced from it.[3] The consequence of the incompatibility of the mental representations produced through the several sense organs by the apple, may be the acceptance of either of the three following propositions:  (i) That only those qualities exist in the apple which we perceive. (ii) That more than these exist. (iii) That even those perceived do not exist.[4] Accordingly, any experience which can give rise to such different views regarding outward objects, cannot be relied upon as a testimony concerning them.

    [1] Hyp. I. 90.

    [2] Hyp. I. 94.

    [3] Diog.  IX. 11 81.

    [4] Hyp. I. 99.

The non-homogeneous nature of the mental images connected with the different sense organs, as presented by Sextus, reminds us of the discussion of the same subject by Berkeley in his Theory of Vision.

Sextus says that a man born with less than the usual number of senses, would form altogether different ideas of the external world than those who have the usual number, and as our ideas of objects depend on our mental images, a greater number of sense organs would give us still different ideas of outward reality.[1] The strong argument of the Stoics against such reasoning as this, was their doctrine of pre-established harmony between nature and the soul, so that when a representation is produced in us of a real object, a [Greek:  kataleptike phantasia],[2] by this representation the soul grasps a real existence.  There is a [Greek:  logos] in us which is of the same kind, [Greek:  syngenos], or in relation to all nature.  This argument of pre-established harmony between the faculties of the soul and the objects of nature, is the one that has been used in all ages to combat philosophical teaching that denies that we apprehend the external