View:
By Chapter
[225] But if the genus is some of them only, the genus of these will not be the genus of the rest; if, for instance, the genus ‟something” is corporeal it will not be that of the incorporeal, and if the genus ‟animal” is rational it will not be that of the irrational, so that there is neither an incorporeal ‟something” nor an irrational animal, and so likewise with all other cases; and this is absurd. Therefore the genus cannot be either of both this and that kind, or of this kind but not of that, or of neither this kind nor that; and if this be so, neither does the genus exist at all.
And if one should say that the genus is potentially all things,
1
we shall reply that what is potentially something must also be actually something, as, for instance, no one can be potentially literary without being so actually. So too, if the genus is potentially all things, what, we ask them, is it actually? And thus we find that the same difficulties remain. For it cannot actually be all the contraries;
Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes. Sextus Empiricus. Robert Gregg Bury (Translator). London. 1933.
Funding provided by Tisch Library, Tufts University.