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There was no importation from Greece to which a more determined resistance was made from the first by the national party. Seven years later took place the embassy of the three leaders of the most celebrated schools of thought, Diogenes the Stoic, Critolaus the Peripatetic, and Carneades the New Academician.
The rest seem to be more hampered with these doctrines, but yet they get clear of them; such as Epicurus, Hieronymus, and whoever else thinks it worth while to defend the deserted Carneades: for there is not one of them who does not think the mind to be judge of those goods, and able sufficiently to instruct him how to despise what has the appearance only of good or evil.
He is represented astaking the part reluctantly, saying that one consents to soil his hands in order to find gold, and he professes to give the substance of the famous discourse of Carneades. Laelius answers him, and, so far as we can judge from the fragments of his reply that are extant, with the preponderance of reason, which Cicero intended should incline on the better side.
And if there be not, then there is an end of all society in life. May it turn out well, says Carneades, speaking shamelessly, but still more sensibly than my friend Lucius or Patro: for, as they refer everything to themselves, do they think that anything is ever done for the sake of another?
Another desires the Possessor of it to consider it as a meer Gift of Nature, and not any Perfection of his own. A Third calls it a short liv'd Tyranny; a Fourth, a silent Fraud, because it imposes upon us without the Help of Language; but I think Carneades spoke as much like a Philosopher as any of them, tho' more like a Lover, when he call'd it Royalty without Force.
Epicurus, who composed it of atoms, was at least right in seeking the origin of its determination in that which he believed to be the origin of the soul itself. That is why Cicero and M. Bayle were wrong to find so much fault with him, and to be indulgent towards, and even praise, Carneades, who is no less irrational.
The most vigorous champion of this latter theory appears to have been one Carneades, a Greek philosopher of the second century B.C., said to have been the founder of the third Academy and expounder of the philosophy of probabilities and to have possessed the acutest mind of antiquity.
So far it stands nearly on a parallel with the older method of the sophists; except that, as may be conceived, the sophists made war more against the popular faith, Carneades and his disciples more against their philosophical colleagues.
Now, though we should attack these men in the same manner as Carneades used to do, I fear they are the only real philosophers; for which of these definitions is there which does not explain that obscure and intricate notion of courage which every man conceives within himself? And when it is thus explained, what can a warrior, a commander, or an orator want more?
For the observation of our favourite Carneades is well-known, "That Clitomachus had a perpetual sameness of sentiment, and Charmidas a tiresome uniformity of expression."
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