Note 438 — LIFE OF LUCULLUS. (continued 2)

Plutarch's word is κατάληψις, the word that was used by the Academics. Cicero translates κατάληψις by the Latin word Comprehensio. The doctrine which Lucullus maintains is that the sensuous perception is true. "If all perceptions are such, as the New Academy maintained them to be, that they may be false or cannot be distinguished from what are true, how, it is asked, can we say of anyone that he has come to a conclusion or discovered anything?" (Academ. Prior, ii. c. 9.) The doctrine as to the impossibility of knowing anything, as taught by Karneades, is explained by Sextus Empiricus (Advers. Mathematicos, vii. 159). The doctrine of the incomprehensible nature of things, that there is nothing certain to be collected either from the sense or the understanding, that there is no κατάληψις (comprehensio), comprehension, may be collected from the passages given in Ritter and Preller, Historia Philosophiæ Græco-Romanæ, p. 396, Academic Novi.