Note 18 — Chapter XII
Reading edition
The ancient as well as the modern enquirer into the truth of things was confronted with the question of the origin of all our knowledge. Is knowledge obtained originally through the exercise of the reason or the senses, or through their combined and inseparable action? To this question Lucretius distinctly answers, that the senses are the foundation of all our knowledge.18 They are our 'prima fides': the basis not only of all sound inference, but of all human conduct. The very conception of the meaning of true and false is derived from the senses:—