6
When Nicander had expounded all this, my friend Theon, whom I presume you know, asked Ammonius if Logical Reason had any rights in free speech, after being spoken of in such a very insulting manner. And when Ammonius urged him to speak and come to her assistance, he said, That the god is a most logical reasoner the great majority of his oracles show clearly; for surely it is the function of the same person both to solve and to invent ambiguities. Moreover, as Plato said, when an oracle was given that they should double the size of the altar at Delos Cf.Moralia, 579 b-d; and on the doubling of the cube, T. L. Heath, A Manual of Greek Mathematics (Oxford, 1931), pp. 154-170. (a task requiring the highest skill in geometry), it was not this that the god was enjoining, but he was urging the Greeks to study geometry. And so, in the same way, when the god gives out ambiguous oracles, he is promoting and organizing logical reasoning as indispensable for those who are to apprehend his meaning aright. Certainly in logic this copulative conjunction has the greatest force, inasmuch as it clearly gives us our most logical form, the syllogism. Must not the character of the hypothetical syllogism be of this sort: granted that even wild animals have apperception of the existence of things, yet to man alone has Nature given the power to observe and judge the consequences? That it is day and that it is light assuredly wolves and dogs and birds perceive by their senses; but if it is day, then it is light, no creature other than man apprehends, Cf. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ii. 216 (p. 70) and 239 (p. 78). for he alone has a concept of antecedent and consequent, of apparent implication and connexion of these things one with another, and their relations and differences, from which our demonstrations derive their most authoritative inception. Since, then, philosophy is concerned with truth, and the illumination of truth is demonstration, and the inception of demonstration is the hypothetical syllogism, then with good reason the potent element that effects the connexion and produces this was consecrated by wise men to the god who is, above all, a lover of the truth.
