Arnobius — Against the Nations 2.7

7.1. And you yourselves thoroughly see yourselves, whenever you dispute about obscure matters and proceed to unlock natural secrets, that you do not know even those things which you say, which you assert, which you commonly defend with capital contention, and that each one guards his own suspicions with stubborn wrestling as if they were proved and grasped. 2. For what, if I look at the truth, even if all ages were spent in investigating things, can we know through ourselves—we whom I know not what thing has brought forth so blind and proud, and envy has put together, so that, though we know nothing at all, we still deceive ourselves and are lifted into an opinion of knowledge under the swelling of an inflated breast? 3. For to pass over divine things and things sunk in natural obscurity, can any of mortals explain—that which Socrates in the Phaedrus cannot grasp—what a human is or whence he is, two-sided, varying, movable, deceitful, manifold, many-formed, 4. for what uses he was brought forth, by whose ingenuity he was devised, what he does in the world, why he experiences such swarms of evils, 5. whether the earth, turned by the rottenness of some moisture, animated him like worms, like mice, or whether he received these outlines of body and the form of the face by the hand of some potter and craftsman?

6. Can he know, I say, these things placed in the midst and set in common senses: by what causes we sink into sleeps, by what we wake, by what means dreams happen, by what visions: 7. indeed what Plato doubts in the Theaetetus—whether we ever wake or that which is called waking is a portion of perpetual sleep, and what we seem to do is a dream; 8. when we say we see, whether we see by an aiming of rays and light or whether images of things fly and settle in our pupils; whether taste is in things or happens by contacts of the palate; by what causes hairs lay aside inborn blackness and not all equally but by gradual adding grow white; 9. what it is that makes all liquids one body by mixture, while oil alone refuses to suffer immersion into itself, but is always clearly gathered into its own nature impenetrable; 10. finally the mind itself, which is said by you to be immortal and a god, why in the sick it is sick, in infants dull, in old age worn out it pours out delirious and insane things? 11. Whose weakness and pitiable ignorance is this the more, that although it can happen that we sometimes say something true, even this itself is uncertain for us—whether we have said something true.