Why the schools hold their followers captive

Is it not this that has brought in the doctrines that fight and contradict one another, and the factions of the philosophers, some opposing the doctrines of others, some holding fast to one set of views and others attaching themselves to another? All of them, from the time they were first turned toward philosophy, want to practice it and profess that they do. They claim that they desire it no less now that they are deep in its arguments than when they were beginning them; rather, that they love philosophy even more now, when it has been granted them to taste it, so to speak, and to spend their time in its arguments, than when at first, knowing nothing of it, they were carried away by some impulse to philosophize. So they say; yet they will no longer listen to the arguments of anyone who thinks otherwise. So not one of the older philosophers ever persuaded any of the newer ones, or any of the Peripatetics, to turn to him and follow his philosophy, nor the other way round; in short, no one ever persuaded anyone. For no one would easily be won over to give up his own views and join others, and that perhaps the very views which, had he been persuaded of them before he came to philosophy, he would have loved from the first and accepted easily. Since his soul was not yet taken over by any arguments, he would have held to them and loved them, and for their sake would have opposed, in just the same way, the views he now holds.

Such is the philosophy of these fine Greeks of ours, most learned and most searching as they are. Whatever each one happened upon at the start, driven by some impulse, that alone he calls true, and all the views of the other philosophers he calls deceit and nonsense. He does not support his own views by argument any more than each of the others champions theirs; and for refusing to change his mind or think again, whether pressed by necessity or by persuasion, he has, if the truth must be told, no other ground than the unreasoning impulse that, as he came to philosophy, drew him to these doctrines, and no other judge of what he thinks true, if it is not too strange a thing to say, than undiscerning chance. Each loves the views he first happened upon, and, bound by them as it were, he can no longer give heed to any others. If he can say something to prove the truth of his views on every point, and to show that his opponents' views are false, then he has argument on his side as well; but even without that help he has surrendered himself to the arguments that took hold of him first, welcoming them at random like a lucky find. These arguments have tripped up those who hold them in other matters, and above all have made them miss the greatest and most necessary thing of all, the knowledge of the divine and reverence toward it. Yet they stay bound in them, in a way, and no one could easily rescue them any longer. It is like a marsh in a vast plain that is hard to cross: once people have fallen in, it no longer lets them save themselves either by turning back or by getting across, but holds them there until they die. Or it is like a deep, dense, towering forest. A traveler goes in, perhaps meaning to come out again and set himself once more in open ground within the fences, but because of its length and thickness he cannot. He turns this way and that many times inside it, and, finding paths within that run on and on, he wanders along them in every direction, thinking he may soon get out by one of them; but they only lead further in and never out, for they are paths of the forest alone. At last the traveler, worn out and giving up, as though the whole world had become forest and there were no longer any dwelling on earth, decides to stay there, sets up his hearth, and clears himself what space he can in the forest. Or it is like a labyrinth. Only one entrance shows, so a man suspects nothing intricate from what he sees outside; he goes in through the single door that appears and walks on to the innermost parts. There he sees an intricate sight, a construction of great cunning, full of passages and cleverly contrived with entrances and exits one after another; and when he wants to leave, he can no longer do so, shut in by a construction that had seemed so clever to him. Yet no labyrinth is so hard to escape and so intricate, no forest so dense and tangled, no plain or marsh so terrible at holding those who come near it, as an argument can be when it is the argument of some of these philosophers.

So that we should not suffer the same fate as most people, he did not lead us to any single one of the philosophers' doctrines, nor did he think it right for us to go off after them; he led us to them all, wanting us to leave no Greek doctrine untried. He himself went in with us, leading the way and taking us by the hand, as on a journey. If anything crooked, unsound beneath its surface, or full of sophistry should confront us, he, a master of the craft to whom, after his long familiarity with arguments, nothing was strange and nothing untried, would stay safely above it himself and, stretching out his hand to others, would bring them through, drawing them up like people who are sinking. He gathered and set before us everything that was useful and true in each of the philosophers, and he sifted out whatever was false, in other matters and above all in whatever, where piety was concerned, was merely human.