"Quite so," remarked Haterius; "and was there not another inference dormant in what you said?"
"There was," said Dionysius; "but it looks like subtilizing to wake it and give it wings; and, as I am a Greek, I fear—I—in short, I have tried to confine myself to the plainest and broadest reasonings."
"Fear not," said Germanicus; "learned Greece, you know, has conquered her fierce vanquishers."
Tiberius gnawed his under-lip; and the Lady Plancina, glancing at him and then at her husband Cneius Piso, who was listening attentive but ill at ease, exclaimed,
"Enervated them, you mean!"
Germanicus threw back his head, smiled, and remarked, "To-morrow the legions are going forth to try against the Germans whether the Roman heart beats as of old; what was the further inference, Athenian?"
"Since there must," said Dion, "where greater and smaller beings exist, be a greatest, we can all try to form some conception of him. Now, this conception must fall short of his real greatness. Why? Because as I have demonstrated that this being is the first force, from which all others in the universe, including our minds, must have come, no idea contained in our minds can be greater than the very power which made those minds themselves. But, apart from this demonstration, every one of us can say, a being may exist so great as to be incapable of non-existence. Such a being is conceivable; it is his non-existence which then, by the very supposition, is inconceivable. Now, if there be something the non-existence of which would be inconceivable, while of the being himself you possess a notion, thinking of him as, for example, and terming him, the first force, eternal, boundless—giver of all, recipient of naught—the certainty of his existence is established already for the heart; for that faculty which precedes demonstration in accepting truth—for remember I have shown, and I have proved, that we are so made as to be compelled to believe far more than any of us can ever demonstrate."
"This, then," said Augustus, "is the dim image of which you spoke; the reflection of the star in water?"
"Yes, emperor," replied Dionysius; "but not always dim; the deepest and the purest of all the lights which that water reflects. Often it reflects no image, however; and often it reflects but clouds and storms. To say you truly conceive a thing, is to say you are certain of it in the way you conceive it. If you conceive any thing to be certain, you possess the certainty of it. You may be certain that a thing is uncertain; in other words, you have arrived at a clear notion of its uncertainty. To conceive the contingency of an object, is to possess the positive idea that it is contingent. To conceive a necessary being, is to have the clear idea not simply that he is, but that he must be. He could not be conceived at all, he could not even be an object of thought, as both necessary and non-existent. All conceivable objects, except one, are conceived as either possible or actual. But that one alone is conceived as necessary, and, therefore, necessarily actual. Either a necessary being is not conceivable—and which of us, I should like to know, cannot sit down and indulge in the conception?—or, if he be so much as conceivable, then his reign is recognized, because far more than his existence is involved—I mean the impossibility of his non-existence."
"Are all the dreams," said Domitius Afer, "of a poet's imagination truths because they are conceptions?"