[In the following excerpt from Against Colotes, Plutarch seeks out logical contradictions and inconsistencies in Epicurean philosophy, focusing largely on ideas of sensation and sense perception.]

(1109a) … Anyway, he [Colotes] who even held that nothing is any more like this than like that, is using Epicurus' doctrine that all presentations received through the senses are true. (1109b) For if when two people speak and one person says that the wine is dry and the other says that it is sweet, and neither is wrong about his sense-perception, how can the wine be dry rather than sweet? And again, you can see that some people treat a bath as though it were hot and that others treat the same bath as though it were cold. For some ask for cold water to be poured in and others ask for hot. They say that a lady from Sparta came to see Berenike, the wife of Deiotaurus, and when they got close to each other they both turned away, the one nauseated by the [smell of] perfume, the other by the [smell of] butter. So if the one sense-perception is no more true than the other, it is likely both that the water is no more cold than hot and (1109c) that the perfume and the butter are no more sweet-smelling than foul-smelling. For if someone says that the same object of presentation is different for different people, he has missed the fact that he is saying that [the object] is both [at once].

And the much discussed symmetries and harmonies of the pores in the sense organs and the compound mixtures of seeds which they say produce different sense-perceptions of quality in different people by being distributed in all flavours and odours and colours, do these not immediately force things into being 'no more [this than that]' for them? For they reassure those who think that sense-perception deceives on the grounds that they see the same things having opposite effects on perceivers, and instruct them [as follows]: (1109d) since everything is combined and blended together and since different things are designed by nature to fit into different [pores], it is not possible for everyone to touch and grasp the same quality; nor does the object [of sense-perception] affect everyone the same way with all of its parts, but all of them only experience those parts [of an object] with which their sense-organs are symmetrical; so they are wrong to quarrel about whether the object is good or bad or white or not white, supposing that they are supporting their own sense-perceptions by undermining those of other people; but one must not quarrel with even one sense-perception, since all sense-perceptions make contact with something, (1109e) each drawing what is compatible and suitable to itself from the compound mixture as though from a spring; and must not assert [things] about the whole when one is in contact with [mere] parts, nor think that everyone has the same experience, but that different people have different experiences according to the differing qualities and powers of it.

So is it time to consider which men do more to inflict 'no more [this than that]' on things than those who proclaim that every sensible object is a blend of all sorts of qualities—'mixed like new wine in the filter'—and who agree that their canons [of truth] would perish and their criterion would completely vanish if they left any object of perception whatsoever pure [and simple] and they did not leave each and every one of them a plurality?

Notice, then, what Epicurus has had Polyaenus (in the Symposium) say to him about the heating power of wine. (1109f) For when he said, "Epicurus, do you deny that there are heating properties in wine?" he answered, "What need is there to show that wine has heating properties?" And a bit further on: "For wine seems in general not to have heating properties, but a given quantity could be said to have a heating effect on this individual person."

And again, suggesting the cause [for this], he attributed it to (1110a) compactions and dispersions of atoms and to commixtures of and linkages with other atoms in the mixture of wine with the body; and then he adds: "that is why one must not say that wine has heating properties in general, but that a given quantity has a heating effect on a nature of this type which is in this sort of condition, or that a given amount could have a cooling effect on this [other] nature. For in such an aggregate [as wine] there are also the sort of natures from which coolness might be produced, or which being linked appropriately with other natures, would produce the nature of coolness. Hence, people are deceived, some into saying that wine in general has cooling properties, others that it has heating properties."

But he who says that the majority are deceived when they suppose that what heats things has heating properties, or that what cools things has cooling properties, is himself deceived, (1110b) unless he believes that it follows from what he says that each thing is no more like this than like that. And he adds that wine often does not enter the body with heating or cooling properties, but that when the mass has been set in motion and the rearrangement of bodies has occurred, sometimes the atoms which produce heat assemble in one place and by their numbers produce heat and fever in the body, and sometimes they are expelled and [so] chill it.

It is obvious that these arguments can be used against everything which is generally said or believed to be bitter, sweet, purgative, soporific, or bright, on the grounds that nothing (1110c) has its own independent quality or power when it is in bodies, nor is it active rather than passive, but rather takes on different features and mixtures in various bodies.

For Epicurus himself, in book two of his Against Theophrastus, says that colours are not natural properties of bodies, but are produced by certain orderings and positions [of the atoms] relative to our vision; yet he says that, by this argument, body is no more colourless than it is coloured. And earlier he had written this, word for word: "but even without this part [of my theory] I do not know how one can say that those things which are in the dark have colour. And yet, when there is a dark cloud of air [i.e., fog] evenly wrapped around things, (1110d) it is often the case that some men perceive differences in colours while others do not because of the dullness of their vision; again, when we go into a dark house we do not see colours, but after we have stayed for a while we do." Therefore, no body will be said to have colour rather than not to have it.

And if colour is relative, so too will white and blue be relative, and if these, so too sweet and bitter; consequently it will be true to predicate of every quality that it no more exists than does not exist: for the object will be like this for people in one condition, but not for those who are not. (1110e) So Colotes ends up pouring over himself and his master the very mud and confusion in which he says those people wallow who assert that things are 'no more this than that'.

So is this the only place where this fine fellow shows that he "teems with sores though he tries to heal others"? Not at all. In his second accusation [Colotes] fails even more miserably to notice how he drives Epicurus, along with Democritus, outside, the pale of normal life. For he claims that Democritus' dicta, "colour is by convention and sweet is by convention" and compounds are by convention and so forth, but "in truth there are void and atoms," are opposed to sense perception; and that anyone who clings to and uses this theory could not even think of himself as human or as alive.

I have no criticism to make of this argument, and I claim that these [Democritean] views are as inseparable from Epicurus' opinions as they themselves say the shape and weight are from the atom. For what does Democritus say? that substances infinite in number, indivisible and indestructible and, moreover, qualitiless and impassible, are scattered about and move in the void; (1111a) and when they approach one another or collide or get tangled up with each other they appear, because they are aggregated, as water, fire, a plant, or a man; and that everything is what he calls atomic 'forms' and is nothing else. For there is no coming-into-being from what-is-not, and from what-is nothing could come to be since atoms can neither suffer nor change due to their solidity. Hence colour does not exist, [for it would have to be] made up of colourless things, nor do nature and soul exist, [for they would have to be] made up of qualitiless and impassive things.

So Democritus is to be criticized not for conceding what follows from his principles, but for assuming principles from which these conclusions follow. (1111b) For he ought not to have posited that the primary entities were unchangeable, but having made this postulate he ought to have seen that he has eliminated the genesis of all qualities. The most brazen position of all is to see the absurdity and to deny it. So Epicurus makes the most brazen claim, saying that he posits the same principles but does not say that "colour is by convention" and [so too] sweet and bitter and the qualities. If "does not say" means "does not admit," then he is up to his old tricks. For while destroying divine providence he says that he leaves piety intact, and while choosing friendship for the sake of pleasure he says that he would suffer the greatest pains for the sake of his friends, and he says that he postulates that the totality is unlimited but that he does not eliminate up and down. This sort of behaviour is not right even when one is joking over a drink: (111lc) to take a cup and drink as much as one wants and then to give back what is left. In argument one must recall this wise maxim: the beginnings may not be necessitated, but the consequences are. So it was not necessary to pos tulate—or rather to steal [the doctrine] from Democritus—that the principles of the universe are atoms; but when once he postulated the doctrine and prided himself on its superficial plausibility, then he ought to have drained its difficulties to the last drop too, or showed us how bodies which have no qualities produced most varied qualities just by coming together in a compound. For example, where did you get what is called hot and how did it come to be an attribute of your atoms, (1111d) which neither came [into the compound] already having heat, nor did they become hot by their conjunction? For the former is characteristic of something which has a quality, and the latter of something which is naturally prone to be affected; but you say that neither of these is appropriate for your atoms because they are indestructible.

… (1112e) … When Epicurus says, "the nature of existing things is bodies and place," should we interpret him as meaning that nature is something distinct from and in addition to the existing things, (1112f) or as referring just to the existent things and to nothing else? just as, for instance, he is in the habit of calling the void itself 'the nature of void' and, by Zeus, the totality [of things] the 'nature of the totality'.

… (1114a) Yet by saying that the totality is one he somehow prevented us from living. For when Epicurus says that the totality is unlimited and ungenerated and indestructible and neither grows nor shrinks, he discourses about the totality as though it were some one thing. In the beginning of his treatise [On Nature] he suggests that the nature of existing things is bodies and void, and though it is one nature, he yet divided it into two. One of these is really nothing, but you call it intangible and void and incorporeal.

… (1118d) … For if, as they think, a man is the product of both, a body of this sort and a soul, then he who investigates the nature of soul is investigating the nature of man by way of its more important principle. And let us not learn from Socrates, that sophistical boaster, that the soul is hard to understand by reason and ungraspable by sense-perception, but rather let us learn it from these wise men who get only as far as the corporeal powers of the soul, by virtue of which it provides the body with warmth and softness and tension, (1118e) when they cobble together its substance out of something hot and something breathlike and something airy, and they do not get to the most important part, but give up. For that in virtue of which it judges and remembers and loves and hates and in general the intelligent and reasoning part, this they say comes to be from a kind of 'nameless' quality.

. . (1119f)…Who makes worse mistakes in dialectic than you [Epicureans], who completely abolish the class of things said lekta,], which give substance to discourse and leave only [mere] utterances and the external things, saying that the intermediate class of 'signified things' (by means of which learning, (1120a) teaching, basic grasps, conceptions, impulses, and assents all occur) does not exist at all? …