Xenophanes, quoted by Karl Popper in “The Beginnings of Rationalism” and cited by the excellent Matt Young (who, along with Superfluidity, will surely have wiser commentary on Popper than I ever did).
The quote in full:
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black while the the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw and could sculpture like men, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.
The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is better…
These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it:Â for all is but a woven web of guesses.
In anticipating Popper’s brilliant description of how we know what we know, presented alongside his solution to the problem of induction, Xenophanes demonstrates again: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
