The painter who threw the sponge.
Apelles could not paint the foam on a horse's mouth, gave up, and threw his dirty sponge at the panel. The mark it left was the foam.
The Apelles story is the founding anecdote of the school's emotional claim, and it is a story about failure producing the result that effort could not. Sextus tells it to explain something he says the early sceptics found by accident: they took up the practice hoping to reach tranquillity by settling questions, could not settle them, suspended judgement — and tranquillity arrived anyway, following suspension as a shadow follows a body. The structure is exactly that of grace in a theistic tradition, or of sudden awakening in Chan: the thing cannot be obtained by wanting it. It is the one point where Pyrrhonism sounds like a religion rather than a technique.
The Sceptics were in hopes of gaining quietude by means of a decision regarding the disparity of the objects of sense and of thought, and being unable to effect this they suspended judgement; and they found that quietude, as if by chance, followed upon their suspense, even as a shadow follows its substance.
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.29, R. G. Bury translationSextus tells the Apelles anecdote in I.28 and draws this moral from it immediately after.
The same ground, other faiths
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