β. Since to Carneades sensation is merely what comes first, he then says: “The criterion is thus to be sought for in the affection of the soul by actuality.” For it is only in the mean between the energy of the soul and that of outward things that the criterion can fall. A determinate content of sensation such as this, which is at the same time again determined through consciousness, this passivity and activity of consciousness, this third something, Carneades called the conception which constituted to the Stoics the content of thought. Respecting this criterion, he says: “This being determined must, however, be an indication both of itself and of the apparent, or of the thing through which it is affected; this affection is none other than the conception. Hence in life the conception is something which presents both itself and the other. If we see something, the sight has an affection, and it no longer is just as it was before seeing. Through an alteration such as this there arise in us two things: first change itself, _i.e._ the ordinary conception” (the subjective side) “and then that which change produced, what is seen” (the objective). “Now just as the light shows itself and everything in it, the conception reigns over knowledge in the animal, and it must, like the light, make itself evident, and reveal the actual through which consciousness is affected.” This is quite the correct standpoint for consciousness, and it is in itself comprehensible, but it is only for the phenomenal mind that the other in the determinateness of consciousness is present. We now expect a development of this opposition; but Carneades passes into the region of empiricism without giving this further development. “Since the conception,” he continues, “does not always point to the truth, but often lies, and resembles bad messengers in that it misrepresents what it proceeds from, it follows that not every conception can give a criterion of the truth, but only that which is true, if any are so. But because none is so constituted that it might not also be false, conceptions are likewise a common criterion of the true as of the false, or they form no criterion.” Carneades also appealed to the fact of a conception proceeding even from something not existing, or—if the Stoics asserted that what in the objective is thinkingly apprehended is an existent—to the fact that the false may also be apprehended.[177] In a popular way that is stated thus: There are also conceptions of untruth. Although I am convinced, it is still my conception merely, even if men think they have said something by saying that they have this conviction. They likewise say that insight or objective knowledge is still only the conviction of difference, but really the content is in its nature universal.