Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/68

place which they have so long held in the forefront of the writings of Aristotle. We turn to that which was, so far as we know, in reality the opening treatise of the Aristotelian Encyclopædia—namely, the ‘Topics;’ and there is some peculiarity to be remarked in the very fact that the subject with which it deals should have been the first to be taken in hand. We know that Aristotle founded, and all but completed, the science of Logic; but we are apt to forget that, when he began to write, the very idea that there was, or could be, such a science had never come into anybody’s head. What philosophers then knew about, and practised, and formulated, was not Logic, or the science of the laws of reasoning, but Dialectic, or the art of discussion. This art was by no means confined to philosophers, but it was the fashion of the day, and was widely and constantly in use in Athenian society, as an intellectual game or fencing-match. The dialogues of Plato give us dramatic specimens of the encounter of wits which might be seen exhibited in numerous Athenian circles from the middle of the fifth century B.C. down to the time of Aristotle. That restless and intellectual people who, three and a half centuries later, were described as “spending their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing,” were at an earlier period possessed by an insatiate appetite for discussion and controversy, whether with a view to truth or to mere victory over an opponent. Dialectic then, as an art, was thoroughly recognised, and all but universally practised, yet still the fundamental principles on which it must rest had never yet been pro-