his part must be unscrupulous also in syllogising; but this is a disgraceful scene. To keep clear of such abusive discourse, you must be cautious not to discourse with commonplace, unprepared respondents.”
Athenian Dialectic has passed away, though it had a faint and clumsy revival in the “Disputations” of the middle ages. Even as a preparation for ordinary controversy and debate, it is questionable whether a study of Aristotle’s ‘Topics’ would nowadays be found useful, except so far as the logical distinctions which it contains might sharpen the intellect. But this latter result might equally well be attained by studying the ordinary logics into which all those distinctions have been transplanted. The ‘Topics,’ at the time when it was written, was a work of original penetration, and of vast accumulative labour. Aristotle perhaps ought to have foreseen that it would not be worth his while to reduce Athenian Dialectic to a methodised system, but he did not; and much of what he accumulated for one purpose, came to have great value for another. The chief merit of the ‘Topics’ of Aristotle is, that while intended to be the permanent regulator of Dialectic, it became in reality the cradle of Logic.
Aristotle himself did not use the word “Logic,” which was probably invented afterwards by the Stoics; he spoke of “Analytic,” by which he meant the science of analysing the forms of reasoning. We come now to his ‘Prior and Posterior’ (or First and Second Series of) ‘Analytics.’ In these works he has produced nothing temporary, or of merely antiquarian
