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Few men of letters have made more impression on their contemporaries; and yet his published writings are scanty. The generation that followed sought for his manuscripts as though they were of the classics; but thirty years elapsed before the De inuentione dialectica was printed, and more than fifty before there was a collected edition.
During this period Agricola translated Isocrates ad Demonicum and the Axiochus de contemnenda morte, a dialogue wrongly attributed to Plato, which was a favourite in Renaissance days. Also he completed the chief composition of his lifetime, the De inuentione dialectica, a considerable treatise on rhetoric.
And then again, perhaps I did not like to see men scared or scandalized by unfeeling logical inferences, which would not have troubled them to the day of their death, had they not been forced to recognize them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, "Non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;" I had a great dislike of paper logic.
Faith fighteth against error and heresies, it proveth, censureth and judgeth the spirits and doctrines. Faith in divinity is the wisdom and providence, and belongeth to the doctrine. Faith is the 'dialectica', for it is altogether wit and wisdom. Luther in his Postills discourseth far better and more genially of faith than in these paragraphs.
My Creed may be put in the words of Newman's favourite quotation: Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum Not in cold logic is it God's will that His people should find salvation." "It is profoundly true," sighed Mr. Cargill, and Miss Claudia's beaming eyes proved her assent. The moment of destiny, though I did not know it, had arrived.
And then again, perhaps I did not like to see men scared or scandalised by unfeeling logical inferences, which would not have touched them to the day of their death, had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, "Non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;" I had a great dislike of paper logic.
Consequently, in a work which he significantly entitles De inventione dialectica, he defines logic as the art of speaking in a probable manner concerning any topic which can be treated in a speech. According to Agricola's scheme, rhetoric retains "elocutio," style; and logic carries over "inventio," as his title shows, and "dispositio."
But about this time it fell out that the learned brother aforesaid had read "Aristotelis Dialectica," and especially that wonderful piece de Interpretatione, which has the faculty of teaching its readers to find out a meaning in everything but itself, like commentators on the Revelations, who proceed prophets without understanding a syllable of the text.
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