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But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing the honour of the pursuit. Very true, he said.
We have as yet no magnificent vision, so definite, so touching, so 'clothed with the beauty of a thousand stars, as to make us eager, for the sake of it, to murder all the sweetnesses of filial piety in an aggressive eristic. This much one concedes.
What he wanted to do was to study the truth for its own sake, without having to think of and be hindered by the exposure of errors; and above all, to seize it in all its breadth and all its depths, to have done with this blighting and irritating eristic, and to reflect in a vast Mirror the whole and purest light of the sacred dogmas. He never found the time for it.
Because polemic and eristic discourses must follow the adversaries at the heels whithersoever they go, finding them out in all the lurking-places of their elaborate subterfuges, and conflicting with them wheresoever they pitch, until not only all their blows be awarded, but themselves also all derouted, therefore, perceiving the informality of the Formalists to be such that sometimes they plead for the controverted ceremonies as necessary, sometimes as expedient, sometimes as lawful, and sometimes as indifferent, I resolve to follow the trace, and to evince, by force of reason, that there is none of all those respects to justify either the urging or the using of them. And albeit the Archbishop of Spalato (Pref. Libror. de Rep. Eccl.) cometh forth like an Olympic champion, stoutly brandishing and bravading, and making his account that no antagonist can match him except a prelate, albeit likewise the Bishop of Edinburgh (Proc. in Perth, Assembly, part iii. p. 55) would have us to think that we are not well advised to enter into combat with such Achillean strength as they have on their side, yet must our opposites know, that we have more daring minds than to be dashed with the vain flourish of their great words. Wherefore, in all these four ways wherein I am to draw the line of my dispute, I will not shun to encounter and handle strokes with the most valiant champions of that faction, knowing that—Trophoeum ferre me
SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS. We may just mention the very celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us that of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which appears to have been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of Elea and of Gorgias.
Long ago, in the Euthydemus, the vulgar application of the 'both and neither' Eristic had been subjected to a similar criticism, which there takes the form of banter and irony, here of illustration. The attack upon the Ideas is resumed in the Philebus, and is followed by a return to a more rational philosophy.
Therefore I regard this paragraph, p. 223-4, as a specimen of admirable special pleading 'ad hominem' in the Court of eristic Logic; but I condemn it as a wilful resignation or temporary self-deposition of the reason. I will not suppose what my reason declares to be no position at all, and therefore an impossible sub-position. Ib. p. 235.
Certainly, if Home Rule is to be refused till all the prophets of evil are refuted, Ireland must go without Home Rule for ever. "If the sky fall, we shall catch larks." But he would be a foolish bird-catcher who waited for that contingency. And not less foolish is the statesman who sits still till every conceivable objection to his policy has been mathematically refuted in advance, and every wild prediction falsified by the event; for that would ensure his never moving at all. Sedet æternumque sedebit. A proper enough attitude, perhaps, on the part of an eristic philosopher speculating on politics in the silent shade of academic groves, but hardly suitable for a practical politician who has to take action on one of the most burning questions of our time. Human affairs are not governed by mathematical reasoning. You cannot demonstrate the precise results of any legislative measure beforehand as you can demonstrate the course of a planet in the solar system. "Probability," as Bishop Butler says, "is the guide of life;" and an older philosopher than Butler has warned us that to demand demonstrative proof in the sphere of contingent matter is the same kind of absurdity as to demand probable reasoning in mathematics. You cannot confute a prophet before the event; you can only disbelieve him. The advocates of Home Rule believe that their policy would in general have an exactly contrary effect to that predicted by their opponents. In truth, every act of legislation is, before experience, amenable to such destructive criticism as these critics urge against Home Rule. I have not a doubt that they could have made out an unanswerable "case" against the Great Charter at Runnymede; and they would find it easy to prove on
The train of consequences which follows, is inferred by altering the predicate into 'not many. Yet, perhaps, if a strict Eristic had been present, oios aner ei kai nun paren, he might have affirmed that the not many presented a different aspect of the conception from the one, and was therefore not identical with it. Such a subtlety would be very much in character with the Zenonian dialectic.
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