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Updated: May 15, 2025
Rational instruction in the Bible and in Hebrew grammar, scorned by the Talmudic dialecticians as superficial studies, was banished from the Heder. Happily for the future writer, his father taught him the Bible, and awakened love in his sensitive heart for the Hebrew language and for the glorious past of his people. At the same time, his Talmudic education went on admirably.
For the mere act of division, and of definition, and the distribution of the partitions of a doubtful question, and the understanding the topics of arguments, and the arranging the argumentation itself properly, and the discerning what ought to be assumed in arguing, and what follows from what has been assumed, and the distinguishing what is true from what is false, and what is probable from what is incredible, and refuting assumptions which are not legitimate, or which are inappropriate, and discussing all these different points either concisely as those do who are called dialecticians, or copiously as an orator should do, are all fruits of the practice in disputing with acuteness and speaking with fluency, which is instilled into the disciples of that academy.
The saints? the saints were not dialecticians; far more likely the evil one himself, in whom the Church has always such faith. "He hath a devil and by Beelzebub casteth out devils." It was all like a play, only more exciting than any play, and going on endlessly, the excitement always getting stronger till it became the chief stimulus and occupation of life.
If ever men have preached Christ, these men did; Christ, nothing but Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. They had no system, they had no views, they combated no opinions, they took no side. Let the dialecticians dispute about this nice distinction or that. There could be no doubt that Christ had died and risen, and was alive for evermore.
Such harmony should exist, says the holy man, for though the soul is not mortal like the body, nor the body spiritual like the soul, we shall, if we follow the method of the dialecticians, find that such differences do not necessarily render the two inharmonious. Harmony cannot be produced from like elements or like sounds, but only by the right adjustment of those which are dissimilar.
Anselm did not carry out metaphysical reasonings to such lengths as did the Schoolmen who succeeded him, those dialecticians who lived in universities in the thirteenth century. He was a devout man, who meditated on God and on revealed truth with awe and reverence, without any desire of system-making or dialectical victories.
The Petit Pont belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and down disputing. In the island adjacent to the king's palace, which dominates the whole town, the palace of philosophy is seen where study reigns alone as sovereign, a citadel of light and immortality."
All the various schools of the mediaeval dialecticians, Realists and Nominalists alike, sought to establish old theories, not to discover new truth. They could not go beyond their assumptions. So far as their assumptions were true, they rendered great service by their inexorable logic in defending them. They did not establish premises; that was not their concern or mission.
France submits sometimes to the yoke of subtle dialecticians who preach total disarmament, who spread insanely disastrous doctrine of capitulation, glorify disgrace and humiliation, and stupidly drive us on to suicide. The manly counsels of Ardant du Picq are admirable lessons for a nation awakening.
How far the "definitions" of Socrates led to the solution of the great problems of philosophy, in the hands of such dialecticians as Plato and Aristotle, I will not attempt to enter upon here; but this I think I am warranted in saying, that the main object and aim of Socrates, as a teacher of philosophy, were to establish certain elemental truths, concerning which there could be no dispute, and then to reason from them, since they were not mere assumptions, but certitudes, and certitudes also which appealed to human consciousness, and therefore could not be overthrown.
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