P E T R I R A M I OF PETRUS RAMUS

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Therefore, he took this problem: That whatever had been said by Aristotle was fabricated. Astonished by the novelty and insolence of the problem, our Masters, when they saw that the authority of Aristotle (with which, like a shield, they were accustomed to protect themselves against all insults) had been snatched from them, attacked the candidate (as the barbarians barbarously call him) for an entire day with vain effort. From this fortuitous success, he subsequently seized the opportunity to seriously and freely judge and inquire into Aristotle; and he set out to polish, sharpen, and free from rust Logic, especially as an instrument of the other arts. But he himself will speak better about these logical studies from the epilogue of the fifth book of the Dialectical Schools. When I had spent three years and six months, he says, in scholastic philosophy in our Academy according to the laws, in knowing, disputing, and meditating upon the books of the Organon The body of Aristotle's logical works (for of all the Aristotelian books, the logical ones are especially clamored for and reclaimed during the whole three-year period), when, I say, I had passed that time in such a way, and was already an absolved master of arts, so to speak, and gifted with the philosophical laurel, I took account of my age consumed in the scholastic arts, and considered in what things I might exercise for the future the arts of the logical Organon, which I had previously learned with so many clamors and sweats. I did not find myself made wiser in the history and antiquity of things, more eloquent in speaking, more prompt in poetry, nor finally, in any way wiser in any thing by such logic. Woe to me, how I was stunned, how deeply I groaned, how I lamented myself and my nature, that by some unhappy and miserable fate, I judged myself born with a genius utterly abhorring the Muses, I who could perceive or see no fruit of that wisdom, which was so highly proclaimed in those logical texts, despite such great labors! Therefore, so that I might not do nothing at all, I returned to the studies of eloquence, which I had interrupted four years before, and I exercised myself in training the youth in them; yet in such a way that I constantly looked back to that settled opinion and persuasion regarding the Aristotelian logical texts. For in every reading of poets and orators, I watched, I labored, I strove in every way whether it could happen that I might recall the books of the Organon to some use of erudition. I read the distribution of dialectic in Cicero and Quintilian on invention and judgment; but I read it more according to the custom of our times.

Aristotle's sayings on the logic of the Organon.