PETRI RAMI

What forbids me from σωκρατίζειν acting like Socrates for a while, and, omitting the Aristotelian authority, asking whether this doctrine of Dialectica dialectics is true and proper? For perhaps that philosopher deceived us with his authority, so that it should no longer be a wonder to me if I did not find fruit in those books where there was none. What if that doctrine is fabricated? Do I not torture and crucify myself in vain to reap fruit from a sterile and arid soil? But yet I gave and rendered great thanks to Galen, greater to Plato, but the greatest to Aristotle, when I had extracted that logic, like oracles, from the Posterior Analytics concerning the matter and form of art. And so, as if admonished by the living voice of the present Aristotle, that all documents of all arts must be weighed and examined by that balance, I returned to the reading of the entire Organon, that I might consider how so many decrees collected into logic agreed with those principles and laws. I sought first from that Platonic categorical rule of method the highest and most general end of the logical faculty; the first definition, by which the art of reasoning well might be defined for me, as generally and broadly as that thing extends, namely, by reason. In the logical Organon, having repeated the whole work, I did not find the definition; I remembered then the dialectical partition of invention and judgment or disposition. And when I had more studiously contemplated and admired such light, and one so proper to the human mind in inventing and judging, I turned to the Organon-based logic and was stunned; I seemed to see a kind of chaos: thus the parts of invention and disposition were confused among themselves with definitions, without partitions, without popular and clear examples; and then I recognized that I had been deceived by the false persuasion of scholastic opinion, and that the Socratic love of method had been very great in Aristotle, but with a vanity equal to that which had been in Socrates, who would abandon his lover. Forgive me, whoever you are who hear these things, if I speak truly and simply with you: With what joy do you think I then exulted, with what gladness was I affected, with what pleasure of mind was I struck? For I thought a great foundation of wisdom had been laid for me, because I had then been loosened from the fog of gross ignorance, and I understood that because I had learned scholastic sophistries, I had attained nothing of wisdom. For Horace rightly says:

Virtue is to flee vice, and the first wisdom
Is to have lacked folly.

Before, it seemed to me a burden heavier than Aetna to bear; I was so vexed by the false persuasion that I believed the Organon-based logic was both most perfect and was taught and exercised most perfectly; and when that whole thing was known and vehemently clamored for with scholastic shouts, and I had perceived no force of logic and no use, I thought myself born with a genius condemned to misery. And so, for such a gift of such pleasing liberation, I gave immortal thanks to God the Best and Greatest in the name of Galen, Plato, and Aristotle, because He had provided them as pilots for me, through whom, rescued from such a long tossing, from so many waves, from so many tempests, I might finally either reach port in safety or at least catch sight of nearby land. You have, therefore, how Ramus arrived from scholastic darkness to this light of doctrine. In the twenty-first year of his age, which was the year of Christ 1536, he devoted himself entirely to the studies of Dialectica dialectics with great eagerness of mind, that he might restore the use of that art, so celebrated by the exercises of the ancients, both philosophers and orators, to the Parisian schools. In that ardor of mind, at the age of twenty-eight, if I am not mistaken, he first published his Dialectica dialectics to the Parisian Academy and the Aristotelian Animadversions; the year was then 1543. The following year he published Euclid in Latin, commended him with his own preface, and dedicated him to Charles of Lorraine. But a certain evil genius...