P E T R I R A M I

A heavy weight and great difficulty were proposed, but love also easily persuaded him that whatever could be done, should be done. Therefore, anticipating in his mind the longer stretches of his labor and the sweats of much time, he set before his eyes one leader of all paths above all else: USE original: "VSVS", from which the truth and utility of every art might later appear. For whatever he professed for the sake of eloquence in Plato, or Cicero, or Caesar, or Virgil, or any other authors whatsoever, he almost always professed it for the sake of some art and doctrine as well. Thus, he took up the orations of Cicero and the book On Fate original: "de Fato" for reforming rhetoric and dialectics; for physics and astronomy, Virgil’s Georgics and Cicero’s Dream; for ethics, the commentaries of Julius Caesar and the books On Laws. For he embraced and loved this kind of teaching above all, by which disciplines are made not only clearer, but more convenient and useful for human life. For thus he had received from Plato: that many arts are sagaciously invented by human experience; for skill indeed causes our life to proceed artificially, while lack of skill causes it to proceed by chance. For Polus in Plato’s Gorgias put it thus: original Greek: "ὦ χαιρεφῶν, πολλαὶ τέχναι ἐν ἀνθρώποις εἰσὶν ἐκ τῆς ἐμπειρίας ἐμπείρως ὡρμημέναι. ἐμπειρία μὲν γὰρ ποιεῖ τὸν αἰῶνα ἡμῶν πορεύεσθαι κτ τέχνεν: ἀπερία ὂ κτ τύχεν." — translation: "O Chaerephon, there are many arts among men that have proceeded expertly from experience. For experience makes our life proceed by art, while inexperience proceeds by chance." He remembered that this same thing was repeated and celebrated in philosophy by Aristotle, the disciple, that one becomes a master of any discipline through observation, experience, induction, sense, historia history/inquiry, empeiria experience, epagoge induction, aisthesis sense perception. Therefore, led by the authority of these philosophers, or rather by the nature and truth of the things themselves, he sought the fruit of the liberal arts in the authors of those disciplines who were preeminent in fame and glory. The first labor of the year in which he became royal professor of eloquence and philosophy was to demonstrate by the thing itself and by examples that eloquence and philosophy (even if the precepts were distinct in the arts) were nevertheless coupled and joined in use. Thus, he wished to begin the trustworthiness of his demonstration from the prince of eloquence, Cicero, and indeed from the doctrine of Aristotle. And since so many examples of Cicero were at hand, he selected those from the Consular Orations most of all for Aristotle’s epagoge induction and empeiria experience, which would be most approved by the author himself, such as the three Agrarian Orations, the four Catilinarians...

Ramus's method of teaching.