Hence we make it a rule to attack a counter-argument, even though to all appearances it is true and forcible, in the belief that its truth is only superficial, and that in the course of the dispute another argument will occur to us by which we may upset it, or succeed in confirming the truth of our statement.

When your opponent uses a merely superficial or sophistical argument and you see through it, you can, it is true, refute it by setting forth its captious and superficial character; but it is better to meet him with a counter-argument which is just as superficial and sophistical, and so dispose of him; for it is with victory that you are concerned, and not with truth.

The gigantic bones have all turned out to be animal remains; even the skeleton twenty-five feet high and ten feet broad, which one savant wrote a book called "Gigantosteologia" to prove human, and another, a counter-argument, called "Gigantomachia," to prove animal,neither of the philosophers taking the trouble to draw a single fragment of the fossil.

As for the barbarians' complaints, he disparaged them, offering no counter-argument, but asserting that the dispute which the prince had with Tigranes concerned some boundaries, and that three men should decide the case for them.