Varchi says: Just as the logician uses for his means the noblest of all instruments, that is, demonstration or the demonstrative syllogism; so the dialectician, the topical syllogism; and the sophist, the sophistical, that is, the apparent and deceitful; the rhetorician, the enthymeme, and the poet, the example, which is the least worthy of all.

Johnson, who was no dialectician, and, moreover, superstitious enough himself, gives eight different definitions of the word; which is equivalent to confessing his inability to define it at all: "1.

Nor is it probable that as a dialectician he has ever been surpassed, while his purity of life and his lofty inquiries and his belief in God and immortality make him, in an ethical point of view, the most worthy of the disciples of Socrates.

He was not a dialectician, but a moralist, and as such takes the highest ground of all the old inquirers after truth.

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

Let us see if doctors or dialecticians Will dare to dispute my definitions, Or attack any one of my learned theses.

The schools of Athens could make Sophists, rhetoricians, dialecticians, and sceptics.

This insurrection of human intelligence gave great alarm to the orthodox leaders of the Church; and to suppress it the Church raised up conservative dialecticians as acute and able as those who strove for emancipation.

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.

All the various schools of the mediaeval dialecticians, Realists and Nominalists alike, sought to establish old theories, not to discover new truth.

For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux.

" "My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be a far better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use his Common Sense.

Did I not just say that any man might be a dialectician?

Every man is a dialectician, be he scholar or boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he does not understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expression of them, by that Reason which is at once common to men, and independent of them.

For Aristotle himself has given many rules for arguing: and those who followed him, and who are called dialecticians, have delivered many very difficult rules.

The next topic is one peculiar to dialecticians; derived from consequents, and antecedents, and inconsistencies; and this one is very different from that drawn from differences.

But the dialecticians call that conclusion of the argument in which, when you have first made an assumption, that which is connected with it follows as a consequence of the assumption, the first mood of the conclusion; and when, because you have denied the consequence, it follows that that also to which it was a consequence must be denied also, that is the second mood.

This kind of disputing is very closely connected with the mode of discussion adopted by you lawyers in reply, and still more closely with that adopted by philosophers, as they share with the orators in the employment of that general conclusion which is drawn from inconsistent sentences, which is called by dialecticians the third mood, and by rhetoricians an enthymeme.

And from those conclusions which I have mentioned above, the former is called by the dialecticians the fourth mood, and the latter the fifth.

By degrees, however, as Spinello conversed with her, now of one trifle, then of another, her eyes involuntarily wandered to that portion of the room in which the young dialectician sat involved in shadow, and exerting all his eloquence and ingenuity to awaken her attention.

A similar mentality can be seen in another school which appeared from the fifth century B.C. on, the "dialecticians".

Here are a number of names to mention: the most important are Kung-sun Lung and Hui Tz[)u], who are comparable with the ancient Greek dialecticians and Sophists.

It knows nothing of the rules of the dialecticians,of the syllogism, the dilemma, the enthymeme, or the sorites,but it recurs to the homely implements of its operative parent for its methods of instruction, and with the plumb-line it inculcates rectitude of conduct, and draws lessons of morality from the workman's square.

Among the crotchets of this born dialectician was a theory as to the importance of Christian names in determining the future behaviour and destiny of the children to whom they are given; and, whatever admixture of jest there might have been in some of his other fancies, in this his son affirms he was absolutely serious.

The result of all these triumphs over dialecticians and theologians was unfortunate.