That at the present day the word humorous is generally used in German literature in the sense of comical arises from the miserable desire to give things a more distinguished name than belongs to them, the name of a class that stands above them. Thus every inn must be called a hotel, every money-changer a banker, every concert a musical academy, the merchant’s counting-house a bureau, the potter an artist in clay, and therefore also every clown a humourist. The word _humour_ is borrowed from the English to denote a quite peculiar species of the ludicrous, which indeed, as was said above, is related to the sublime, and which was first remarked by them. But it is not intended to be used as the title for all kinds of jokes and buffoonery, as is now universally the case in Germany, without opposition from men of letters and scholars; for the true conception of that modification, that tendency of the mind, that child of the sublime and the ridiculous, would be too subtle and too high for their public, to please which they take pains to make everything flat and vulgar. Well, “high words and a low meaning” is in general the motto of the noble present, and accordingly now-a-days he is called a humourist who was formerly, called a buffoon. Chapter IX.(21) On Logic In General. Logic, Dialectic, and Rhetoric go together, because they make up the whole of a _technic of reason_, and under this title they ought also to be taught—Logic as the technic of our own thinking, Dialectic of disputing with others, and Rhetoric of speaking to many (_concionatio_); thus corresponding to the singular, dual, and plural, and to the monologue, the dialogue, and the panegyric. Under Dialectic I understand, in agreement with Aristotle (_Metaph._, iii. 2, and _Analyt. Post._, i. 11), the art of conversation directed to the mutual investigation of truth, especially philosophical truth. But a conversation of this kind necessarily passes more or less into controversy; therefore dialectic may also be explained as the art of disputation. We have examples and patterns of dialectic in the Platonic dialogues; but for the special theory of it, thus for the technical rules of disputation, eristics, very little has hitherto been accomplished. I have worked out an attempt of the kind, and given an example of it, in the second volume of the “Parerga,” therefore I shall pass over the exposition of this science altogether here. In Rhetoric the rhetorical figures are very much what the syllogistic figures are in Logic; at all events they are worth considering. In Aristotle’s time they seem to have not yet become the object of theoretical investigation, for he does not treat of them in any of his rhetorics, and in this reference we are referred to Rutilius Lupus, the epitomiser of a later Gorgias.