[Footnote 63: The Platonic critics talk about the Eristics (as they do about the Sophists) as if that name designated a known and definite class of persons. This is altogether misleading. The term is vituperative, and was applied by different persons according to their own tastes. Ueberweg remarks with great justice, that Isokrates called all speculators on philosophy by the name of Eristics. "Als ob jener Rhetor nicht (wie ja doch Spengel selbst gut nachgewiesen hat) alle und jede Spekulation mit dem Nahmen der Eristik bezeichnete." (Untersuchungen über die Zeitfolge der Plat. Schriften, p. 257.) In reference to the distinction which Aristotle attempts to draw between Dialectic and Eristic--the former legitimate, the latter illegitimate--we must remark that even in the legitimate Dialectic the purpose prominent in his mind is that of victory over an opponent. He enjoins that you are not only to guard against your opponent, lest he should out-manoeuvre you, but you are to conceal and disguise the sequence of your questions so as to out-manoeuvre him. [Greek: Chrê\ d' o(/per phula/ttesthai paragge/llomen a)pokrinome/nous, au)tou\s e)picheirou=ntas peira=sthai lantha/nein.] Anal. Prior. ii. 66, a. 32. Compare Topic. 108, a. 25, 156, a. 23, 164, b. 35.] [Side-note: Without the habit of formal debate, Plato could not have composed his Euthydêmus, nor Aristotle the treatise De Sophisticis Elenchis.] Without the experience acquired by this habit of dialectic debate at Athens, Plato could not have composed his Euthydêmus, exhibiting a _reductio ad absurdum_ of several verbal fallacies--nor could we have had the logical theories of Aristotle, embodied in the Analytica and Topica with its annexed treatise De Sophisticis Elenchis, in which various fallacies are discriminated and classified. These theories, and the corollaries connected with them, do infinite honour to the comprehensive intellect of Aristotle: but he could not have conceived them without previous study of the ratiocinative process. He, as the first theorizer, must have had before him abundant arguments explicitly laid out, and contested, or open to be contested, at every step by an opponent.[64] Towards such habit of formal argumentation, a strong repugnance was felt by many of the Athenian public, as there is among modern readers generally: but those who felt thus, had probably little interest in the speculations either of Plato or of Aristotle. That the Platonic critics should themselves feel this same repugnance, seems to me not consistent with their admiration for the great dialectician and logician of antiquity: nor can I at all subscribe to their view, when they present to us the inherent infirmities of the human intellect as factitious distempers generated by the habit of formal debate, and by the rapacity of Protagoras, Prodikus, and others.