recurs after a cycle of transformations. Every occurrence has another for its consequent, and this consequent another, and so on, till we are brought round to the primary occurrence.”
After finishing his ‘Later Analytics,’ Aristotle seems to have taken up Rhetoric, and to have written the main part of his treatise on that subject. He then reverted to Dialectic, and completed his exposition of it by writing his book on ‘Sophistical Confutations,’ which now stands as the conclusion of the ‘Organon.’ The matter treated of in this book has a close connection with that treated of in the ‘Topics.’ The practice of Dialectic at Athens had given scope to a class, which gradually arose, of professional and paid disputants, or professors and teachers of the art of controversy. This professional class, who were called the “Sophists,” got a bad name in antiquity; and Aristotle treats them disparagingly as mere charlatans. Thus while Contentiousness is arguing for victory, he describes Sophistry as arguing for gain. The Sophist, according to Aristotle, tried to confute people and make them look foolish, employing for this purpose, not fair arguments, but quibbles and fallacies; and all this was done in order to be thought clever and to get pupils. An amusing picture of this sort of process is given in Plato’s dialogue called ‘Euthydemus,’ where two professionals are represented as bamboozling with verbal tricks an ingenuous youth, until Socrates by his dialectical acumen and superior wit rescues the victim from his tormentors, and turns the tables upon them. The following is a specimen of the “sophistical confutations”
