Top Highlights

• dialectic, treated in the Topics, its matter probable premises discussed in the spirit of inquiry, its instrument the dialectical syllogism and induction,
• thus appears, says Aristotle, that rhetoric is an offshoot of dialectic (logos) and also of ethical studies (ethos and pathos).
• The difference in habits of thought and in methods of developing a thought results in a corresponding difference in expression principally because the Renaissance theory of composition, derived from an ancient tradition, was permeated with formal logic and rhetoric, while ours is not.
• Logic and rhetoric
• are concerned with the communication of ideas directly from mind to mind through words; poetic, with the communication of experience indirectly by the creation of illusion, into which the reader may enter imaginatively to share the experience vicariously.