Our pains, our gains, all pass away;
Get thee beyond the world, for it is nought.”
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 [pg 284] 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 [pg 286] this reference we are referred to Rutilius Lupus, the epitomiser of a later Gorgias.
All the three sciences have this in common, that without having learned them we follow their rules, which indeed are themselves first abstracted from this natural employment of them. Therefore, although they are of great theoretical interest, they are of little practical use; partly because, though they certainly give the rule, they do not give the case of its application; partly because in practice there is generally no time to recollect the rules. Thus they teach only what every one already knows and practises of his own accord; but yet the abstract knowledge of this is interesting and important. Logic will not easily have a practical value, at least for our own thinking. For the errors of our own reasoning scarcely ever lie in the inferences nor otherwise in the form, but in the judgments, thus in the matter of thought. In controversy, on the other hand, we can sometimes derive some practical use from logic, by taking the more or less intentionally deceptive argument of our opponent, which he advances under the garb and cover of continuous speech, and referring it to the strict form of regular syllogisms, and thus convicting it of logical errors; for example, simple conversion of universal affirmative judgments, syllogisms with four terms, inferences from the consequent to the reason, syllogisms in the second figure with merely affirmative premisses, and many such.