ictitious examples have all the force of
real ones, but they belong rather to the orator than to you lawyers,
although you also do use them sometimes, but in this way. "Suppose a
man had given a slave a thing which a slave is by law incapable of
receiving, is it on that account the act of the man who received it?
or has he, who gave that present to his slave on that account taken
any obligations on himself?" And in this kind of argument orators and
philosophers are allowed to make even dumb things talk, so that the
dead man be raised from the shades below, or that anything which
intrinsically is absolutely impossible, may, for the sake of adding
force to the argument, or diminishing, be spoken of as real and that
figure is called hyperbole. And they may say other marvellous things,
but theirs is a wider field. Still, out of the same topics, as I have
said before, arguments are derived for the most important and the most
trivial inquiries.

XI After similarity there follows difference between things, which is
as different as possible from the preceding topic, still it is the
same art which finds out resemblances and dissimilarities. These are
instances of the same sort--"If you have contracted a debt to a woman,
you can pay her without having recourse to a trustee, but what you
owe to a minor, whether male or female; you cannot pay in the same
manner."

The next topic is one which is derived from contraries. But the genera
of contraries are several. One is of such things as differ in the same
kind; as wisdom and jolly. But those things are said to be in the same
kind, which, when they are proposed, are immediately met by certain
contraries, as if placed opposite to them: as slowness is contrary to
rapidity, and not weakness. From which contraries such arguments as
these are deduced:--"If we avoid folly, let us pursue wisdom; and if
we avoid wickedness, let us pursue goodness." These things, as they
are contrary qualities in the same class, are called opposites. For
there are other contraries, which we may call in Latin, _privantia_,
and which the Greeks call [Greek: _steraetika_]. For the preposition
_in_ deprives the word of that force which it would have if _in_ were
not prefixed; as, "dignity, indignity--humanity, inhumanity," and
other words of the same kind, the manner of dealing with which is
the same as that of dealing with other kinds which I have called
opposites. For there are also other kinds or contraries;