ed, contracted, expanded, and supplemented.

Logic has always made high claims as the _scientia scientiarum_,
the science of sciences. The builders of this Tower of Babel are
threatened in these latter days with confusion of tongues. We may
escape this danger if we can recover the designs of the founder, and
of the master-builders who succeeded him.

Aristotle's Logic has been so long before the world in abstract
isolation that we can hardly believe that its form was in any way
determined by local accident. A horror as of sacrilege is excited by
the bare suggestion that the author of this grand and venerable work,
one of the most august monuments of transcendent intellect, was in his
day and generation only a pre-eminent tutor or schoolmaster, and
that his logical writings were designed for the accomplishment of his
pupils in a special art in which every intellectually ambitious young
Athenian of the period aspired to excel. Yet such is the plain fact,
baldly stated. Aristotle's Logic in its primary aim was as practical
as a treatise on Navigation, or "Cavendish on Whist". The latter is
the more exact of the two comparisons. It was in effect in its various
parts a series of handbooks for a temporarily fashionable intellectual
game, a peculiar mode of disputation or dialectic,[1] the game of
Question and Answer, the game so fully illustrated in the Dialogues of
Plato, the game identified with the name of Socrates.

We may lay stress, if we like, on the intellectuality of the game, and
the high topics on which it was exercised. It was a game that could
flourish only among a peculiarly intellectual people; a people less
acute would find little sport in it. The Athenians still take a
singular delight in disputation. You cannot visit Athens without being
struck by it. You may still see groups formed round two protagonists
in the cafes or the squares, or among the ruins of the Acropolis, in
a way to remind you of Socrates and his friends. They do not argue as
Gil Blas and his Hibernians did with heat and temper, ending in blows.
They argue for the pure love of arguing, the audience sitting
or standing by to see fair play with the keenest enjoyment of
intellectual thrust and parry. No other people could argue like the
Greeks without coming to blows. It is one of their characteristics
now, and so it was in old times two thousand years ago. And about
a century before Aristotle reached manhood, they had invented this
peculiarl