A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in The Art of Thinking - Rick Kennedy

A History of Reasonableness
Rochester Studies in Philosophy

ISSN: 1529-188X
Senior Editor: Wade L. Robison
Rochester Institute of Technology
1. The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation

Edited by Paul Wood
2. Kant’s Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck

Edited by Predrag Cicovacki
3. Plato’s Erotic Thought: The Tree of the Unknown

Alfred Geier
4. Rationality and Happiness: From the Ancients to

the Early Medievals
Edited by Jiyuan Yu and Jorge J. E. Gracia
5. A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority

in the Art of Thinking
Rick Kennedy
A History of Reasonableness:
Testimony and Authority
in the Art of Thinking
Rick Kennedy
THE UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Rick Kennedy
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,

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Kennedy, Rick, 1958–

A history of reasonableness : testimony and authority in the art of
thinking / Rick Kennedy.
p. cm. – (Rochester studies in philosophy, ISSN 1529–188X ; v. 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–58046–152–2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Reasoning. 2. Critical thinking. 3. Philosophy—History, I. Title.
II. Series.
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Dedicated to
Susan Elizabeth Kennedy

CONTENTS
List of Figures viii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
The King of Siam and Assent 1
to the Existence of Ice
1. The Classical Tradition of Testimony 9

in Topics
2. Three Medieval Traditions: Augustine, 43

Boethius, and Cassiodorus
3. Two Renaissance Traditions: 87

Ciceronian and Augustinian
4. The Long Influence of The Port-Royal Logic 127
5. Appreciating Aristotle: Thomists, Scots, 175

and Oxford Noetics
6. Testimony Becomes Experience: 227

The Rise of Critical Thinking
Bibliography 255
Index 269
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1. Extrinsic in Cicero’s Topica 26

Figure 1.2. Divine and Human Testimony in 28
De Inventione and De Partitione Oratoria
Figure 2.1. Augustine’s Three Levels of Fault and 53

Five Types of Persons
Figure 2.2. Boethius’s Twofold Division of Topics 61
Derived from Cicero
Figure 2.3. Boethius’s Threefold Division of Topics 62
Derived from Themistius
Figure 2.4. Cassiodorus’s Six-Part Dialectic 69
Figure 2.5. Cassiodorus’s Three-Part Topics 70
Figure 3.1. Ramus’s Scheme for Testimony 91

Figure 3.2. Melanchthon’s Divison of Topics 95
Figure 3.3. Testimony in Melanchthon’s 97
Category of Quality
Figure 3.4. Testimony in Morton’s Category of Quality 100
Figure 5.1. John of St. Thomas’s Inevident Habits 181

Figure 5.2. William Hamilton’s Divisions of Logic 190
Figure 5.3. Richard Whately’s Scheme for Arguments 211
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was begun in the early 1990s among supportive colleagues at
Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, Indiana, especially J. Barry, Bill
Rumsey, Stephanie Bower, John Findling, Frank Thackeray, and Andrew
Trout. The book was mostly written among supportive colleagues and
administrators at Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, California,
especially Dwayne Little, Ron Kirkemo, Bill Wood, Diana Reynolds, Linda
Beail, Rebecca Flietstra, Gerard Reed, Sam Powell, John Wright, Maxine
Walker, and Patrick Allen. The libraries and librarians of both of these
small universities were, day in and day out, the places and people at the
foundation of this work. Indiana University financially supported research
in English, Scottish, and New English archives, although accumulating chil-
dren hampered any extended use of distant manuscript collections. The
project was not stalled, however, thanks to the extensive microfilm collec-
tion at the University of California, San Diego, and the wonderful rare book
and manuscript collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
The continuing encouragement for this book came from the regularly
teaching a methods class to history majors. To my students who have been
willing to read and discuss old books, I owe much of the thinking behind
this book and my professional happiness.
INTRODUCTION
THE KING OF SIAM AND ASSENT TO THE

EXISTENCE OF ICE
“Let us raise our sail before the wind and fervently pray for a
good end.”
—Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, “Greeting to Trypho”
This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The
tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by
Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nine-
teenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of
the twentieth century. The modern critical thinking movement has tried to
reclaim some of the tradition, but the central idea of reasonableness—the
part that makes it broader than mere reasoning—remains gutted. For
Aristotle and the subsequent tradition of Western education the difference
between reasoning and reasonableness was partly a matter distinguishing
three sources of information, the methods for handling those three sources,
and understanding the levels of certainty available in each. The three
sources can be generically called intuition, experience, and testimony. The
first two were available to an individual reasoner, but the third was social.
Testimony required the individual to trust information gained from other
people. The first two were the stuff of reasoning, but the third was the key
to a broader reasonableness.
One of the most provocative parables used to teach the subtleties of
this aspect of reasonableness was first offered by John Locke in An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke has a King of Siam,
while listening to a Dutch ambassador tell of the far north, suddenly recoil
at the report that water gets so cold in Holland that it turns hard enough
for an elephant to walk on it. Astonished, the king replies, “Hitherto I have
believed the strange Things you have told me, because I look upon you as
a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lye.”1 The story’s goal is to help
2 A History of Reasonableness
readers understand that reliance on one’s own experience and reason is

limited and that assent to testimony, even highly improbable testimony,
from a credible witness is important for right reasoning. Although the story
became the fodder for people on both sides of the eighteenth-century
debate about the reasonability of belief in miracles, Locke had more mun-
dane issues in mind.2 He was exploring the levels of certainty and guide-
lines of trust inherent in the slippery realm of information we gain from
sources outside ourselves. For Locke—who himself took the cynical turn of
saying that “there is much more Falshood and Errour amongst Men, than
Truth and Knowledge”—the moral of the story is that even in a world
where so much false information is being passed around, people need to
sometimes trust each other in order to grasp true information.3 Reasoning
from experience alone was not broad enough to lead the King of Siam to
the truth of ice.
Later students of Locke often forget that much of his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding—especially book four—was meant to be practical.
It was the part of the book that settles down to teaching reasonableness.
The practical context of Locke’s little story would have been well known to
his first readers in England and Holland. Information passing between
Europe and Siam was a real problem. Decisions were being made on the
basis of weak knowledge. In the two decades prior to publication of Locke’s
Essay, at least three European travel accounts of visits to Siam had been
published in English, one of them was written by a Dutch traveler, and all
passed on dubious information.4 Samuel Pepys, secretary to the admiralty
and a man well known to Locke, recorded in his diary of 1666 a story that
the King of Siam was regularly told untruths: “our King,” a Siamese man
reported, “doth not live by meat nor drink, but by having great lyes told
him.”5 In the minds of Locke and his readers, Oriental exotic despots loved
to be told lies. On the other hand, Locke and his initial readers would have
been familiar with Henry Wooton’s witty definition of his job as an ambas-
sador: “An ambassador is an honest man, sent abroad to lie for his coun-
try.”6 Any reasonable king should be wary of an ambassador’s facts.
Here is the rub of the parable: in the necessarily social and practical
world of international diplomacy and trade, people—even people like
ambassadors and kings who wallow in lies—have to trust each other for
some kinds of information. For Locke, this is an aspect of reasonableness.
For Aristotle and the whole Western educational tradition until recently, this
aspect of reasonableness was an important issue for general education.
Locke, even with his dark view of our world of disinformation, thought so.
Aristotle, who held the brighter view that truth is rampant and persuasive
among humans, founded the first comprehensive terms and structure for
teaching the role of testimony in a reasonableness more social and practical
than individual reasoning.
King of Siam and Assent to Existence of Ice 3
The heroes of this book are Aristotle and those who have followed him
in teaching a reasonableness that includes methodical thinking about testi-
mony. The book, therefore, is a history of the way reasonableness was tra-
ditionally distinguished from reasoning and the way it was especially
oriented toward practical matters such as jurisprudence, diplomacy, geogra-
phy, and history. This is not a philosophical study of the epistemology of
trust, belief, or assent; rather, it deals with the long tradition of how such
matters were taught in beginning classes on the art of thinking. In other
words, this book is about an Aristotelian tradition of rules and structures for
handling testimony and authority that eventually flourished in the seven-
teenth through nineteenth centuries. My strategy for finding these rules and
structures is to follow the history of textbooks teaching what has been var-
iously called dialectic, logic, rhetoric, and, most recently, critical thinking.
Aristotle founded a set of terms and described a structure useful for his
students who needed to understand the role of testimony in the art of think-
ing. In his lectures on topics and rhetoric he distinguished that which could
be accomplished alone from that which was social, using the terms techni-
cal and nontechnical. Later Cicero used intrinsic and extrinsic and
Quintilian, artificial and inartificial. These three sets of terms recur
throughout the history of education in rhetoric and dialectic. Although awk-
ward and never fully stabilized with clear definitions, the terms were used
to get at the difference between the pure art of thinking and the messier
aspects of the art. The pure art—the technical, intrinsic, or artificial—was
constructed out of what could be known by one’s self and could yield the
strongest knowledge. Mathematics using self-evident truths was a pure art
of thinking. Experience, such as learning that animals are not plants and hot
is not cold, or watching an event, was also the stuff used in a purely indi-
vidual art of thinking that yielded absolute certainty. Aristotle was most
interested in codifying the art of pure thinking, but he recognized that most
thinking was less pure and yielded weaker conclusions. There were non-
technical, extrinsic, or inartificial aspects of the art of thinking that required
acts of trusting information gained from other people through written and
oral testimony. The messiness of trusting, the messiness of what was some-
times taught as the duty, responsibility, and submission required in the full-
ness of the art of thinking, seems to have been behind the designations
nontechnical, extrinsic, and inartificial. The Aristotelian tradition distin-
guished individual reasoning from social reasonableness using these terms.
For two thousand years it was common to teach young people in general
education that there is individual reasoning and also a larger art of thinking
that was socially broader and fuller. There is reasoning, but there is also
being reasonable.
The place in the curriculum where the distinction between reasoning
and reasonableness was regularly taught was in topics. Aristotle developed
topics as a memory tool and strategy for creating reasonable arguments.

Topics in the Aristotelian tradition was one of several methods for catego-
rizing or compartmentalizing knowledge that could be useful in under-
standing something or creating persuasive arguments. It was often taught
as part of both dialectic and rhetoric. As an educational tradition it could
stand alone or be merged with other thinking tools. As opposed to other
Aristotelian methods of categorization that better served observational
knowledge, the benefit of topics was that it best served as one of the tools
and strategies for social matters such as jurisprudence, public address, his-
tory, geography, and swearing oaths. Topics worked best as a schematic fil-
ing system for bits of information moving from the most particular bits on
the bottom of the scheme up through a pyramid to the most general dis-
tinctions of types of information on the top. At the very top, the first and
foremost distinction was between information gained by oneself (technical,
intrinsic, or artificial) and information gained socially (nontechnical, extrin-
sic, or inartificial). The latter was often further designated as testimony or
authority. The user of topics could take information in from intuition, expe-
riences, or from oral or written communications and plug them in to their
proper places. This enhanced understanding. Also the user, when trying to
persuade an audience, could strengthen his or her argument by picking and
choosing from the multiple types of arguments that the schematic plainly
distinguished. An orator could pluck a self-evident truth, a commonly expe-
rienced truth, and a commonly accepted truth from history, each support-
ing his or her point.
Topics, with its clear place for testimony, was long taught as a standard
thinking tool. But on the whole it was awkward to use and not a very pre-
cise instrument. Eventually in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the
system was criticized and abandoned by many who had a thought there
was a better, more natural, way to teach testimony in the art of thinking.
What these books did not abandon was the need to clearly discuss the role
of outside authoritative knowledge as the only way to know history, the
world’s geography, and the culture of foreign peoples. As always and most
practically, jurisprudence relied upon testifiers.
In the textbook traditions we will be following, the two terms, testimony
and authority, are most often interchangeable. Authorities are the trusted
sources of testimony. Since classical times students have been taught that
what we know by testimony we know by authority. There is a power issue
in the use of term authority. Sometimes the authority of the testifier—such
as a virtuous eyewitness—compels assent. Edward Gibbon in the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire wrote that Athanasius’s testimony to being
secretly present at two church councils “forces us to believe that he was
secretly present.”7 Gibbon, even though he was probably writing with his
tongue in his cheek, was bowing to eighteenth-century rules of authority
taught in the logic textbooks of England. But more often, authority is con-
sidered a weak foundation for knowing.
In following a two thousand-year textbook tradition we cannot be too
precise with the definition of words. For a thousand years there is prefer-
ence for the word authority, then there is a renewed preference for the
word testimony. Beginning in the seventeenth century there is a preference
for the word information in the place where previously had been used the
word knowledge. There are types of recent textbooks that prefer the term
evidence. Some textbooks have made elaborate distinctions demanding that
testimony applies to facts and authority applies to opinions. Most textbooks
have jumbled such matters together. Key words used throughout this tradi-
tion are assent, belief, faith, and submission, along with key phrases such
as compelled assent, honest error and assent without fault. Each of these
words and phrases can be dissected but, frankly, at the elementary text-
book level, I believe we murder to dissect such things. The books I study
are mostly written for what we would call teenagers.
The history of educating kids about testimony and authority, at its
deepest, is about the way societies have wanted communication and trust,
along with the risks inherent in such trust, to be taught as part of the art of
being a reasonable person. The ultimate hope is the creation of a reason-
able society. For leaders to act, for juries to decide, and for history to teach,
people have needed to trust testimony and authority. The flip side of trust
is risk. When does responsible thinking advise taking a risk on the truth of
information? If the information proves eventually to be false, what delineates
an “honest error” and when is there “no fault” in being wrong? The craft of
thinking takes much that is weakly known only by trust to construct some-
thing credible, a best explanation that is socially acceptable.
In the Hellenistic curriculum of arts that developed after Aristotle, top-
ics was placed at the beginning of a student’s education. Early Christian and
medieval education had much reason to support a liberal arts system that
taught the reasonableness of using testimony because the historical event
of the Resurrection was crucial in their apologetics. Augustine is second
only to Aristotle in importance to our story. Augustine clearly declared that
there were only two ways humans know anything—by reason and by
authority. Reason mined what could be known by using only one’s own
mind and senses. Authority was the source for everything else—even know-
ing who your parents are. Reasonableness demanded a healthy mixing of
reason and authority. Augustine also gave greater psychological depth to
assent and the Aristotelian critique against too radical a skepticism. He also
fully supported and enhanced the Roman development of distinguishing
divine from human testimony.
Elementary textbooks in the Middle Ages, although informed by
Augustine, followed two patterns of teaching testimony developed by
Cassiodorus and Boethius. There was, however, a tendency in higher philo-

sophical education to denigrate knowledge from authority and to explore
what the individual mind could accomplish. In one of the most famous
philosophical incidents of the Middle Ages, Anselm was challenged by his
students to see how far he could get proving God’s existence using his own
reason without recourse to testimony. Although dialectic was still taught to
the young, academic philosophy tended to be more interested in formal
logic. But topics did not disappear.
In the Renaissance, a combination of Ciceronian topics and Augustinian
anti-skepticism revived as the fields of dialectical and rhetoric merged in the
curriculum. A new-style comprehensive art-of-thinking textbook developed
that served the educational boom from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries. Philipp Melanchthon’s deep appreciation of Aristotelian dialectic
and Augustinian psychology was behind what was probably the most cre-
ative and influential of the new Renaissance textbooks. Petrus Ramus, with
his genius for pedagogical simplification, helped spread a more Ciceronian
version of what were most often called logic textbooks.
If the Renaissance looked backward, the leading seventeenth-century
logics inaugurated two centuries of flourishing creativity about the handling
of testimony and authority. The Port-Royal Logic jettisoned the structure of
topics but inaugurated a much expanded discussion of testimony that would
encourage many subsequent logics to follow suit. The Port-Royal Logic also
introduced the problem of miracles into art-of-thinking textbooks and
encouraged the multifaceted debates of the eighteenth century. Descartes
and Augustine were the source of its intellectual energy, and their views on
mathematics encouraged the beginning of mathematical analogies applied
to testimony. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding directly
responded to The Port-Royal Logic’s exuberance with a more sober view of
the role of testimony in the art of thinking which in turn led Isaac Watts to
produce the most extensive and popular set of rules for handling human
and divine testimony.
Watts’s Logick: or The Right Use of Reason was a high-point for English
speaking cultures in the art-of-thinking style textbook. Richard Whately at
Oxford and William Hamilton at the University of Edinburgh in the nine-
teenth century were the two most dynamic proponents of testimony in rea-
sonableness; however, they did this within the context of a drive toward
more sophisticated logic and a clear distinctions between pure logic,
applied logic, and rhetoric. They worked within the context of the rising
modern university structures and tendencies that worked eventually against
the tradition of teaching reasonableness to all entering students. I chroni-
cle the rise of Harvard’s philosophy department in this regard.
This book closes with the influence of Kant’s declaration that testimony
must not be distinguished from personal experience. Such a declaration
from such an influential philosopher tripped up the long Aristotelian tradi-

tion of teaching authority as a distinct source of knowledge that deserved
special consideration. The teaching of the subject faltered. Many of the
“critical thinking” textbooks that came into use during twentieth-century
curricular reforms idealized the self-reliant critical thinker rather than the
socially conscious reasonable person. Teaching the “fallacy of appealing to
authority”—a long tradition itself—continued but seldom was the critical
thinker encouraged to think about the appropriate use of authorities.
Given my limitations in language and perspective, this study mostly fol-
lows a northwesterly then westerly course from Greece to Rome to Europe
to the Anglo-American sphere of influence of modern times. There is much
that I decided to avoid and much, I am sure, that relates to the subject that
I do not have the ability even to study. Jews and Muslims have long been
strong in the Aristotelian philosophic tradition. The laws of evidence used
in jurisprudence have always had to deal with witnesses. Historians in
whatever culture have had to rely on testimony and authority. But, as far
as I can tell, only the educational structure of the Western liberal arts sup-
ported a textbook tradition teaching the practical art of being reasonable
that included testimony and authority. But my knowledge does not range
far and my language abilities are even more restricted.
The King of Siam in Locke’s story was certainly working with what he
considered reasonable standards of credibility when he rejected testimony
that elephants could walk on cold water. The authority of the Dutch ambas-
sador was simply not high enough to create credibility for such informa-
tion. Locke, himself, knew nothing of the educational system of Siam and
only assumed the natural reasonableness of the king. Locke was writing
within the context of his own tradition of education, a tradition that long
wrestled with the role of testimony and authority in the art of thinking. This
book shares Locke’s interest and limits.
NOTES
1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H.
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), IV.xv.5–6.
2. See Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The ‘Indian Prince’ in Miracle Arguments of Hume and
His Predecessors and Early Critics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (1998): 175–230.
3. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.xv.6.
4. See Guy Tachard, Voyage de Siam des Peres Jesuites (London: 1688);
Mr. Glanius, A New Voyage to the East-Indies (London: 1682); and Francois Caron
and Joost Schorten, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam,
trans. Roger Manley (London:1671).
5. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds. Robert Latham and William
Matthews (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), VII, 251.
6. Isaac Walton reported this quote in his Life of Wotton, first published in
1651. See Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Henry Wotton.”
7. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 40 of
Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 324.
CHAPTER ONE
THE CLASSICAL TRADITION OF

TESTIMONY IN TOPICS
Greek and Roman dialectic and rhetoric taught that the art of being rea-
sonable and persuading people toward reasonable conclusions required an
understanding of the relationship between what we know from within our-
selves and what we learn from others. The former was our strongest knowl-
edge—a boy mathematician could wield such knowledge with great force.
The latter was weaker—wisdom and the experiences of long life were
required for its best use. The former was individual, the latter was corpo-
rate. The former was solipsistic, the latter, forensic. For Aristotle and the
classical liberal arts tradition that later developed, the disciplines of dialec-
tic and rhetoric were responsible for teaching this relationship. Aristotle
ingeniously created an intellectual device that served this and other
purposes. He called it topics.
Topics was a schematic structure to be used mentally for analyzing,
storing, and retrieving information. Organized in a triangular structure, the
student entered it at the narrow top and descended through the structure
adding to the breadth and depth base of the triangle as needed. Aristotelians
for two thousand years explored this malleable structure, and at times let
it dominate all of logic and epistemology, but more often hedged it in
beside other Aristotelian categorization strategies. Sometimes it was
described as a storehouse of all knowledge in which a student could be
surrounded library-like with every bit of information in spacial relation to
its related bits. Topics could help a person analyze and categorize knowl-
edge. It could also help an orator preparing a persuasive argument gather
diverse bits of evidence to support a larger point. At minimum it was
supposed to help a person’s memory. The fundamental organizing princi-
ple of topics was epistemological, with the kinds of knowledge separated
first according to their sources. At the entrance to the storehouse, the first
division of everything to the left or to the right was a distinction between
technical and nontechnical sources of knowledge. To the left was all the
knowledge that was worked up personally within oneself. To the right
was all the knowledge gained from outside sources, from authorities. The
whole system of topics was driven by distinguishing information gained
from within oneself and from various testifiers and authorities.
ARISTOTLE AND THE CREATION OF TOPICS
Diogenes Laertius wrote that Aristotle said that Zeno of Elea was the inven-
tor of dialectic. But Diogenes Laertius is a not-so-reputable authority who
lived about four hundred years after Aristotle.1 Sextus Empiricus, a more
reputable source, made the same report, but he also lived some three hun-
dred years after Aristotle.2 There does seem to be some evidence to sup-
port attribution to Zeno.3 On the other hand, at the end of the Organon,
Aristotle’s lectures on logic collected long after his death, Aristotle claims
that he, himself, developed dialectic without relying on any earlier work.4
Who invented dialectic is a dialectical problem. Dialectic is charged, in
part, with making rational judgments from and about information that has
no self-evidence and yields conclusions of varying degrees of certainty. In
the statements by Aristotle, Diogenes, and Sextus there is nothing that is
self-evident. All the information comes in the form of testimony from
authorities. Certainly Aristotle’s statement about Zeno, if he really said it,
seems trustworthy. But we also have his contradictory statement in the
Organon—which in turn is an uncharacteristic statement in a conclusion
with an editorial tone in a book put together long after his death. (Added
to the layers of testimony is my endnote number 3 that draws on the
authority of modern scholarly assessment).
The invention of dialectic is hard to pinpoint, tangled as the question
is in testimonies and authorities. However, the invention of topics, the core
of Aristotelian dialectic, can be traced to two of Aristotle’s dialectical works:
Topics and The Art of Rhetoric.5 In these books, Aristotle inaugurated the
tradition of teaching a role for testimony in the art of thinking. Quintilian,
an authority on the subject, wrote that Aristotle was the first to distinguish
a special epistemological place for testimony in dialectic, a place desig-
nated as nontechnical (atechnoi).6
ARISTOTELIAN OPTIMISM
Before describing Aristotle’s topics and the place of nontechnical

knowledge, it is best to step back and view the subject from a wide angle.
As will become more clear throughout this history, interest in testimony
usually accompanies distinctive attitudes. The most famous teachers of the
Classical Tradition of Testimony 11
subject—for example Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, the Renaissance

Humanists, Arnauld, Watts, Reid, Hamilton, and Whately—have been pro-
ponents of the power of human communication and reasonableness. They
tend to be practical, social, and optimistic about the human potential to
gain true knowledge. The teachers most antagonistic to dialectic in general
and dismissive of testimony in particular have tended toward extreme
forms of skepticism and intellectual individualism. They tend to emphasize
the weakness of all knowledge and are pessimistic about communication
in any form. It would be wrong to draw a sharp distinction between those
for and against teaching testimony; however, throughout history many
philosophers pursuing what they perceived to be a higher road of pure
thought have characterized teachers of Aristotelian dialectic as gullible,
lacking rigor, and naively optimistic. The tradition of an art of reasonable-
ness as begun by Aristotle certainly has wanted to avoid gullibility and
naiveté; however, it has always been optimistically committed to believing
that true knowledge is often communicated and that individuals can gain
access to truths higher and broader than personal experience.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was an optimist. Anthony Kenny characterizes
him as a man who was amazingly optimistic about the power of the human
mind to understand the ways things worked. “Everywhere he looks for
answers to why-questions.”7 He had little respect for cynics, skeptics, and
purveyors of paradoxes. “Truth,” Aristotle taught, “is not beyond human
nature and men do, for the most part, achieve it.” Truth, for Aristotle, is
“naturally superior” and “more persuasive” than its opposite.8 This optimism
is the most important Aristotelian legacy in the history of the structures and
rules of reasoning and reasonableness, and it invigorated the tradition of
understanding and using testimony. Aristotle established a pattern followed
by most of the textbook writers discussed in this book, a pattern of writing
about testimony from the perspective of honest people giving and receiv-
ing the best information available to them. Emphasis on the existence of
liars, forgers, the overly biased, or even the unknowingly misinformed is a
more modern trend in education.
But the Aristotelian tradition is not naïvely optimistic. Although overtly
emphasizing honest people communicating truths, dialectic recognized that
it dealt with a relatively weak realm of alleged facts and hopefully correct
opinions. Dialectic was supposed to be, at its best, a responsible and pro-
ductive form of skepticism. The irresponsible and unproductive form of
skepticism is most famously associated with Pyrrho of Elis (c.360–c.270
B.C.), a younger contemporary to Aristotle. Pyrrho developed a debilitating
form of dialectic rooted in radical skepticism. He pessimistically collapsed
all knowledge, even information from his own senses, into the status of
dubious facts and opinions. Moreover, he proposed that since one’s knowl-
edge was so weak and probably untrue the thinker should pursue all sides
of an issue, purposefully balancing every pro with a con, every positive

with a negative. Judgment should be avoided. The goal was balanced
nondecision. Such a pseudo-dialectic debilitated not only the polis but the
individual.
For the art of thinking to serve rather than debilitate, it must be more
optimistic. Throughout history, Aristotelian optimism rather than Pyrrhonian
skepticism has largely powered the art of reasoning and reasonableness.
However, Pyrrhonian skepticism along with other forms of skepticism has
played the important role of keeping Aristotelian dialectic honestly aware
of its weaknesses. The history of testimony and authority in textbooks must
be understood in the context of Aristotelian optimism tinged with the pes-
simism of skeptics. Aristotle established the tradition of keeping the relative
strengths and weaknesses of different methods of reasoning at the forefront
of educating thinking citizens. But he also established a strong tradition,
which dominated education until the twentieth century, of focusing on the
positive aspects of what we can know rather than on the weaknesses. For
Aristotle the project of applying reason to life required the attitude best
stated by Quintilian: “let us raise our sail before the wind and fervently pray
for a good end.”9 The statement is optimistic, but a tinge of pessimism is
implied by the need for a prayer.
THE POLIS IN ARISTOTLE’S DIALECTIC
The tendency of the great philosophers is to be triumphantly self-reliant.

This is probably an important reason why the canon of great philosophy
has so little to say about testimony. As I have already pointed out, the subject
of testimony involves both a social epistemology and social applications.
Both of these undermine any triumphant self-reliance. Nicholas Wolterstorff
in his recent study of Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (2001)
speculates that Reid’s interest in the epistemology of testimony was actu-
ally part of his deep antagonism to the traditional “image” of the self-reliant
philosopher. Reid believed the best student of epistemology was not a lone
thinker who, Descartes-like, tries to begin by doubting everything. Reid is
one of the few important epistemologists in history to support the impor-
tance of testimony probably because he believed that philosophers would
do better to model themselves as “social beings” than as self-reliant
thinkers.10
Emphasis on testimony and authority always drags against self-
reliance. Historically, we should not be surprised by the lack of high philo-
sophic interest in testimony. Teachers of elementary reasonableness and
persuasion have been more interested. Aristotle, as the father of logic,
harbored the standard tendencies of a logician. He aspired to the certainty
and clarity of closed and formal thinking. However, Aristotle also taught
elementary reasonableness and persuasion in the political world of shared

information and opinions. “Scientific knowledge and its object,” Aristotle
wrote, “differ from opinion and the object of opinion.” Scientific knowl-
edge is true and cannot be otherwise, while opinion “is concerned with
that which may be true or false, and can be otherwise.” For Aristotle “opin-
ion is unstable” and so are the conclusions drawn from it.11 The tradition
of scientific demonstration is a tradition of “man investigating by himself,”
whereas, the tradition of dialectic works with “reference to another
party.”12 Dialectic is social. “In regard to the first principles of science,”
Aristotle wrote, “it is improper to ask any further for the why and where-
fore of them.” The strength of a demonstration comes only from within.
On the other hand, reasoning is called “dialectical if it reasons from opin-
ions that are generally accepted.” By “generally accepted” he meant those
opinions “which are accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the
philosophers—i.e., by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and
illustrious of them.”13
Just as a good city-state could not ignore “the People,” neither could
good dialectic.14 In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle made the famous
observation that a boy can be an accomplished mathematician; however,
the dialectic of community leadership required the experience that comes
with age.15 Authority should be given not only to “all, the majority, or
the most notable and illustrious” of the philosophers, but also to “the
undemonstrated remarks and beliefs of experienced and older people. . . .
For these people see correctly because experience has given them their
eye.”16 In Politics when discussing the proper size of a city-state, Aristotle
taught that it should be small enough for people to know each other. “In
order to decide lawsuits and distribute offices on the basis of merit, each
citizen must know what sorts of people the other citizens are.”17
Knowing what sorts of people one deals with is a crucial aspect of
Aristotle’s thinking about testimony. The dialectical judgments necessary for
a good government and a good court system require knowing the charac-
ter of all the people involved. Knowing the character of one’s own self is
also crucial for reasonableness. The soul, Aristotle explained in the
Nicomachean Ethics, has three capacities that affect rationality: perception,
understanding, and desire. The last of these has a direct influence on the
deliberations and decision that are the product of dialectic. “Decision,”
Aristotle succinctly described as “deliberative desire.” By this he meant that
for an excellent decision, “the reason must be true and the desire correct,
so that what reason asserts is what desire pursues.”18 Decision-making
requires both “thought and character.”19 Aristotle lectured that intelligence
“cannot reach its fully developed state without virtue.” Vice “perverts
us and produces false views.” In sum: “we cannot be intelligent without
being good.”20
Dialectic—especially the dialectic of testimony and authority—is

muddy. It is social. Character has to be assessed. Personal desires have to
be taken into account. True opinions have to be separated from false
opinions. Age and fame should be accounted assets of wisdom. A boy of
no particular virtue living alone might make a good mathematician or
scientific logician; however, such a boy could not be a good dialectician.
Dialectic, in general, to work correctly required small city-states of
predominantly honest citizens. Trustworthy individuals, the consensus of
opinions, and the accumulation of experiences could lead to truth even
though inherently weak in comparison to scientific knowledge. Such was
the Aristotelian context for his teachings on topics and the dialectic of
testimony and authority.
TOPICS AND NONTECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE
Many people before Aristotle had thought about the use of testimony—
Herodotus usually rated the quality of the testimony with which he worked,
and the laws of ancient peoples often had some rules about witnesses—
but it was Aristotle who inaugurated the educational support-structure
that established a specific place for testimony in the craft of dialectical
reasoning. The system he called topics and the place was designated
nontechnical.21
Topics has a long but unstable history. William and Martha Kneale’s
standard work, The Development of Logic (1962), describes topics as a “log-
ical theory in solution.”22 Ann Moss calls Aristotle “slippery” on the subject.23
Apparently Aristotle thought of topics as “all of three things: the universally
applicable procedures of dialectical reasoning; the subject-specific heads
apparently more useful for rhetoric; and propositions which form the prem-
ises of different areas of philosophical and scientific enquiry.”24 Essentially
topics was supposed to be malleable and broadly useful. Aristotle offered
it up differently in two different books: Topics and Rhetoric. In the long run
the lack of focus may have made topics more useful than it would have
been otherwise. We shall see how topics is amoeba-like in dialectic, chang-
ing shape and endlessly versatile. At bottom is one of the options Aristotle
offered in his constant quest to divide things up and put them back together
again. In the history of reasonableness, many textbook writers found the
structure generally helpful. For those interested in testimony and authority,
topics was the only Aristotelian structure that took into account the differ-
ence between internal and external sources of knowledge.
Aristotle thought most about topics when offering help to orators.
Cicero would later popularize topics as the foundation of a broad idea of
the orator as gentleman thinker. Both he and Aristotle described topics in
prose. It was not until the medieval and Renaissance textbooks that authors
began to create schematic diagrams picturing the structure. The genius of

the whole was that every bit of information had its rightful location or
“topic” in the whole library-structure of knowledge. The schematic draw-
ing mapped the relationship of every “topic”—what was in Latin called a
locus or in English a place. Every topic or place was related to a more
general place and usually could be divided into smaller places. Although
there was nothing about the system that necessitated emphasis on testi-
mony, Renaissance educators eventually created two genres of testi-
mony oriented topics books. The first was the personal notebook of
information gained from reading called in England the commonplace book
in which students wrote down, organized, and kept track of important
quotes. The other could be bought as a pre-organized compendium of the-
ology. The most famous of these was Philip Melanchthon’s Loci Communes
Rerum Theologicarum (1521), which collected under appropriate head-
ings and subheadings supporting bits of information for the essentials of
Lutheran theology. As a personal notebook or purchased compendium,
the book owner held a physical manifestation of what had begun as a
mental scheme.
Topics was a malleable organizing strategy. Every remembered quote
and every remembered fact had a proper place. The quotes, facts, and any
other bit of information was available to be gathered together when making
a judgment or creating a persuasive speech. This gathering was called
“invention of arguments.” These two words have technical meanings in
topics. Arguments are the bits of information—general or specific—that can
be useful for arguing something. Invention means to discover or find or
remember—not create. So the “invention of arguments” means the gather-
ing of general or specific bits of information from the various topics or loci
or places in one’s mind or notebook so as to make a judgment or persuade
an audience.
Aristotle encouraged his readers to create a “good stock” of these loci
so as to keep “familiar and primary ideas at your fingers’ ends.”25 In
Rhetoric, he further developed topics by proposing examples of general
and specific names for loci. For example, within a long list of “demonstra-
tive common topics” he offers as a locus “earlier judgment about the same
or a similar or an opposite matter.”26 If the orator preparing a speech was
at a loss for an argument at some point, the orator might remember that
earlier judgments are a good source of arguments and that there are three
types of useful earlier judgments: same, similar, and opposite. With this top-
ical guideline, the orator racks his or her memory for earlier judgments,
whether the same, similar, or opposite. The best of these could then be
added to the speech to make it more persuasive.
Aristotle hoped for topics to be broadly useful, but he understood that
the “obvious” use would be in teaching students how to think better.27
In the long run, topics was kept alive primarily in textbooks teaching the
art of dialectic. Its downfall would come when the writers of elementary
textbooks no longer thought it useful. The most influential critic of topics
was a seventeenth-century textbook titled The Art of Thinking but most
often called The Port-Royal Logic (1662). This book criticized the system as
unnatural and pointed out that reasonable people don’t actually consult a
scheme of topics when thinking. Aristotle’s plot-map of information
management may look good on paper but could not be actually imposed
on human nature.
It was the relative naturalness and unnaturalness of thinking that
inspired Aristotle to formulate his rules and structures of formal and dialec-
tical logic. For Aristotle, the highest levels of reasoning were not natural
and required tools and skills that had to be codified and taught. Thinking
was a techne—a craft or art. When eventually his lectures on reasoning
were collected into one book, that book was called the Organon, what we
might call the “toolbox.” His lectures on topics were part of the Organon.
If reasoning were simply natural, there would be no craft, no art, no tech-
nology. One of the traditional tenets in the history of education is that while
low-level reasoning abilities are natural to humans, the duty of education
is to enhance reasoning with tools, skills, and an organization that makes
it into an art or craft.
Understanding the role of techne in reasoning is crucial for under-
standing why Aristotle called testimony and authority “nontechnical.” At the
forefront of the whole system of topics was the recognition that there was
a fundamental epistemological distinction between information worked up
by the reasoner out of the reasoner’s own resources, and information taken
in ready-made. Evidence gained ready-made from an outside source is
atechnoi (nontechnical), broadly meaning that which is not one of the
techniques. Individual reasoning is a technical skill, an art, or a craft that takes
self-evident truths, sense perceptions, or intuitions and combines such
materials into successive levels of knowledge. Testimony; however, is non-
technical. Testimony comes from outside the individual mind and carries its
own authority that has nothing to do with the mind or skill of the reasoner.
Some proofs “belong to the art and some do not,” Aristotle lectured; the
latter “are not contrived by us but pre-exist, such as witnesses.”28 In the
writings available to us, Aristotle does not go very far in explaining himself;
however, his distinction between what is individually contrived and what
is gained ready-made begins the tradition of teaching testimony in the art
of being reasonable.29
When applying his principles of rhetoric to the courtroom, Aristotle
taught that there were five types of nontechnical or ready-made proofs:
“law, witnesses, contracts, tortures, and oaths.”30 By “laws” he meant “writ-
ten laws” for which he had little respect. “A better man,” Aristotle believed,
follows “the unwritten rather than the written laws,” and he used the exam-
ple of the woman Antigone as the better man for not following the written
laws of Creon.31 Aristotle’s discussion of the rhetorician’s responsibility to
written law sets the tone for the rhetorician’s responsibility to nontechnical
proofs in general. He believed there was little in such proofs per se to
recommend confidence. Contracts and oaths can be easily undermined and
the statements of people being judicially tortured are as likely to be false
as true.32
Nontechnical information might be weak stuff, but a courtroom could
not function without it. What is important for the tradition of topics is that
Aristotle recognized a distinct epistemic status for such information. He inau-
gurated a long tradition of discussing the weakness in relation to evidence
used and misused in courtroom situations.
The testimony of witnesses, however, deserved to inspire more confi-
dence. When dealing with witnesses, Aristotle rose above mere litigation to
discuss forensics in general. Forensics he defined as “about the past.”33 We
learn much from witnesses about the events that surround us and histori-
cally shape us. There are two kinds of witnesses, he wrote, ancient and
modern. Ancient witnesses are poets and famous men, even “proverbs,”
that attest to some truth. Aristotle used examples of the elegies of Solon
to show that Critias must obey his father and support the proverb that it
is “foolish to kill the father [but] spare the sons.”34 In these examples an
ancient witness offers more than an attestation to an event. The witness
testifies to historical lessons for right living.
Modern witnesses, on the other hand, are notables whose judgment is
useful in a controversy about some point. Aristotle taught that such wit-
nesses can only attest to an event, not “the character of the events, such as
whether they are just or unjust.”35 Of these modern witnesses, Aristotle
believed that the “remote are more convincing” and, he iterated, “most of
all the ancients; for they cannot be corrupted.”36 Geographical and chrono-
logical distance enhanced the authority of testimony.
Ready-made information was communicated information. Because it
was communicated it required special considerations about who was doing
the communicating and what the circumstances were. An oath was one
thing, an oath under torture another. A live witness was one thing, an
ancient witness another. Another type of communication deserving consid-
eration was divine communication. Aristotle gave the example of a proph-
esy from the Oracle of Delphi, which Themistocles interpreted to mean that
the “wooden walls” of Athens’s ships would hold against the Persians.
Aristotle offered no comment on the general credibility of oracles and
prophets; however, prophets, prophesy, oracles, augury, holy scripture,
and eventually church authority would play an important part in discus-
sions of testimony in textbooks from Aristotle up through the middle of the
early nineteenth century. Although it would be Cicero, Quintilian, and

Augustine who actually began distinguishing divine testimony from human
testimony, Aristotle was the authoritative foundation for the view that
divine testimony should be handled as a nontechnical epistemological
source to be used in the overall technology of practical rationality.
In summary, Aristotle inaugurated a long tradition by carving out a
prominent but weak place for testimony and authority in dialectic. In his
topics he epistemologically distinguished testimony as ready-made informa-
tion that is gained without recourse to one’s own abilities to reason.
Knowledge gained from testimony and authority was weak, but it was a
structurally important and distinctive part of his optimistic and socially con-
scious art of being reasonable. In creating the term atechnoi he recognized
that the full art of reasoning, especially the necessary practices of a polis,
required an obligation to knowledge that an individual reasoner could not
produce alone. Communication was at the heart of a reasonableness that
assumes a wider scope than mere reasoning. Although leaving many paths
of interpretation open to future textbook writers, Aristotle led the way in
using the courtroom, history, and divine communication as the most obvi-
ous examples of the necessity of reasoning from testimony.
HELLENISTIC ASSENT AND A SCALE

OF PROBABILITY
A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley introduce The Hellenistic Philosophers with the
ghost of Aristotle returning to Athens in 272 B.C., fifty years after he died.
The point of using such a return serves to show that Aristotle would hardly
“recognize it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and
researched.”37 The creation of the Hellenistic empire had broadened the
intellectual life of Athens. Philosophy flourished in new forms. Aristotle’s
Lyceum remained but maintained a “low profile,” waiting for the revival of
Aristotelianism in the Roman Empire.38 Topics with its role for testimony
seems to have also laid low—at least we have very little evidence of peo-
ple discussing it. What we do know is that Stoicism became powerful and
the scholarch leaders of Plato’s academy were exploring skepticism. Out of
this milieu rose two developments that would later become tied to discus-
sions of testimony in dialectic textbooks. The first was assent. The second
was probability.
STOIC ASSENT
The most intellectually exciting region of Athens was along the colonnaded
porches that surrounded the central marketplace, especially the stoa poikile
or “painted porch.” Stoics gathered there to walk, discuss, and hear public
lectures along with Cynics, Epicureans, and the skeptics who now domi-
nated Plato’s Academy. Of these, the Stoics were the most influential stu-
dents of reasoning methods. The Stoics split philosophy into logic, ethics,
and physics so that logic was likened to the bones of an animal, the shell
of an egg, and the wall circling a city. Logic was divided into dialectic and
rhetoric.39 This emphasis on dialectic rather than formal syllogistic seems to
have come from the influence of Zeno of Elea (c.490 B.C.) and his follow-
ers the Megarians—predecessors to the Stoics who concentrated their atten-
tion on “everyday argumentative encounters.”40
Such everyday argumentative encounters were the daily bread of the
Hellenistic and Roman empires. Multicultural empires are good for dialec-
tic. Zeno of Citium (c.336–c.265 B.C.), the founder of Stoicism, had a grand
political vision much broader than Plato’s and Aristotle’s narrow city-state
programs. Zeno’s Politea, we are told by Plutarch, reached for a “cos-
mopolis” where “we should regard all men as our fellow-citizens and local
residents.”41 Given such a high communal vision, it is understandable that
dialectic would flourish in the Hellenistic Empire. Sadly, we know very lit-
tle directly about the logic of this creative period.42 Diogenes Laertius lists
many works of logic from this era that are lost. Chrysippus the Stoic is sup-
posed to have written some three hundred books dealing with logic. “So
renowned was he for dialectic,” Diogenes wrote that “if the gods took to
dialectic, they would adopt no other system than that of Chrysippus.”43 We
can guess that much that was written in this era made its way into the writ-
ings of Cicero and Quintilian; however, it will be those two Romans who
will become the most influential dialectic textbook writers. What we do
know is that Cicero used the term assent in the Stoic manner. Paul Oskar
Kristeller writes that the Stoic innovation of emphasizing assent “has not
been clearly understood or appreciated.”44 Given the Aristotelian problem
of how to think about outside, nontechnical, information, the Stoic view of
assent needs more understanding and appreciation.
Zeno of Citium developed the concept of assent in dialectic. For Plato
and Aristotle, when the mind grasped knowledge, truth was persuasive and
almost unavoidable. But the Hellenistic age was more skeptical and pes-
simistic. For Stoics the mind was more passive and truth more elusive. For
them knowledge presented itself to humans. Knowledge was a perception
or, more precisely, a comprehending representation ( phantasia katalep-
tike), that was not necessarily reliable or trustworthy. Zeno of Citium used
the concept of assent (Greek: synkatathesis, Latin: adsensio) as a circum-
spect way to handle what Plato and Aristotle thought was more direct.45
Although less optimistic than Aristotle and Plato, Zeno and the Stoics
were much more hopeful about the abilities of reason than the radical
skeptics. For this reason they did not abandon dialectical logic. Stoics
recommended using the knowledge to which they assented. More adamant

skeptics insisted that assent was an illegitimate strategy, recommending
instead an immobilizing suspension of judgment.46
“Dialectic,” the Stoics taught “is indispensable and is itself a virtue,
embracing other particular virtues under it.” The first of these virtues is
“freedom from precipitancy” or “wariness,” which is the “knowledge when
to give or withhold the mind’s assent to impressions” and the “strong
presumption against what at the moment seems probable, so as not to be
taken in by it.”47 Without the study of dialectic, the Stoics believed,
the wise man cannot guard himself in argument so as never

to fall; for it enables him to distinguish between truth and
falsehood, and to discriminate what is merely plausible and
what is ambiguously expressed, and without it he cannot
methodically put questions and give answers.48
Assent was the key to all dialectic. The risks of assenting were the risks
wise people were willing to accept.
The skeptics rebelled at this. The wise man, Arcesilaus, scholarch of
Plato’s academy, insisted, “is not in the class of assenters.” He does not
assent to what are just opinions and then construct elaborate syllogisms on
foundations of mud. “Opinion is a mark of folly and a cause of sin.” The
wise man, instead, should suspend judgment.49 Arcesilaus’s position reap-
pears often in history. The debate is epistemological and rooted in notions
of wisdom and folly. In the long run, the Stoic notion of assent proves to
be a productive way to bow to the deep truth of human limitations while
retaining the optimistic and productive spirit of Aristotle’s dialectic.
Different from Aristotle, however, is that the reasoner is not passive. Any
emphasis on assent is an emphasis on the power of the reasoner to pick
and choose what information to take in and what to reject. In the history
of testimony, the concept of assent will be emphasized by those who desire
to empower the reasoner while diminishing the power of the authority that
gives the testimony.
CARNEADES’S SCALE OF PROBABILITY
Carneades (c.213–c.128 B.C.), Arcesilaus’s successor at the Academy in

Athens, also wrestled with the epistemology of how humans know things
and how well they know them. Although Carneades did not apply his ideas
to the issue of testimony, later textbooks would often feel the necessity
of teaching levels of assent or probability when teaching the handling of
testimony. If the art of thinking is in part the craft of creating credibility,
of establishing some level of probable certainty for a judgment, decision,
or position, then thresholds of socially acceptable probability mark the

beginning of reasonableness.
Carneades charged that the Stoics were unsophisticated in the way
they handled criteria for probability but was unwilling to travel all the way
down the road of skepticism. As a middle ground of mitigated skepticism,
Carneades offered “three degrees of probability.”
The first and lowest is that which involves belief but has no
support from other representations. A higher kind excites
belief but is also consistent with, and supported by, other rep-
resentations. The highest degree of probability occurs when
a given belief not only is plausible in itself, and related to
other representations, but is such that an investigation of
these other, supporting representations reveals each of them
to be as vivacious and distinct as our first representation.50
An example of this level (the “probable”) would be viewing something

so small or for such a short period of time that the sense of sight cannot
be sure what it has seen. Such a limited presentation would be rare, however,
and the second degree of probability (the “irreversible”) is more common.
This awkward name comes from the collection of multiple presentations
giving great confidence. For example when a person meets another man
multiple sensations convince the person irreversibly that a real encounter
has taken place. But although very strong, this type of probability still has
weaknesses. Carneades warned that Menelaus was convinced by multiple
presentations that the wraith Helen he had brought with him from Troy was
the true Helen when in fact she wasn’t. So only the third degree is fully
trustworthy. This is the degree that is not only probable and irreversible,
but also tested. Testing must precede any assent to highest probability.
Such a process and expectation is normal. Sextus Empiricus explaining
Carneades’s position used an example from “ordinary life”:
when we are investigating a small matter we question a sin-

gle witness, but in a greater matter several, and when the
matter investigated is still more important we cross-question
each of the witnesses on the testimony of the others.51
From what we know of these debates, there is little evidence that

Artistotle’s Topics or Rhetoric had much influence. Carneades, as a schol-
arch of Plato’s Academy, was probably working from Platonic sources
and the bits and pieces of probabilistic thinking in ancient law, history, and
philosophy.52
The Stoics and Carneades are important seeds for the future development
of degrees of assent and probabilistic logic. The epistemological problems
of the Hellenistic era encouraged Roman textbook writers to think in terms

of assenting to knowledge and degrees of probability. In Cicero’s textbooks
these Hellenistic concerns were fused with a revived Aristotelian topics and
particularly applied to the role of testimony and authority.
CICERO & QUINTILIAN: THE FORENSICS

OF AUTHORITY
For the history of testimony in logic textbooks, there is probably no more
influential figure than Cicero (106–43 B.C.). He has been venerated as
gentleman-scholar, public servant, courtroom advocate, and model citizen
willing to risk his life in service to the highest ideals of his state. It is easy
to overrate Cicero’s originality; however, it is hard to overrate his influence
in the history of the Western education from his own era until the
nineteenth century.53 His influence on the tradition of testimony and authority
rests on three textbooks that teach Aristotelian topics in the broader context
of Hellenistic dialectic and rhetoric. The most influential of his textbooks is
Topica, written at the end of his life to explain Aristotelian topics to a
friend. The earliest of the texts, De Inventione, is a schoolboy’s transcrip-
tion that is probably representative of common teaching on the subject. The
third book, De Partitione Oratoria, is a catechism /dialogue with his son
that emphasizes courtroom forensic. Testimony and authority are taught
most straightforwardly in the first two, while the last emphasizes the weak-
ness of reliance on evidence from witnesses.
All three textbooks were influenced by Cicero’s veneration of “our
famous school, the Middle Academy,” the name Romans gave to Plato’s
academy in the era of Arcesilaus and Carneades.54 Cicero’s own education
was heir to the Academy’s teaching that the orator’s goal is to create cred-
ibility, and the process of creating the credibility of testimony became
subject to a two-sided courtroom approach in which a defender advocates
assent while a prosecutor recommends rejection. With Cicero, the discus-
sion of testimony accepted the core teachings of Aristotle while increasing
the complexities.
Testimony and authority are always the weakest part of any system of
handling knowledge and creating credibility, but any system that aspires to
be comprehensive needs to address the subject. Cicero addressed the sub-
ject systematically in all three of his textbooks on topics. Quintilian (A.D.
35–c.90) followed Cicero’s lead in handling the subject while presenting
it in an enlarged, enthusiastic, and more optimistic form. Quintilian’s
Institutione and Cicero’s three textbooks became the standard models of
Roman handling of testimony and authority used by later textbook writers
in Western history.
CICERO’S THREE TEXTBOOK PRESENTATIONS OF

TESTIMONY AND AUTHORITY
Cicero had a knack for synthesizing philosophies and presenting them well.
He may have been an heir to the tradition of Arcesliaus and Carneades, but
he also remained a proponent of Aristotle, and was largely responsible for
a revival of Aristotelianism in the last half of the first century B.C. As we
have noted, Aristotle’s dialectic, if not his science, diminished in influence
as Stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism dominated the Hellenic era.
During that time Aristotle’s works were largely unavailable and their influ-
ence circumscribed. A former student of the Lyceum is supposed to have
taken Aristotle’s books to Asia Minor and hid them. Later the works were
returned to Athens in bad condition. The Roman general Sulla brought
Aristotle’s works to Rome where a librarian (who sometimes worked for
Cicero) along with the eleventh scholarch of the Peripatetic school pub-
lished them between 43 and 20 B.C. A student of the librarian, Strabo, is
the main source of this story.55
Cicero textbooks link Stoic-Roman dialectic and Aristotlian topics.
Cicero and his compatriots believed that they were merely advocating the
system of “that godlike genius,” Aristotle.56 Topics itself they considered a
valuable and practical method for comprehensively organizing arguments.
In De Oratore Cicero advised the orator to keep the structure of topics
“firmly established in his mind and memory” because with it “nothing will
be able to elude the orator, either in our own contentions at the Bar, or in
any department whatever of speaking.”57 Aristotle’s distinction between tech-
nical and nontechnical information was, for Cicero, the principal division in
topics that every young thinker and speaker must “firmly establish in his
mind and memory.” He therefore discussed it in each of his three books.
Topica, probably written in 44 B.C., was the most straightforwardly
Aristotelian of Cicero’s three textbooks. He reported to Trebatius the cir-
cumstances of writing it:
You will remember that when we were together in my

Tusculan villa and were sitting in the library, each of us
according to his fancy unrolling the volumes which he
wished, you hit upon certain Topics of Aristotle. . . . And
when I had made clear to you that these books contained a
system developed by Aristotle for inventing arguments so that
we might come upon them by a rational system without wan-
dering about, you begged me to teach you the subject.58
Cicero recognized that Aristotle’s works, which “were ignored by all except
a few of the professed philosophers,” needed to be better known, and he
promised to write a guide to Aristotle’s topics. However, he did not have
time to write his Topica until he was on a voyage, and then had to rely on
memory.59 Cicero’s Topica emerged more as a comprehensive textbook
than as a mere guide to Aristotle’s work.
Testimony appears in Cicero’s Topica as it did in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: as
first and foremost an epistemological distinction between technical and
nontechnical arguments. Cicero, however, changed the Aristotelian terms
to intrinsic (haerent) and extrinsic (extrinsecus). An argument is intrinsic
when it is “inherently in the very nature of the subject which is under dis-
cussion” or at least “in some way closely connected with the subject.”60
Extrinsic arguments are “removed and widely separated from the subject”
and “depend principally on authority.” The Greeks, Cicero noted, call such
an argument “atechnoi, that is, not invented by the art of the orator.”61
More than Aristotle, Cicero emphasized the personal and practical ways
testimony and authority interacted. Because of its long influence, here is
the complete text of the main section on testimony and authority:
This form of argumentation [extrinsic], that is said not to be

subject to the rules of art, depends on testimony. For our
present purpose we define testimony as everything that is
brought in from some external circumstance in order to win
conviction. Now it is not every sort of person who is worth
consideration as a witness. To win conviction, authority is
sought; but authority is given by one’s nature or by circum-
stances. Authority from one’s nature or character depends
largely on virtue; in circumstances there are many things
which lend authority, such as talent, wealth, age, good luck,
skill, experience, necessity, and even at times a concurrence
of fortuitous events. For it is common belief that the talented,
the wealthy, and those whose character has been tested by
long life, are worthy of credence. This may not be correct, but
the opinion of the common people can hardly be changed,
and both those who make judicial decisions and those who
pass moral judgements steer their course by that. As I was
saying, those who excel in these things seem to excel in
virtue.
But as for the rest of the qualities that I just now enu-
merated, although they have in them no kind of virtue, yet
they sometimes strengthen conviction, if a person is shown to
possess skill or experience; for knowledge has great influence
in convincing, and people generally put faith in those who
are experienced. Necessity, too, wins conviction, and this
necessity may be either physical or mental. For what men say
when they have been worn down by stripes, the rack, and
fire, seems to be spoken by truth itself; and what they say
under stress of mind—grief, lust, anger or fear—lends author-
ity and conviction, because these emotions seem to have the
force of necessity.
This class also includes those states or conditions from

which the truth is sometimes discovered, such as childhood,
sleep, inadvertence, intoxication and insanity. Small children
have often given some information without knowing its per-
tinence, and many facts have been revealed by persons
asleep, intoxicated, or insane. Many men, too, have fallen into
disgrace through inadvertence, as lately happened to Staienus
who made incriminating statements within the hearing of
some reputable citizens concealed behind a wall. When these
remarks of his were published, and reported in court, he was
justly condemned on a capital charge. We have heard a sim-
ilar story about Pausanias, the Lacedaemonian.
The concurrence of fortuitous events is illustrated, for
example, by a chance interruption when something was being
said or done which should be kept secret. An instance of this
sort is the mass of circumstantial evidence of treason which
was heaped on Palamedes. Sometimes truth itself can scarcely
refute evidence of this sort. We may also put in this class pub-
lic opinion, which is a kind of testimony of the multitude.
The testimony which produces conviction through virtue
is of two kinds; one sort gets its efficacy by nature, the other
acquires it by hard work. That is to say, the surpassing virtue
of the gods is the result of their nature, but the virtue of men
is the result of hard work. The testimony of the gods is cov-
ered thoroughly enough by the following: first, utterances, for
oracles get their name from the fact that they contain an utter-
ance (oratio) of the gods; secondly, the flight of birds through
the air and their songs; thirdly, sounds and flashes of fire from
the heavens, and portents given by many objects on earth, as
well as the foreshadowing of events which is revealed by the
entrails (of sacrificial animals). The testimony of the gods is at
times adduced from these topics in order to win conviction.
In the case of a man, it is the opinion of his virtue which
is most important. For opinion regards as virtuous not only
those who really are virtuous, but also those who seem to be.
And so when people see men endowed with genius, industry
and learning, and those whose life has been consistent and of
approved goodness, like Cato, Laelius, Scipio, and many
more, they regard them as the kind of men that they would
like to be. Nor do they hold such an opinion only about those
who have been honoured by the people with public office
and are busy with matters of state, but also about orators,
philosophers, poets, and historians. Their sayings and writings
are often used as authority to win conviction62 (fig. 1).
Such is the basic structure of Cicero’s topic for testimony and author-
ity. The overall legacy of Aristotle is evident in the distinctions between
nature and circumstance, with the latter including such examples as torture,
Figure 1.1. Extrinsic in Cicero’s Topica.
Extrinsic
Considerations for
authority of a witness
Nature/Character Circumstances
Talent
Wealth
Divine Human Skill
Opinion of Virtue is Experience
more important than fact Necessity
Concurrence of
fortuitous events
Positions of authority
Public office and public opinion
Revealed by Orators
Philosophers
Poets
Historians
Oracles Works of Gods Dreams

In the heavens
Flight and songs of birds
Lightning and thunder
or earthly portents
experience, and public opinion. The legacy of Stoic assent and skepticism
is also evident in Cicero’s emphasis on the authority. The mere fact of a
testimony is not enough. To win conviction, Cicero taught, testimony must
be joined to authority. In this way we see Cicero mitigating Aristotle’s
bald statements about the persuasiveness of truth with the more subtle
Stoic interest in the problems of creating credibility and giving warrant to
beliefs.
Although Cicero’s Topica was more influential in the long run of his-
tory, his other two books were much read and quoted in the centuries fol-
lowing the Renaissance. De Inventione was written by Cicero as a teenager
and most of it seems to be a notebook transcription of his teacher’s
lectures. As such it reflects common Roman education along with Cicero’s
youthful commitment to the system of topics. As for testimony and author-
ity, the treatment remains highly consistent between this youthful work and
the two textbooks of his old age. Even the three examples—Cato, Laelius,
and Scipio—of “men possessed the highest virtue and an authority
strengthened by their virtue” remained the same.63
De Inventione is focused on the invention of arguments—“the discov-

ery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one’s cause plausible.”64
The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic is not clearly delineated nor
are the technical terms used even though Cicero moved in and out of the
subject of testimony and authority throughout the book. De Inventione
gives much useful advice to orators who are laying praise or blame,
engaged in political debate, or acting as accusers or defenders in a court of
law. It touches on such matters as use of authoritative opinions in similar
cases (I.xvii.24), the ways bad preparation can cause the loss of authority
(I.xviii.25), the imporance of personal attributes to argumentation
(I.xxiv.34–xxv.35), the importance of assent to authority (I.xxx.48), and
the great weight of authority given to testimony from the gods and from
“forefathers, kings, states, nations, men of supreme wisdom, the senate, the
people and authors of laws” (I.liii.101).
De Partitione Oratoria, the third of Cicero’s textbooks on topics, was
written at the end of his life. Presented as a dialogue between Cicero and
his son, like De Inventione, it also focuses on the invention of arguments
to convince or influence. Like Topica, the book begins with the distinction
between what he called in Topica intrinsic and extrinsic arguments, a
distinction he described as arguments that are “either contained in the facts
of the case itself or are obtained from outside” (in rei ipsa insitis aut
assumptis).65 The latter group he then split into either divine or human
testimony, using a list not too different from his childhood list given in
De Inventione (see fig. 2). These lists would be much used by Renaissance
and early modern humanists.
Cicero discussed topics and the role of testimony and authority in many
other works besides these three textbooks; however, these books created
an educational scaffolding that gave a clear and prominent place to testi-
mony and authority. In the long tradition of testimony and authority in top-
ics, Aristotle would most often be understood in the context of Cicero.
ASSENT, COMMON BELIEFS, THE INCREDIBLE,

AND DIVINE TESTIMONY
As opposed to Aristotle’s, Cicero’s topics benefited from Hellenistic explo-

rations of assent and probability. Whereas Aristotle seems to have more
baldly assumed the simple use of ready-made nontechnical arguments,
Cicero more skeptically examined the problems involved. Another way to
look at this is to say that Aristotle’s emphasis on testimony is more passive
than Cicero’s emphasis on a lawyer winning a conviction or an orator cre-
ating credibility. Cicero’s emphasis on assent gives power to the listener,
the person who receives testimony. In other words, assent is what gives
authority to the authority.66 Ciceronian topics can be characterized as being
Figure 1.2. Divine and human testimony in De Inventione and

De Partitione Oratoria.
De Inventione I.liii.101 De Partitione Oratoria ii.6
Authorities with Greatest Weight Two Types of Testimony
From immortal gods by: Divine:
Casting lots Oracles
Oracles Auspicies
Soothsayers Prophesies
Portents Responses to priests,
Prodigies augurs, and diviners
Responses and the like
Also: Human (viewed in light of ):
Forefathers Authority
Kings Inclination
States Freely given or compelled:
Nations Written documents
Men of supreme wisdom Pledges
The senate Promises
The people Statements made
Authors of Laws under oath or
examination
about methods of creating credibility where that creation requires activity

from a minimum of two parties—giver and receiver.
The boundary between intrinsic and extrinsic knowledge becomes
clouded when emphasis is placed on assent. Cicero, reporting an instance
of a teacher-student intimacy that must have often been repeated in history,
noted the cloudiness but still affirmed the distinction in De Partitione
Oratoria:
Cicero Junior: Well, as to the rules that are styled [without

art, sine arte], which you said have been adopted long ago, do
they as a matter of fact require some degree of [art, artis]?
Cicero Senior: They do indeed, and they are not called
[without art] because they really are so, but because they are
not engendered by the [art] of the speaker, but he receives
them from outside, yet all the same he handles them with [art]
and particularly in dealing with the evidence of witnesses.67
Junior perceptively notes the awkwardness of the idea that non-art is part
of art and that art must be involved with the non-art. Cicero agrees, but
affirms the traditional distinction and the separate rules that go with that
distinction. Cicero tells his son that the issue is the source. Even though
the reasoner handles the non-art with art—most blatantly by deciding to
assent or not—the extrinsic has not been “engendered” by the reasoner’s

art. Distinctive rules for handling must apply—especially in the case of
testimony from witnesses.
Heightened emphasis on assent opens the door for discussing the too-
easy assent to common beliefs, the refusal of assent to the incredible, and
the problematic role of assenting to divine testimony. Unfortunately Cicero
did not offer extensive analysis of each of these subjects; however, he did
plant a seed in dialectic that would flower in the Renaissance and on into
the miracle debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Cicero’s statement on too-easy assent has already appeared in the long
quote from Topica. He stated in that passage that it is a “common belief ”
that the talented, the rich, and the aged should be accorded authority. Such
a belief “may not be correct”; however, those “who make judicial decisions
and those who pass moral judgements steer their course by that.”68 Cicero
implies here that when working in a courtroom or public arena the truth
of testimony matters less than its perceived authority. Common beliefs
granted authority, and the orator who wished to persuade should work
within the confines of common beliefs—whether the orator believed them
true or not.
Cicero could sometimes be cynical and manipulative when discussing
testimony. Lacking the full measure of Aristotle’s belief that most people are
telling the truth and that truth will out, Cicero could use assent as a weapon
to simply dismiss even an authoritative testimony. This is especially true
when handling the reports of the incredible. In De Partitione Oratoria
Cicero noted that when a witness makes statements that are incredible, they
need only be met “with a mere refutation.”69 Such is the power of the Stoic
doctrine of assent. Aristotle offered no such clear-cut ability to reject testi-
mony. The incredible need not even be accorded a reasoned response.
Mere refutation is enough.
Divine testimony was a similar issue for Cicero but not so easily refuted
as the incredible. When writing practical textbooks, Cicero apparently did
not think it appropriate to say what he really thought about the problem of
divine testimony. In On Divination, he expressed deep reservations about
divine testimony; however, in Topica, a book he wrote later in the same
year, he offered no reservations. The dichotomy between what Cicero
wrote in a textbook and his own thoughts on the subject is not an uncom-
mon situation throughout this present study. Textbooks are social docu-
ments designed to serve a social purpose. As such, textbook writers from
Cicero’s time to today often submit themselves to public opinion more than
they would if they were writing a more personal treatise. The benefit of
such submission for a historical study is that textbooks usually teach us
more about commonly held ideas and common use of terms. The obvious
lesson here is that historians should be wary of the dichotomy between the
ideas of individual thinkers and their textbooks and wary that the high road
of discussion between the philosophical elite might be very different from
the lower road of discussion in classrooms and courtrooms.
As already quoted in Topica and seen in figures 1.1 and 1.2, Cicero
described several types of divine testimony useful “in order to win con-
viction.”70 In Topica he listed five forms: 1) astrology, 2) the flight and songs
of birds, 3) thunder and lightning, 4) portents revealed by earthly objects
such as entrails of sacrificial animals, and 5) dreams. In the Renaissance,
Petrus Ramus would popularize Cicero’s list from De Inventione: “casting
lots, from oracles, soothsayers, portents, prodigies, responses and the like”
(ex sortibus, ex oraculis, vatibus, ostentis, prodigiis, responsis, similibus
rebus).71 Cicero, himself, it should be noted, had held a public office as a
vaticinator or soothsayer—an office that held much political power.
Cicero was more free with his ideas about divine communication in
On Divination, a dialogue between Quintus, Cicero’s brother, and himself.
Quntus presents a long, sober, and sophisticated defense of divination
founded on human and divine testimony. Careful to cite testimony from
well-respected human authorities and note the large mass of testimonial
evidence for communication with divinities, he goes so far to implore
Cicero: “Shall we wait until brute beasts are ready to speak—being unsat-
isfied with the universal testimony of human beings?”72
Cicero was unmoved by this appeal. He refused to give assent to any
report of divine communication no matter how well-respected the author-
ity or how many testimonies were reported. He simply ranked all such
testimonies as incredible. In a style and with reasons similar to David
Hume’s eighteenth-century essay On Miracles, Cicero denied the authority
of testimony in matters that he had already decided were “beyond the
range of possibility.”73 Even though Cicero here denied the role of divine
testimony, his argument does not contradict his textbooks’ position that
authority ultimately rests on assent. By implication, the truth of a testimony
is not always sufficient to persuade; rather, the willingness of the receiver
to grant authority to the witness is necessary as well.
David Potter, in Prophets and Emperors: Human and Divine Authority
from Augustus to Theodosius, writes that “The Roman republican aristocracy
was loath to admit any that any of its members could be in direct, personal
communication with a god,” while the Roman people “seem to have been
deeply fascinated by this possibility.”74 Potter uses Cicero’s On Divination
as evidence for this assertion; however, the dialectic textbooks of the
Roman empire—designed to train that republican aristocracy—were not
hesitant to teach the authority of divine testimony. Quintilian later noted in
a discussion on oaths that it is possible to find philosophers who “deny that
the gods intervene in human affairs” but he implies that such philosophers
are hard to find.75
Summing up Cicero’s tenets for handling testimony and authority is an

awkward task. His conflicting remarks about divine testimony tend to
undermine any confidence we might have in understanding his true posi-
tion on the role of testimony in dialectic. We can safely assume, though,
that he was serious when he encouraged his son to adopt the notion and
the rules governing a class of knowledge that was extrinsic—that the full-
ness of the art of reasoning required something gained without art.
Certainly in his many speeches and essays, Cicero himself advocated the
personal and public importance of good faith and even compelled assent
when giving or receiving testimony. In On Duties, for example, he uses his-
torical reports to prove that what is morally wrong can never be advanta-
geous, and in Against Verres he demanded that his case against the
governor was strong because it was based on “the evidence of records and
witnesses, and the letters and other testimonies of individuals and public
bodies.”76 Public life demands that citizens not be too dismissive of the
importance and power of extrinsic arguments. Cicero lived this way, taught
it to his son, and in three textbooks taught many throughout history.
QUINTILIAN: LAWYERS, HISTORIANS, AND HONEST ERROR
Cicero’s textbooks have had long influence in the history of teaching the art
of being reasonable, but there was another Roman author with equal and
may be greater influence: Marcius Fabius Quintilianus (A.D. c.40–c.96). His
De Institutio Oratoria begins with the qualifications for a child’s tutor, is
sprinkled throughout with practical wisdom, offers a description of topics,
and extensively discusses the uses of testimony and authority by lawyers
with a shorter discussion for historians.
We know little about him other than what can be gleaned from his text-
book. Born in Roman Spain, he apparently first worked as a lawyer, moved
to Rome in 68, and was soon named teacher by the Emperor Vespasian of
what is often called Rome’s first public school. It is not clear what his duties
were or who he actually taught. George Kennedy tells us that
Vespasian in general was not especially interested in the arts,

but he was interested in education as a means of creating an
intelligent and responsible ruling class, and Quintilian would
have appealed to him. They both had a straightforward hon-
esty and practicality and non-aristocratic backgrounds, and
Quintilian’s educational and literary ideas were as much a
reaction to the period of Nero as was Vespasian’s rather
homey court.77
If virtue was to be restored to the imperial bureaucracy, it needed to

encourage a less strident educational ideal of the gentleman orator than
Cicero’s and one more calmly supportive of virtuous public service. Cicero
seems to have always had an axe to grind while Quintilian was a comfort-
able man without aspirations to power. Soon after retiring from his public
post, Quintilian wrote the Institutio (c.92), a book that probably represents,
better than anything Cicero wrote, Roman education at its best.
Quintilian cited Aristotle as the source for distinguishing internal from
external sources of information, and wrote that in his own era the distinction
“has met with almost universal approval.”78 Almost universally approved.
Quintilian reported that there were some who would eliminate testimony
and authority from the rules of oratory, but he believed they deserved “the
strongest condemnation.”79 His argument against them is simple: Most
forensic arguments are concerned with “rumours, evidence extracted by
torture, documents, oaths, and witnesses.”80 The courtroom, if nothing else,
demanded that reasonable people recognize the importance of distinguish-
ing external sources of evidence.
Where Quintilian differed from Aristotle and Cicero was in his choice
of terms. Whereas Aristotle used the terms technical and nontechnical
(technoi and atechnoi) and Cicero used the terms inherent and extrinsic
(haerent and extrinsecus), Quintilian preferred the terms artificial and inar-
tificial (artificiales and inartificiales). All three English terms, nontechnical,
extrinsic, and inartificial, refer to information that a reasoner does not, and
often cannot, know by self-reliance; rather, such information can be known
only by openness to external sources. Because of Quintilian’s great influ-
ence, the term inartificial has been the most widely used term in textbooks
for describing testimony and authority. Although an awkward term, it
means essentially the same as Cicero’s son referring to testimony as “with-
out art” (sine arte).
Quintilian wrote that he learned his material on testimony and author-
ity primarily from Domitius Afer: “I attended his lectures when he was old
and I was young, and consequently have the advantage not merely of
having read his book, but of having heard most of his views from his own
lips.”81 Afer was a lawyer and taught the young Quintilian the importance
of establishing or demolishing the credibility of witnesses. Cases often
hinge on “the direction of believing the witness or the reverse.”82 Quintilian,
therefore, did not follow Aristotle in simply teaching the persuasiveness
of truth—especially true testimony; rather, he followed Cicero in teaching
the arts of manipulating testimony and authority. Certainly Quintilian, like
Cicero, was not interested in teaching orators to lie or deny known truths;
however, in the courtroom testimony and authority were always weak
sources of knowledge deserving of careful scrutiny and even refutation.
Quintilian devoted several sections of his text to the weakness of tes-
timony and authority and the methods of refutation. For the purposes of a
defender or prosecutor, every kind of inartifical proof can be argued for or
against. The character of witnesses can be praised or impugned. Rumors

can be the verdict of public opinion or vague talk with unsure authority.
Torture can bring out truth or just what is expedient. Documents, he
believed, are especially weak. Written testimony is easily forged, the cir-
cumstances surrounding the writing usually have something easily under-
mined, and, most importantly, the character of the absent author is not
easily assessed. An acute examiner—Quintilian gave the example of
Socrates—can usually find something to undermine in any specific inartifi-
cial argument.
Even when actually dealing with inartificial knowledge gained from
divine testimony, the lawyer must be ready to support or refute. Divine tes-
timony (divina testimonia), which Quintilian defined as “based on oracles,
prophecies, and omens;” must be subject to lawyerly dissections. A lawyer
is charged with the “task of establishing or demolishing such evidence.”83
Quintilian was not teaching anything new. In a practical and construc-
tive Roman manner Quintilian taught his students to seek the middle path
between radical skepticism and gullibility, the ideal taught by all textbooks
in the long tradition of practical reasoning. Radical skepticism was imprac-
tical and destructive. At the other pole, gullibility was also impractical and
destructive. Practical and constructive thinking ranged between the two
poles and necessarily involved careful handling of inartificial information.
Quintilian praised both Stoic and the Socratic models for handling evi-
dence. The Stoics taught a positive way to argue “with great keenness on
what is just, honourable, expedient and the reverse, as well as on the prob-
lems of theology, while the Socratics give the future orator a first-rate
preparation for forensic debates and the examination of witnesses.”84
This complementary difference between Socratics and Stoics manifests
itself in the way Quintilian taught that testimony and authority should be
handled differently by lawyers and historians. When focused on training
lawyers, Quintilian emphasized the weakness of testimony and the lawyerly
methods of either supporting or refuting any witness. When discussing his-
tory and the work of historians he advised more openness. Quintilian like
Cicero believed historians had a high calling above the partiality of court-
room forensic. Cicero in De Oratore had declared that, at minimum, a his-
torian “should not be a liar.”85 For who does not know, he asks, that
“history’s first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but
the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth?
That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor
of Malice?”86 Quintilian had declared it essential that an orator “should be a
good man.”87 Being a good historian required high standards of truth-telling
and precision even above the standards of poets. “We should not follow
the poets in everything,” Quintilian believed, “especially in their freedom
of language and their license in the use of figures.”88 Although sharing
similarities, the historian was different from the poet and lawyer. History for
Quintilian,
has a certain affinity to poetry and may be regarded as a kind

of prose poem, while it is written for the purpose of narra-
tive, not of proof, and designed from beginning to end not
for immediate effect or the instant necessities of forensic
strife, but to record events for the benefit of posterity and to
win glory for its author.89
Recording events for the benefit of posterity was the high responsibil-
ity of a historian. And such a responsibility required a different attitude
toward evidence drawn from testimony and authority. At the beginning of
the Institutio, before he began teaching how lawyers can undermine the
authority of written documents and the testimony of witnesses in the court-
room, Quintilian held up the authority of orators and historians in the use
of language. “Authority as a rule we derive from orators and historians.”90
Their judgment “is placed on the same level as reason.”91 Historians are
especially charged with the duty of teaching the lessons and wisdom of the
past. “As for Antiquity,” he declared, “it is commended to us by the
possession of a certain majesty, I might almost say sanctity” (Vetera maies-
tas quaedam et, ut sic dixerim, religio commendat).92 History is of such
sanctity that if a student errs in his judgment because he follows the author-
ity of antiquity, it is an honest error that should not be held against the
student. “Error brings no disgrace (error honestus),” Quintilian declared, “if
it result from treading in the footsteps of such distinguished guides.”93
This is an important passage. Quintilian, working with the two standard
models that necessarily use testimony, distinguishes historical from lawyerly
treatment of witnesses. Both depend on using inartificial knowledge, which
is always weak and easily undermined. The weakness is what makes it so
vulnerable in courtroom forensic. When teaching the short-term, case-winning
methods of a lawyer, Quintilian emphasized capitalizing on the weaknesses.
When teaching the long-term responsibilities of the historian, Quintilian
emphasized the sanctity of what we know from the ancients, the honor of
assenting to worthy authorities, and that there is no dishonor in being wrong
if a historian must risk making a judgment based on weak evidence. In the
art of handling reports from witnesses, the lawyer’s short-term responsibili-
ties are very different from the historian’s long-term responsibilities. The
lawyer must win a case. Weakness must be pounced on. Historians teach
the values and traditions that undergird society, they must not pounce as
readily on the weakness of testimony. Historians have a duty to work more
softly and respectfully with testimony. In the context of the historian’s
responsibility, Quintilian also proposed the important notion of honest error.
The art of being reasonable requires the use of the doubtful as warrant for
the reasonable. The art requires allowance for acceptable risk of error. After
the Stoics emphasized the role of assent in the process of bringing the inar-
tificial into the art of reasoning—essentially increasing the responsibility of
the assenter—Quintilian thought it appropriate to offer no-fault insurance to
protect the respectability of a historian who, honoring the testimonial evi-
dence available, might affirm something that might later be proven wrong.
This respect for the authority of testimony coming down through his-
tory can be seen in Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus. Plutarch (c.46–c.120), a
contemporary of Quintilian, modeled the kind of long-term responsibility
of a productive historian instead of Cicero’s dismissive lawyerly methods.
In his sketch of Coriolanus, Plutarch writes about reports of a talking statue,
a statue of the goddess Fortune who declared to a woman publicly:
“Blessed of the gods, O woman, is your gift.”
These words, they profess, were repeated a second time,

expecting our belief for what seems pretty nearly an impos-
sibility. It may be possible enough that statues may seem to
sweat, and to run with tears, and to stand with certain dewy
drops of an sanguine colour; for timber and stones are fre-
quently known to contract a kind of scurf and rottenness,
productive of moisture; and various tints may form on the
surfaces, both from within and from the action of the air out-
side; and by these signs it is not absurd to imagine that the
deity may forewarn us. It may happen, also, that images and
statues may sometimes make a noise not unlike that of a
moan or groan, through a rupture or violent internal separa-
tion of the parts; but that an articulate voice, and such express
words, and language so clear and exact and elaborate, should
proceed from inanimate things is, in my judgment, a thing
utterly out of possibility. For it was never known that either
the soul of man, or the deity himself, uttered vocal sounds
and language, alone, without an organized body and mem-
bers fitted out for speech.
But where history seems in a manner to force our assent
by the concurrence of numerous and credible witnesses, we
are to conclude that an impression distinct from sensation
affects the imaginative part of our nature, and then carries
away the judgment, so as to believe it to be a sensation; just
as in sleep we fancy we see and hear, without really doing
either. Persons, however, whose strong feelings of reverence
to the deity, and tenderness for religion, will not allow them
to deny or invalidate anything of this kind, have certainly a
strong argument for their faith, in the wonderful and tran-
scendent character of the divine power; which admits no
manner of comparison with ours, either in its nature or its
action, the modes or the strength of its operations. It is no con-
tradiction to reason that it should do things that we cannot
do, and effect what for us is impracticable: differing from us

in all respects, in its acts yet more than in other points we
may well believe it to be unlike us and remote from us.
Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus
says, is lost to us by incredulity.94
Plutarch, predisposed to refuse assent to such a story, did not simply sum-
marily dismiss it in the manner of Cicero in On Divination or submit it to the
lawyerly cross-examination that Cicero and Quintilian showed can always
weaken any evidence from a witness. Acting as respectful historian, he treads
more lightly. If short-term lawyerly methods are used in writing history, not
only divine things but history itself will be lost by incredulity. Plutarch here
exemplified Quintilian’s teaching about respectful history and honest error.
Roman education, as modeled by Quintilian and Plutarch, made the
acceptance and rejection of credible and incredible testimony more fuzzy
in history than law. Plutarch, in his life of Cato the Younger, a man famous
for his virtue and truth-telling, reported that “it was a sort of proverb with
the people, if any very unlikely and incredible thing were asserted, to say
they would not believe it, though Cato himself should affirm it.”95 David
Hume would later quote this passage to support his own refusal to assent
to anything he deemed impossible. But Plutarch was not proposing that he
or other historians should follow such a proverb, and Quintilian did not
place such strictures on assent to testimony. “All proofs (probationum)”
Quintilian wrote, “fall into three classes, necessary, credible, and not
impossible (necessariae, aliae credibles, aliae non repugnantes).”96 This last
category did not imply that what people feel is impossible is excluded;
rather, it was a category to separate self-evident impossibilities. Dialectic in
general, for Quintilian, was where “doubtful things yield faith (dubiis adfer-
ens fidem).”97 Quintilian listed the inartificial doubtful things as “the opin-
ions of nations, peoples, philosophers, distinguished citizens, or illustrious
poets,” and even “common sayings and popular beliefs.”98 Lawyers were
necessarily trained to work for their clients by attacking or supporting evi-
dence presented by a witness. Historians necessarily worked also from
weak testimony; however, their job required more respect for testimony—
especially testimony that has passed into the lore of the country.
BETWEEN THE SCYLLA OF GULLIBILITY AND

CHARYBDIS OF SKEPTICISM
One strength of the classical tradition of handling testimony is that it charted
a sensible route between the Scylla and Charybdis of gullibility and skepti-
cism. As the story goes, Scylla was a sea-nymph turned monster holed up in
two enormous crags coming out of the sea, and Charybdis was the nearby
whirlpool that gulped down water and ships. Circe advised Odysseus on
how to get between the two and on to Ithaca. Odysseus had his own plan
of how to flee Charybdis and fight Scylla, but Circe rebuked him: “So stub-
born!” she cried out—the only way to get through was to “row for your
lives.”99 Odysseus was a famed thinker, a strategist upon whose wit the
Achaeans relied. He was a prone to trust his own personal intelligence rather
assent to an outside authority. But his frustrating years at sea were designed
by the gods to teach him some humility. The human mind’s powers are great;
however, a wise man must sometimes bind himself to the mast, accept his
weakness, submit to outside authority, and command his men to simply row
for their lives. Quintilian opened the Institutio with a similar plea: “Let us
raise our sail before the wind and fervently pray for a good end.”
Essentially, such is the situation of nontechnical, extrinsic, and inartifi-
cial topics. The picture of Odysseus is the picture of Aristotle recommend-
ing the authority of the majority of the best philosophers, or Cicero
demanding that Verres be convicted on basis of evidence of records, wit-
nesses, and written testimonies, or Quintilian humbly recommending that a
historian must be willing to make an “honest error.” Sometimes being rea-
sonable requires simply tying oneself to the mast and accepting authority.
Aristotle praised the mathematical logic of demonstrations from self-evident
truths, but self-reliant boys could do it. Political leadership, courtroom jus-
tice, and even teaching history required working with information gained
from outside of ourselves—a special and complex kind of knowledge with
no self-evidence or personal experience.
The heritage of classical topics offered a model for teaching people to
navigate between the Scylla of gullibility and Charybdis of skepticism. If
Ithaca was to be attained, the role of testimony in the art of being reason-
able had to be affirmed and handled with care. Neither Cicero nor Quintilian
pretended to be original or innovative in what they wrote. Their dialectical
works were part of a Roman “handbook movement” that produced many
manuals of instruction, most of which are lost.100 The textbooks of Aristotle,
Cicero, and Quintilian, however, were never completely lost and had long,
direct, and regenerating influence in the history of education.
NOTES
1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 435.
2. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, trans. R. G. Bury, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1935), bk. 1, 7–8.
3. See Plato, Phaedrus, 261d, and William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The
Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 7–8.
4. Aristotle, De Sophisticis Elenchis, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge in The
Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928),184b.1–5.
5. See Gilbert Ryle, “Dialectic in the Academy” in Aristotle on Dialectic: The
Topics, ed. G. E. L. Owen (Oxford: Oxford University, 1968), 69–79.
6. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1921), V, preface, i.1–3.
7. Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 1.
8. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York:
Penguin, 1991), 1355a.15–20, 35–40.
9. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, “Greeting to Trypho.”
10. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001), 164–65.
11. Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora, trans. G. R. G. Mure in The Works of Aristotle,
ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 88b.30–89a.5.
12. Aristotle, Topica, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge in The Works of Aristotle,
ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 155b.5–15.
13. Ibid., 100a.25–100b.25.
14. Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1998), 1275b.
15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a.15–20.
16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1985), 1143b.5–15.
17. Aristotle, Politics, 1326b.15.
19. Ibid., 1139a.35.
20. Ibid., 1144a.30–35.
21. The fullest description on nontechnical proofs is in Rhetoric 1.15. H. C.
Lawson-Tancred gives a good definition of technical and nontechnical in the
introduction to his translation of The Art of Rhetoric (New York: Penguin Books,
1991), 14–21.
22. Kneale and Kneale, The Development of Logic, 33.
23. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance
Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 5.
24. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 5.
25. Aristotle, Topica, 163b.20.
26. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 1398b–1399a (p. 202).
27. Aristotle, Topica, 101a.25–30.
28. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 1355b.35–40.
29. In the long history of making a place in textbook descriptions of topics,
three other pairs of terms were applied to the distinction Aristotle created between
the technical and nontechnical. In English (as discussed in the Introduction) they
are intrinsic and extrinsic, artificial and inartificial, and artistic and inartistic. The
ambiguities of the relationships within each pair of terms are discussed more fully
in later chapters. Aristotle, himself, dealt most fully with the distinction as part of
his section on litigation in the Rhetoric.
30. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 1375a.20–25.
31. Ibid., 1375a.25–1375b.25.
32. Ibid., 1377a.1–5. For an overview of this perspective on torture as evi-
dence, see James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability
Before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001), 12–40.
33. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 1418b.20–25.
34. Ibid., 1376a.5–10.
35. Ibid., 1376a.15–20.
36. Ibid., 1376a.15–20.
37. The Hellenistic Philosophers, eds. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, vol. 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1987), 1.
38. Ibid., 2. Felix Grayeff in Aristotle and His School: An Inquiry into the
History of the Peripatos (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) dates the decline of
Aristotelianism a little later and emphasizes the success of the Lyceum under
Theophrastus (322–287/6 B.C.). However, under the leadership of Strato (287/6–
268/7 B.C.) the school took a more scientific turn with less interest in logic and lost
influence in Athens while still being powerful in the Hellenic world.
39. Diogenes Laertius, vii.39–43, pp. 151, 153.
40. Kneale and Kneale, The Development of Logic, 113.
41. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 429.
42. For rhetoric, as opposed to dialectic, see George A. Kennedy, A New
History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 81–102.
43. Diogenese Laertius, vii.180–81.
44. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Greek Philosophers of the Hellenistic Age, trans.
Gregory Woods (New York: Columbia University, 1993), 27. See also Richard Bett,
“Carneades’ Distinction between Assent and Approval,” Monist, 73 (1990):3–20, and
Michael Frede, “Two Skeptic’s Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the
Possibility of Knowledge,” in Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 1987).
45. See F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New
York: New York University, 1967), 126. When Plato has Socrates describe what
passes between an eyewitness and listeners, he states “the facts which can be
known only by an eyewitness” whereas the listeners are only “accepting a true
belief,” Theaetetus, 201b.
46. What we have are second-hand accounts of debates primarily from Sextus
Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius involving Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus on the
Stoic side and Arcesilaus and Carneades on the skeptic side.
47. Diogenese Laertius, vii.47–48.
48. Ibid.
49. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, I.156–58.
50. Philip P. Hallie, “Carneades,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul
Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967), vol. 2, 34.
51. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, I.171–85.
52. See James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture, 1–12, 102–14, 195–200.
53. Paul MacKendrick in The Philosophical Books of Cicero (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1989), 3–4, notes the effect of Theodore Mommsen’s dismissal of Cicero
and cites a number of similar modern estimates in footnote 22. See also Kneale and
Kneale, The Development of Logic, 177–82.
54. Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, vol. 4 of Cicero
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1942), XL.139.
55. See Feliz Grayeff’s chapter on “The Library of the Peripatos and its History”
in Aristotle and His School, 69–85. Jonathan Barnes notes the way modern scholars are
interpreting Strabo’s story in a way that allows that copies of Aristotle’s works were
available even though Aristotle’s library might have been hidden. See Jonathan Barnes,
Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995), 10.
56. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, vol. 3 of Cicero
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1942), II.xxxvi.152.
57. Ibid., II.xl.175.
58. Cicero, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell, vol. 2 of Cicero (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1949), I.1–5.
59. That Cicero was working from memory with a large number of sources
is emphasized by Pamela M. Huby in “Cicero’s Topics and Its Peripatetic Sources”
in Cicero’s Knowledge of the Peripatos, eds. William W. Fortenbaugh and Peter
Steinmetz (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 61–76.
60. Cicero, Topica, i.8.
61. Ibid., ii.8, iv.24.
62. Ibid., xix.73–xx.78.
63. Cicero, De Inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell, vol. 2 of Cicero (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1942), I.iv.5. The Cato is the Elder or Censor. The odd aspect
of citing these three is that Plutarch reports that Cato hated Scipio and openly
attacked Scipio’s lack of virtue.
64. Cicero, De Inventione, I.vii.9.
65. Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria, ii.5.
66. Cicero asserts that the act of assent is in the power of the receiver in De
Fato, xix.43–44.
67. Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria, xiv.48.
68. Cicero, Topica, xix.73.
69. Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria, xiv.51.
70. Cicero, Topica, xx.77.
71. Cicero, De Inventione, I.liii.101.
72. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Divination, trans. Hubert M. Poteat and intro.
Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1950), i.39.
73. Cicero, On Divination, ii.12.
74. David Potter, Prophets and Emperors: Human and Divine Authority from
Augustus to Theodosius (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1994), 149.
75. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, V.vi.3.
76. Cicero, Selected Works, ed. and trans. Michael Grant (New York: Penguin
Books, 1960), 172–77, 49.
77. George A. Kennedy, Quintilian (New York: Twayne, 1969), 19.
78. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, V, preface, i.1–3. Note that at times I will not
be using Butler’s translation and will give the Latin in parenthesis after offering my
own translation. Butler’s free translation of technical terms sometimes confuses

important points.
79. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, V.preface.i.2–3.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., V. vii.7.
82. Ibid., vii.8.
83. Ibid., 35–37.
84. Ibid., X.i.35–36.
85. Cicero, De Oratore, II.xii.51.
86. Ibid., 62.
87. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, I.Preface.9.
88. Ibid., X.i.28–29.
89. Ibid., 31.
90. Ibid., I.vi.2.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid. Aristotle also gives greater authority to ancient history than more
recent (Rhetoric, I.15).
93. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, I.vi.1–3.
94. Plutarch, “Coriolanus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans.
John Dryden, revised trans. Arthur Hugh Clough, vol. 14, Great Books of the Western
World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952),
191–92.
95. Plutarch, “Cato the Younger,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans, trans. John Dryden (rev. trans. Arthur Hugh Clough), vol. 14 in Great
Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1952), 627.
96. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, V.viii.7.
97. Ibid., x.8.
98. Ibid., xi.36–37.
99. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996),
12.110–140.
100. James Bowen, A History of Western Education: The Ancient World: Orient
and Mediterranean, vol. 1 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972), 176; see also 193–95.
CHAPTER TWO
THREE MEDIEVAL TRADITIONS: AUGUSTINE,

BOETHIUS, AND CASSIODORUS
The Greeks and Romans developed a place for testimony and authority in
topics manuals as nontechnical, extrinsic, or inartificial arguments. The
early Christians, dependent upon Jewish history and reports of Jesus’ work
and resurrection, had reason to emphasize the reasonableness of reliance
on testimony. Luke in his sketch of Jesus’ life and the early church bases
his authority on eyewitness accounts. Paul, outlining his authority to teach,
claims access to divine testimony. As Christians came to dominate Western
education, they had good reason to retain Greek and Roman ways of teach-
ing testimony and authority in the art of being reasonable.
St. Augustine is the most important figure in this creating a Christianized
version for the dialectic using testimony. Augustine did not simply baptize
classical traditions. He created a new tradition that was psychologically
deeper, epistemologically more sophisticated, and ecclesiastically anchored.
In medieval Europe the classical and Augustinian traditions of testimony
and authority were constricted within two lesser traditions, the Boethian
and Cassiodoran. In both cases, the traditions were stripped down and pre-
sented without the rich examples, discussion, or analysis of earlier writers.
Boethius encouraged a philosophical and theological tradition that held
extrinsic knowledge at arm’s length. He also tantalizingly but without
explanation proposed a position between Aristotle’s persuasive truth and
Stoic assent that depended on a spontaneous and willing belief. Cassiodorus
was the most significant developer of a pedagogical tradition that encour-
aged emphasis on testimony and authority. Working in the Hellenistic
tradition of encyclopedists who wrote economical and comprehensive
guides to the liberal arts, Cassiodorus provided an overview of what should
be taught in each of the seven arts, which became the model for the tightly
packaged form of dialectic that came to dominate Renaissance and early
modern education. Given the centrality of historical reports in Christianity,
it is surprising that the Christian-dominated culture of medieval Europe

did not do more with the dialectic of testimony and authority; however,
Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus kept testimony and authority firmly
in the curriculum.
EYEWITNESSES AND FAITH BEFORE AUGUSTINE
Early Christian apologetics was founded on appeals to the authority of his-

tory and eyewitness testimony. Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned after
reinterpreting the history of Abraham, Moses, and David in a way that sup-
ported Christianity.1 When Peter was encouraging the Roman centurion
Cornelius to assent to Christianity, he declared the authority of the apostles:
“We are witnesses of everything [Jesus] did in the country of the Jews and
in Jerusalem.”2 Paul, not able to claim the status of an eyewitness, declared
that his authority as an apostle came from being the recipient of divine tes-
timony: “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not
something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was
I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”3 Paul’s reg-
ular appeals to his own authority were a recognition that the reasonable-
ness of Christianity fundamentally required trusting testifiers rather than
one’s own intuition or experience. An historical event was the foundation
of Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and
so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses
about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the
dead.”4 Luke, apparently well-trained in the dialectic of historians, empha-
sized that he “carefully investigated” the accounts of “eyewitnesses” when
writing his historical sketches of Jesus and the early Church.5 In one of the
New Testament’s more complex statements about the interrelationship of
divine and human testimony for the authority of Christian doctrine, the
writer of Hebrews stated:
We must pay more careful attention . . . to what we have

heard, so that we may not drift away. For the message spo-
ken by angels was binding. . . . This salvation, which was first
announced by [Jesus], was confirmed to us by those who
heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and var-
ious miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according
to his will.6
The earliest Christian apologists, desiring to create credibility for the truth
of Jesus’ life, teachings, and resurrection among those educated in the
empire, recognized the need to appeal to the traditional role of human and
divine testimony in classical dialectic.
Three Medieval Traditions 45
Although the authors of the New Testament used the dialectic of testi-
mony to promote Christianity, the early church fathers did not. Two extreme
options interested them most: a fideist rejection dialectic and a rationalist
embrace of scientific logic. Of the former, the rhetoric of Tertullian (160–220)
soared highest: “Unhappy Aristotle! who invented [for the philosophers]
dialectic, the art of building up and puling down.” To Christians he asks,
“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”7 Another example is
Jerome’s near-death experience when before the judgment seat he declared
“I am a Christian,” and the judge retorted: “Thou liest, thou art a follower
of Cicero and not of Christ.”8 Paul’s declaration that Christianity was “fool-
ishness to the Greeks” encouraged some of these fideist tendencies in the
early church.9
On the other hand, famous theologians under the influence of the
Platonic schools in Alexandria sought more than mere cordial relations
with Greco-Roman intellectual elite. They embraced rationalism in its
highest and strongest forms. If Christ was the logos as the gospel of John
stated, then the probabilities and uncertainties of apologetics based on
testimony could be superseded by the certainties of scientific logic. Of
course Christianity was a faith, but the term faith (Greek pistis, Latin fides)
was a loose word in logic that could be applied to the weak credibility
created by inartificial arguments or the certainty resulting from scientific
demonstration.
The best example of the tendency to present Christianity in the
strongest form of Greek formal logic is Stromateis or Miscellanies of Notes
of Revealed Knowledge in Accordance with the True Philosophy by
Clement of Alexandria (150–215). Clement dealt directly with the problem
of faith and logic in book eight of the Stromateis, and the collection in
general is concerned with logical inquiry to support Christianity.
Salvadore R. C. Lilla notes that Clement got his logical doctrines from
school handbooks that were popular at the time.10 The three definitions
of faith used by Clement delineated by Lilla were derived from the clas-
sical tradition:
1. Faith/pistis is the attitude peculiar to the human mind

when it believes in the first principles of demonstration;
in more general terms, it also designates any kind of imme-
diate knowledge;
2. Faith/pistis is the firm conviction which the human mind
possesses after reaching the knowledge of something by
means of a scientific demonstration;
3. Faith/pistis may also mean the tendency of the believers
to accept the truths contained in the teachings of Scripture
without attempting to reach a deeper comprehension
of them.11
All three definitions were derived from classical logic with the third being
the weak logic of dialectic. The third definition was faith based on assent
to inartificial information and was the weakest way for reasonable people
to create credibility for themselves and for others. For Clement the highest
goal was a Christian faith secure in scientific demonstration that is secured
by self-evident truths, personal experience, and introspection. Note that
only superficial believers simply “accept the truths contained in the teach-
ings of Scripture.” Such trust was reasonable, but not the kind of thing a
respectable theologian in Alexandria sought. Alexandrian theologians like
Clement were mostly interested in a Platonic-style apologetic that had noth-
ing to do with the vagueries of Roman topics.12
Clement created a Christian school in Alexandria, and we can assume
that topics was taught to the children in the manner of Cicero and Quintilian.
However, like the later universities of medieval Europe, the teachers and
students tended to have the higher aspiration of the stronger faith that
comes from introspection and formal demonstration. The general tendency
of the Christian intellectual elite throughout history has been to seek a
stronger and more certain faith than that offered by a dialectic rooted in
trusting human and divine testimony. However, as in so many other matters,
St. Augustine did not fall into the general tendency of his peers.
AUGUSTINE AND CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
St. Augustine (354–430) was, among other things, an African teacher of

dialectic. After his conversion, educating Christians to be reasonable was of
great importance to him. Although he was probably the author of a per-
functory dialectic manual that fit the normal Roman model and was long
considered the author of a manual on Aristotelian categories, his importance
in the history of textbooks on the art of thinking is the tradition that even-
tually was derived from his major writings.13 Five of Augustine’s works were
especially strong influences in this tradition: On Christian Doctrine, On the
Trinity, The City of God, On the Profit of Believing, and Confessions. The
first two were probably the most important in regard to the subjects of tes-
timony and authority. On Christian Doctrine did not teach about testimony
specifically but advocated the Christian use of dialectic. On the Trinity han-
dled testimony and issues surrounding it in an innovative manner, and has
served as an art-of-reasonableness manual for Christian apologists ever
since. Confessions treats testimony as an underlying theme.
As a teacher, monk, and pastor, Augustine sought and preached rea-
sonable Christianity, with reasonableness defined by the tradition of classi-
cal dialectic. Not much interested in teaching the whole system of topics,
he was, however, much interested in the first division of topics between
interior and exterior sources of knowledge. For him the credibility of

Christianity depended upon teaching good dialectical understanding of the
role of testimony and authority in being reasonable. Eventually in Renaissance
and early modern Europe there would flourish an Augustinian tradition of
Christian-oriented logic textbooks that emphasized testimony. In the sev-
enteenth century when The Port-Royal Logic led the attack against topics, it
did so on the basis of vital Augustinianism; moreover, it would be that
revived Augustinianism that would support the most prolific period of text-
book discussions of testimony and authority.
CHRISTIAN LIBERAL ARTS AND TESTIMONY
Augustine advocated Christian liberal arts in On Christian Doctrine.

Although superficially advocating a Christian-Hellenistic curriculum, the
text was specifically devoted to discovering and expressing the true mean-
ing of holy scriptures. The book had somewhat the feel of a textbook. Its
two-part structure of invention and use, along with its regular references to
dialectics and rhetoric, was so much like a Roman rhetoric/dialectic man-
ual that Augustine felt the need to specifically remind his readers that he
was, in fact, not writing a textbook on the rules of rhetoric. “Not that I think
such rules of no use,” he backpedaled, “but that whatever use they have is
to be learnt elsewhere.”14 Such a statement notwithstanding, there is much
in On Christian Doctrine about dialectic and its use, especially Christian
use. Its theme is that Hellenistic intellectual disciplines should be adopted
and turned “to Christian use”—for the purpose of better understanding
scripture.15
On Christian Doctrine begins with Augustine’s theory of signs—a
theory that reinforced the Aristotelian tradition of epistemological optimism
tempered by recognition of the weaknesses of much of what humans
know. Augustine wanted to humble anyone who thinks that human reason
can attain a complete understanding of God. For Augustine, God is “inef-
fable” and beyond the powers of human speech and intellect. But also like
Aristotle, he believed truth was persuasive and communicative, and that
humans could increase the amount of truth they know through right
reasoning. Dialectic contained the tools proper to the work of increasing
the amount of truth known. As an aside, however, Augustine offered the
caveat that students of dialectic should “not fall into the error of supposing
that when they have learnt these things they have learnt the secret of a
happy life.”16
Augustine believed that dialectic, if approached with humility and not
too high an expectation, was valuable for developing a credibility structure
based on the signs that both God and humans used in communication.
Augustine did not deny the value of dialectic in courtrooms; yet, he had no
interest in teaching such matters. Augustine approached testimony in a dif-

ferent context, thereby creating an alternative tradition parallel to that of
Cicero and Quintilian. In the Roman tradition, testimony was mostly con-
sidered in the context of courtroom forensics and its weakness was empha-
sized. Cicero and Quintilian had taught the ways a lawyer might undermine
or support testimonial evidence depending on one’s role in the courtroom.
Augustine was interested in unifying the Christian community and warned
against falling into “the love of wrangling, and the childish vanity of entrap-
ping an adversary.”17 He embraced testimony and authority as an important
way to understand how the weak and limited knowledge of individuals is
strengthened and broadened by taking in knowledge from society and God.
This is an important point for the long influence of an Augustinian han-
dling of testimony and authority. Augustine was not interested in teaching
courtroom attack or defense strategies. Rather, he advocated dialectic
broadly as a “science of reason,” an “intricate and thorny discipline” of rules
for “searching into and unravelling.”18 Human reliance on testimony and
authority is a good thing. It is not merely a complication in the process of
individual reasoning; rather, it gives humans access to much more than they
could ever know by themselves. In the case of human testimony, it is a
way for people to know other people, to know history, to know of places
never visited. In the case of divine testimony, it is a blessing, an unwar-
ranted grace.
Given Augustine’s insistence in On Christian Doctrine that he was not
writing a dialectic or rhetoric manual, it is understandable that he did not
digress into actually explaining topics or inartificial arguments. He did,
however, often discuss the reasonableness of using testimony and he
starkly distinguished what humans know by internal reasoning and what
they know from external authorities. This is especially true in one of his
other most influential books—a book that has served often in history as a
textbook for creating reasonable credibility for orthodox Christianity—On
the Trinity.
In On the Trinity, Augustine wrote that there are three sources of
knowledge, two of which are internal (artificial) and one external (inartifi-
cial). In order they are 1) that “which the mind knows by itself,” 2) that
“which it knows by the bodily senses,” and 3) those which it has received
and knows by the testimony of others.”19 The testimony that was inartificial
was the social kind in which people needed the active communication of
other people. Augustine was a great proponent of social knowledge.
Without external testimony, Augustine wrote,
we know not that there is an ocean; we know not that the

lands and cities exist which most copious report commends
to us; we know not that those men were, and their works,
which we have learned by reading history; we know not the

news that is daily brought us from this quarter or that, and
confirmed by consistent and conspiring evidence; lastly we
know not at what place or from whom we have been born:
since in all these things we have believed the testimony of
others. And if it is most absurd to say this, then we must con-
fess, that not only our own senses, but those of other persons
also, have added very much indeed to our knowledge.20
Not only is testimony a crucial aspect of epistemology, but the fabric

of society is woven out of it. Without testimony and assent our families,
communities, and all society disintegrates. In Faith of Things not Seen
Augustine warned that if we do not yield “assent without doubting” to the
history told to us by our parents we risk “faithless impiety toward our par-
ents.” He also warned that “if we believe not those things which we can-
not see, human society itself . . . will not stand.”21 Communication not only
binds us to our families and communities, it is also is the means to know
God to the fullest extent humanly possible.
Cicero, as discussed earlier, had a Janus-like approach to divine testi-
mony. In his dialectic manuals he categorized authoritative divine testi-
mony as coming from auguries, soothsayers, oracles, and the like, but
undermined the authority of these same sources in his On Divination.
Augustine and the Christian dialecticians who followed him could unite
Cicero’s two positions by hating divination but accepting the importance of
divine testimony as an authoritative source of knowledge. Augustine lashed
out at divination as “a labyrinth of most pernicious error” and a “species of
fornication of the soul” while teaching that canonical scripture was author-
itative divine testimony.22
In The City of God, probably Augustine’s greatest work, he explained
that the testimony of scripture “excels all the writings of all nations by its
divine authority.”23 Using the general argument for testimony that it
expanded knowledge beyond the limits of the single human, Augustine fur-
ther affirmed the practical need to trust the testimony of scripture writers
who tell of direct divine testimony. The practical necessities of learning
divine testimony from human testifiers should not be used to diminish the
authority of the divine testimony. The fact that the community of churches
defines a canon of authoritative scriptures affirms its divine authority as,
ultimately, a communication from Jesus. Jesus, Augustine wrote,
has produced the Scripture which is called canonical, which

has paramount authority, and to which we yield assent (cui
fidem habemus) in all matters of which we ought not to be
ignorant, and yet cannot know of ourselves. For if we attain
the knowledge of present objects by the testimony of our
own senses, . . . then, regarding objects remote from our own

senses, we need others to bring their testimony, since we
cannot know them by our own, and we credit the persons
to whom the objects have been or are sensibly present.
Accordingly, as in the case of visible objects which we have
not seen, we trust those who have, (and likewise with all sen-
sible objects,) so in the case of things which are perceived by
the mind and the spirit, i.e. which are remote from our own
interior sense, it behooves us to trust those who have seen
them set in that incorporeal light, or abidingly contemplate
them.24
Note the practicality and social character of the argument. Humans need
testimony in order to know beyond the limits of themselves. Jesus has
produced a set of testimonies with highest authority to give humans more
knowledge. The churches, by agreeing on canonicity, guide the individual
to the scriptures Jesus has produced. “It behooves,” then, to accord the
authority of divine testimony to what would appear to be mere human
testimony.
TRUST, SUBMISSION, AND OPTIMISM
Like Aristotle, Augustine believed that truth was naturally persuasive.

Humans must be open to finding truths, might often fall into error, are usu-
ally only seeing through a glass darkly, and must admit that much of their
knowledge is not self-evident; however, in the grand picture of things,
humans are being kept on the right road by a truth more actively power-
ful than error. Such optimism empowers dialectic. “Knowledge is limited
because of the corruptible body pressing down the mind,” Augustine writes;
however, we do, “as the apostle says, know in part.”25 Trust, not a stubborn
skepticism, is the foundation being reasonable. “He is more wretchedly
deceived who fancies he should never trust [the senses].”26 Those who deny
self-evident knowledge in their own minds are worse than deceived. Finally,
those who studiously disbelieve testimony are “absurd.”27 For Augustine, the
cosmos was directed by a nondeceptive, communicating creator. Humanity
was made in that creator’s image. For reasonable society to exist and for
people to have reasonable assurance in Christianity, people had to trust that
true information was prevailing over false.
Then again, a reasonable person must not be naïve. Augustine also
believed the cosmos to be thick with deceivers; and in such a cosmos, it
behooved people to find the right authorities and submit to them. God, in
general, worked in organized and hierarchical ways. God liked things run
decently and in good order. What Paul had said of governmental authority
could be extended to authorities in the realm of knowledge: “Everyone
must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority

except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been
established by God.”28 A command in 1 Peter says the same thing more bla-
tantly: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted
among men.”29 Augustine encouraged the Christian and Jewish (and later
Islamic) tradition that God liked submitters—especially those who submit
to authority in dubious situations. Similar to, but stronger than, Quintilian’s
“honest error,” the Augustinian tradition emphasized responsible submis-
sion to authority—not gullibility, but an ultimately reasonable recognition
of the place of an individual in a cosmos where truth prevails.
Augustine, being interested mostly in Christian matters, discussed testi-
mony, authority, and submission in terms of the holy scriptures and the
teachings of the majority of churches in communion with the Roman
church. For Augustine, Christian piety leaves “no option but to believe in
and submit to the authority of Scripture”; however, the reasonable Christian
still had to judge which texts ranked as scripture and which did not.30 In
Augustine’s time the canon of the New Testament had not yet been decreed
by an ecumenical council. In what amounts to a decision on ranking the
authority of received written testimonies, some claiming to report divine
testimonies, the early Christians were faced with a rather standard dialecti-
cal problem. In this situation, Augustine followed the Aristotelian method of
correlating a general consensus with a hierarchy of authority:
Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the

judgment of the greater number of catholic churches; and
among these, of course a high place must be given to such as
have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to
receive epistles. Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures
he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer
those that are received by all the catholic churches to those
which some do not receive. Among those, again, which are
not received by all, he will prefer such as have the sanction
of the greater number and those of greater authority to such
as are held by the smaller number and those of less author-
ity. If, however, he shall find that some books are held by the
greater number of churches, and others by the churches of
greater authority (though this is not a very likely thing to hap-
pen), I think that in such a case the authority on the two sides
is to be looked upon as equal.31
In the Aristotelian tradition, generally received opinions had authority.

“Truth,” for Aristotle, is “not beyond human nature and men do, for the
most part, achieve it.” Truth is “naturally superior” and “more persuasive”
than its opposite.32 Given this foundation, general consensus deserved
authority. Of course the opinions of the best and brightest of the educated
elite also deserved much authority. Correlating the two offered an author-
ity worthy of submission.
Augustine sided with Aristotle on the spectrum of optimism. Cicero,
however, was certainly less optimistic. He was also less interested in the
dynamics of submission. Cicero had written much on authority, but had
emphasized the role of the reasoner as assenter. Augustine often advised
assent and fully embraced a role for assent in handling knowledge
gained from external sources; however, more optimistic about the per-
suasiveness of truth but believing that deceivers worked to lead people
astray, he pushed the role of assent further into the responsibility of
submission.
But submission should not be blind. Nor was assent simply a black and
white matter. The Roman tradition went further than Aristotle in thinking
about the relationship of probability and assent. Augustine went further than
his Roman predecessors.
THREE LEVELS OF FAULT AND FIVE KINDS OF PERSONS
Rankings of probability and certainty were often included in dialectic manu-

als, and often the relative credibility of testimony was correlated to other
types of knowledge. Carneades had begun this tradition by offering ranks of
probability that influenced Cicero. Quintilian later struggled with presenting
scales in a couple of ways. Augustine went beyond his predecessors by cre-
ating a mixed scale that had much influence in the later history of early mod-
ern textbooks. This Augustinian textbook tradition was drawn primarily from
a ranking system explained in The Profit of Believing that emphasized the
relationship between types of persons and levels of knowledge.
Aristotle had two general levels of credibility: Absolute credibility
accorded to first principles known by intuition and the demonstrations con-
structed on them, and doubtful matters which were known by reason or by
authority and the demonstrations constructed on them. The more skeptical
Carneades, as discussed in chapter 1, thought that all knowledge could bet-
ter be categorized into three levels of credibility with none absolute. The
three were described as tested, irreversible, and probable.33 None, however,
was specifically tied to testimony or authority. Quintilian offered a three-part
division but declared the highest level necessary in the Aristotelian manner.
Quintilian then designated the lesser two categories into credible and not
repugnant. Inartificial arguments could be used to create either of these two
lesser categories.34 Quintilian went further to list four sources of certainties
useful for creating credibility, two of these involved the inartificial. He listed
“those things about which there is general agreement, such as the existence
of the gods” and “those things which are established by law or have passed
into current usage, . . . custom.”35
Figure 2.1. Augustine’s three levels of fault and five

types of persons.
Three Levels of Fault Five Types of Persons
1. Understanding 1. Approved: “Blessed”
Always without fault Believes the truth itself.
and owe to reason.
2. Approved: Earnest after
2. Belief truth
Sometimes without fault Believes authority.
and owe to authority The act of belief is
“praiseworthy”
3. Opinion
Never without fault 3. Faulty: Overly credulous
and owe to error Have opinion that they know
what they know not.
4. Faulty: Moderate skeptic
Seek the Truth but despairing
of finding it.
5. Faulty: Extreme skeptic
Not seeking truth.
This group has two types:
a. Those who assail
knowledge but allow faith.
b. Those who assail both
knowledge and faith.
Augustine, a rhetorician more deeply interested in what we would call

the psychology and sociology of knowledge, analyzed the situation with
more emphasis on the will of the reasoner and the reasoner’s responsibil-
ity to authority. He therefore correlated three levels of fault to five types of
persons (see figure 2.1).
As the title of his book indicates, Augustine wrote from the positive
perspective about profit of believing. Like Carneades, he understood the
necessity of belief and assent, but he did not have Carneades’s negative
perspective. Augustine attributed to Carneades the slippery, sneaky, and
obstinate characteristics of pessimistic skeptics. Augustine called him a
“blockhead” because “Ask Carneades his opinion. He will reply that he is
in doubt.”36 Augustine agreed that assent was an essential part of knowl-
edge; however, between the followers of Carneades and himself he wrote
there is one difference: “they think it probable that truth cannot be found,
and I, that it can.”37
Carneades introduced assent into dialectic, but Augustine introduced
the will. Plato and Aristotle had linked knowledge with desire, but Augustine
created a Christian epistemology of the human will and intellect interacting
with divine grace. Skepticism in the form of Carneades’s scale of probability
was superficial. From his own life he found that “the arguments of the
[skeptics] seriously held me back” from true knowledge.38 Skepticism held
him back from having the necessary will to be persuaded by the truth.
Augustine’s correlation of three levels of knowledge to five types of per-
sons must be understood in the context of his struggle against Carneades
and skepticism. Augustine’s emphasis on two levels of knowledge without
fault and sometimes without fault directly responded to skeptics who
believed it always faulty to declare with confidence any knowledge or
understanding.
On the Profit of Believing was written to a friend who criticized the
church for demanding belief and not teaching a consistent rational method
of attaining truth. Augustine set out to defend the dialectical rationality of
Christianity, confidently asserting that “I can persuade any, if they apply to
me a mind fair and no way obstinate: and this I will do, when you shall
grant to me your ears and mind well disposed.”39
The dialectical heart of On the Profit of Believing is section 25.40 The
section begins with the fundamental question: how can we be rational and,
at the same time, “without fault follow those who bid us to believe” (my
emphasis).
The term without fault is related to Quintilian’s honest error. Both
respond to the fears of a reasoner and are meant to instill confidence.
Skepticism should not hinder progressive logic. Errors caused by human
epistemological weaknesses are inevitable; however, there is no fault or
dishonor in an error that arises while conscientiously abiding by the rules
of reasoning. Those rules required acknowledging three categories of
knowledge each with its own level of faultiness: understanding, belief, and
opinion. Understanding “is always without fault.” Belief is “sometimes with-
out fault.” And Opinion is “never without fault.”41 The level of faultiness of
the first two was tied to the distinction between artificial and inartificial
knowledge. “What we understand, we owe to reason; what we believe, to
authority, what we have an opinion on, to error.”42 Belief is the category of
testimony and authority.
Like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Augustine thought that the realm
of testimony and authority was more dangerous than pure reasoning. A
belief was faulty or “worthy of blame” when a person “over easily” assented
to dubious divine or human testimony. “Rashness” was a problem in this
category; however, understanding and belief could have the same level of
credibility. For Augustine, knowledge gained from the testimony of divine
scripture was as sure as anything gained from pure reasoning. Awareness
of the easier possibility of error necessitated the lesser designation.43
Beliefs were derived from authority and believers walked a tightrope
between sharing the high rank of understanding or low rank of opinions.
Augustine believed that skeptics lacked the will to walk the tightrope and
wrongly jumbled knowledge gained by good authority with the mere mass
of opinion spouted by people who think they know something but don’t:
For [skeptics] who say that we are to believe nothing but what
we know, are on their guard against that one name “opining,”
which must be confessed to be base and very wretched, but
if they consider carefully that there is a very great difference,
whether one think that he knows, or moved by some author-
ity believe that which he understands that he knows not,
surely he will escape the charge of error, and inhumanity, and
pride.44
Key to the difference between understanding, belief, and opinion was

the character and desire of the reasoner. For Augustine reasonability cannot
be separated from the reasoner’s will. The issue of fault, of blameless
reasoning, undergirds the hierarchy. Blameless reasoning comes from dis-
tinguishing what we know absolutely and by good authority from what is
mere opinion—not necessarily coming up with the right conclusion. At the
risk of offering an absurd parallel, Augustine’s view of fault in logic is like
his advice to rape victims in The City of God. A rape victim should have no
shame and her virtue and holiness remain fully intact because the sin of
fornication is in the will, not the act.45 As for the blameworthiness of the
reasoner, Augustine was not so much interested in the outcome but in the
process. As long as the reasoner correctly distinguishes what is understood
and what can be trustworthily believed from mere opinions, then the
reasoner should have no shame or dishonor.
If character is the key to good reasoning, then it is easy to see why he
correlated his three levels of fault with five types of persons. Of the five,
two are “approved”: The “blessed” reasoner who assents to the truth in his
or her mind and the “praiseworthy” reasoner who believes on the basis of
good authority. Three of the five are “faulty”: The overly credulous who
think they know what they don’t, the moderate skeptic who despairs of
finding the truth, and the extreme skeptic who doesn’t even seek truth. Of
the last there are two types: fideists who assail truth but allow faith and—
worst of all—those who assail both knowledge and faith.
Character and desire directly affect reasoning. Augustine understood
that skeptics often had great forensic dexterity, but dexterous use of the
tools of dialectic did not necessarily move one toward truth. The outcome
of dialectic depended on the character of the reasoner. Aristotle had taught
much the same thing, but had never given it the emphasis and study that
Augustine devoted to it.
Augustine recognized that his three categories could not be completely
distinct from each other—“that every one who understands also believes,
and also every one who has an opinion believes; not every one who believes
understands, [and] no one who has an opinion understands.”46 However, he

did not want his readers to be caught in the mire of such complications.
Skeptics perversely enjoyed declaring their ignorance and the frailty of
knowledge. Skeptics enjoyed the mire more than the truth. Good reasoning
demanded keeping one’s eyes on the prize while assenting to knowledge
within the mind and that which was learned from authorities.
THE TWOFOLD FORCE OF AUTHORITY AND REASON
“No one doubts,” Augustine declared, “that we are helped in learning by

a twofold force, that of authority and that of reason.”47 These two, the
extrinsic/inartificial and the intrinsic/artificial, were at the foundation of the
Roman curriculum he advocated for Christian education. Being reasonable
stood on these two legs. No one doubts it! The classical and Christian
standards of being reasonable were the same by civic and Augustinian stan-
dards. There was reasoning and then there was the more full reasonableness
that included the issues that surround testimony and authority: trust, assent,
faith, belief, probability, respect for the old, and submission to majorities of
the wise. Reasoning was more secure while being reasonable required—
especially in areas such as history and theology—taking risks that could
result in honest errors and mistaken faith without fault. Aristotle and Cicero
had taught the same basic division when teaching topics, but Augustine pre-
sented them with great force in his major writings. Given Augustine’s great
influence in Western intellectual history, the force and clarity of his empha-
sis on testimony and authority enhanced the less forceful and less clear
educational tradition derived from Aristotle. What had been a matter of top-
ics became a core value in learning the art of being reasonable.
In the autobiography of his search for truth, Augustine the dialectician
wove back and forth between the internal reasoning that was pushing him
and the outside authorities on which he also relied. The book is usually
titled in English Confessions; however, as Garry Wills insists and Peter
Brown agrees, the book would be more accurately titled Testimony.48
At a crucial point in his life described in book 6, Augustine described
how his reasoning led him to move to a higher reasonableness of submis-
sion to outside authority:
I took into my consideration how innumerable things I other-

wise believed, which I had never seen, nor was present at while
they were in doing: like as those many reports of several
nations, those many relations of places and of cities, which I had
never seen: so many reports likewise of friends, so many of
physicians, so many of these and these men, which unless we
should believe, we should do nothing at all in this life: last of
all, I considered, with how unalterable assurance I believed of
what parents I was descended; which I could not otherwise

come to know, had I not believed it upon hearsay: persuadest
me at last, that not they who believed thy Bible [libris], (which
with so great authority thou has settled among all nations) but
those who believed it not, were to be blamed nor were those
men to be listened unto, who would say perchance, How
knowest thou those Scriptures [libros] to have been imparted
unto mankind by the Spirit of the only true and most high God?49
Augustine further declared, clearly delineating the two legs of dialectic and
the role of divine testimony: “Seeing therefore mankind too weak to find
out the truth by the way of evident reason, and for this cause was there
need of the authority of Holy Writ [auctoritate sanctarum litterarum.]”50
Christianity guided Augustine to emphasize the role of testimony and
authority in logic, the importance of a person’s will in being open to testi-
mony, and the submission it behooved a person to give to the authority of
a socially agreed-upon divine testimony. For Augustine, Christianity
demanded an emphasis on knowledge “we cannot know ourselves.” But
he was not teaching a new Christian form of dialectic; rather, he was affirm-
ing the Roman dialectic he taught before he became a Christian. It was the
Roman dialectic of Cicero and Quintilian that emphasized the authority of
divine testimony. Augustine baptized Roman dialectic into the service of
Christian apologetics.
Augustine’s long influence in Western education rivals the influence of
Aristotle and Cicero. Among the three of them, testimony and authority
were assured a role in the curriculum and ideals of education in the West.
All three taught that there was an essential distinction between what a
person knows by reason and what that person knows by authority. The
former was intriguing to those who wished to push the powers of the
human mind the farthest, but the latter was the bread and butter of being
a reasonable citizen and reasonable Christian. The former empowered the
individual; whereas, the latter discouragingly reminded individuals that
their minds are limited, they need to listen to others, and their conclusions
are founded on risking assent and even submission.
BOETHIAN AND CASSIODORAN TOPICS IN

THE MIDDLE AGES
Between the early 1070s and 1078, some monks of the French Abbey of Bec,
learning dialectic, challenged their dialectic teacher to write a meditation
on the essence of the divine. But the monks wanted to make the challenge
interesting. They had a specific requirement: there was to be no use of inar-
tificial arguments, no use of divine testimony or authoritative statements
from the Catholic Fathers.51 What began as a contest to see how far a
Christian logician could go with only the use of one of his two intellectual
legs resulted first in the Monologion then in the Proslogion, two of the
monuments of medieval philosophy and theology. St. Anslem, the author
of these works, became the abbot of Bec and eventually archbishop of
Canterbury.
The chapter-house challenge from the monks of Bec manifests the ten-
dency of medieval philosophers to pursue higher certainties than those that
could be constructed out of testimony or authority. Certainly, in theology
and in society, it was an Age of Authority where use of inartificial argu-
ments was common and their persuasive power understood. The elemen-
tary dialectic textbooks that children studied explained the rules of
inartificial knowledge, and the leading philosophers and theologians were
well trained in topics. But when doing philosophy, the most interesting
challenges were formal and individualistic. Of the two legs of reasonable-
ness—reason and authority—the leg of reason was more tantalizing.
The philosophers at the universities found the challenge of pure
reasoning an inspiration to great work, and the theologians were often sim-
ilarly inspired. But Christian apologists, for the most part, could not get
away from the fact that their religion relied intellectually on both reason
and authority. Thomas Aquinas began his great apologetic work, the
Summa Theologica, in the manner of topics by starting with the distinction
between artificial and inartifical knowledge. Discussing the use of author-
ity, Aquinas had his objector quote Boethius that “authority is the weakest
form of proof.” Aquinas then trumped the objector with the traditional two-
sided response of classical dialecticians that Augustine had enhanced:
“although the argument from authority based on human reason is the
weakest, yet argument from authority based on divine revelation is the
strongest.”52 He then proceeded to rely heavily on divine testimony and
the authority of the Church Fathers when proving his arguments.
Like the Christian apologists, the good historians of the era understood
that the authority of their work depended upon proper handling of testimony.
Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, often offered long quotes, cited
authorities, and, like Augustine, distinguished things he witnessed himself
from that which he was “told by the faithful.”53 The Venerable Bede in the
eighth century began his history of the church in England not only noting
the authorities he relied upon, but also the character and access to records
of those authorities. Bonaventure in his thirteenth-century biography of
St. Francis of Assisi, wrote that in order to gain “a more certain grasp of the
authentic facts of his life . . . I had careful interviews with his companions
who were still alive, especially those who had intimate knowledge of his holi-
ness and were its principal followers. Because of the acknowledged truthful-
ness and their proven virtue, they can be trusted beyond any doubt.”54
Medieval intellectual life relied heavily on the rules of testimony and

authority taught in the classical and Augustinian traditions; however, the
main line of the history of medieval philosophy tended to avoid the subject.
If we return to the situation at Bec, we get a glimmer of the mentality that
separated working dialectic from the medieval love of formal logic. Bec had
become an important abbey under the leadership of Lanfranc, a man
famous for his dialectical skills, a practical man involved in theological
debate and European politics. Lanfranc was not happy when Anslem wrote
to him about the monks’ challenge and his compliance. Anslem attempted
to justify his action to Lanfranc with the happy truth that, as it turned out,
nothing in Anselm’s Monologion contradicted anything taught in the Bible
or by St. Augustine. The ultimate test of truth still included testimony and
authority—the boys in the refectory were not trying to undermine Christian
orthodoxy. However, the ultimate outcome did not molify Lanfranc’s dis-
pleasure with the method. R. W. Southern believes that this was a turning
point in the two abbots’ relationship.55 Lanfranc the dialectician could not
abide Anselm’s willingness to create a proof about God without reference
to authority. Creating such a proof showed the temperament of a boy math-
ematician rather than an abbot.
Anselm is considered one of the principal founders of high medieval
philosophy. He devoted his life to administrative service in the church and
his sainthood ultimately rested on the Augustinian reasonableness of
famous statements such as “I believe so that I may understand; and what is
more, I believe that unless I do believe I shall not understand.”56 However,
the faculty of the developing universities were often inspired by the idea
of seeing how far one could travel toward truth by the individual mind. The
desire to create philosophy using formal logic while avoiding authority
empowered what medieval philosophers considered their most interesting
work. At the level of textbook education, however, the role of testimony
and authority continued to be taught to the youth who were tutored at their
local church or attended a cathedral or monastery school. In these educa-
tional situations there were two textbook traditions for handling testimony
and authority. The first was derived from Boethius. It was the more sophis-
ticated of the two and taught the topics of Aristotle and Cicero. It also
offered another alternative to the standard structure of topics. However, for
the most part, Boethius was even a little advanced for rudimentary educa-
tion. For those starting out in the curriculum of the liberal arts, there were
books derived from the Hellenistic encyclopedists that included short
descriptions of dialectic and rhetoric. Cassiodorus was the key figure who
transformed the Hellenistic textbooks into a medieval tradition of rudimen-
tary textbooks. Whereas Boethius had written with an eye toward the aspir-
ing philosopher; the many local tutors who wrote Cassiodoran descriptions
of dialectic were simply trying to lay a foundation of essentials.
TWO MODELS FOR EXTRINSIC TOPICS
In The Consolation of Philosophy, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

(d.525/526), awaiting execution for treason, declared himself the victim of
false testimony and forged documents. “Their falsity,” he despaired, “would
have been evident for all to see, had I been allowed to use the confessions
of my accusers themselves, for this always has most influence in all such
matters as these.”57 If true, Boethius died because he was not allowed to
use his skills handling extrinsic topics.58 We might wish, since he claims to
have had these skills, that Boethius had discussed in his logic books
the lawyerly methods of exposing false testimony and forged documents
and turning confessions against confessors. As it is, even his study of
Cicero’s dialectic has none of Cicero’s discussion of the courtroom-handling
testimony.
What Boethius did leave behind after his execution were two of the most
influential topics manuals of the Middle Ages. Born into a family of distin-
guished service to the crumbling western empire, Boethius followed the fam-
ily tradition in two ways. For a job he served the Ostrogothic King Theodoric.
For duty, he devoted himself to the survival of Hellenistic and Roman edu-
cation. Like Augustine a century and a half earlier, he desired to write, edit,
and translate what was needed for a full curriculum of grammar, dialectic,
rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. King Theodoric cut his
life short, but the textbooks that survived became for a long time the most
sophisticated link available between medieval and classical education.
Classical teaching on testimony and authority was linked to medieval in two
textbooks: Ciceronis Topica and De Topicis Differentiis. Both works teach
Cicero’s topics, but the latter work also offered a competing system drawn
from a fourth-century Greek orator named Themistius.59
Like most textbook writers, Boethius wanted to simplify and/or bring
greater clarity to the organization of his material. Topics, as developed by
Aristotle and Cicero, was already an organizational strategy to be used for
probable argumentation. Boethius in his books on topics was conscien-
tiously trying to organize for better dissemination the Greek and Roman tra-
dition for use in the barbarian-dominated Latin West. Given his desire for
greater simplicity and clarity, it is not surprising that Boethius would focus
on creating a well-organized structure rather than re-creating Cicero’s prac-
tical advice to lawyers or Augustine’s practical advice on scripture and
church authority. Boethius’s books on topics are prose blueprints without
the asides and examples that make Cicero and Quintilian fun to read. As
such it is best to work from diagrams (see figures 2.2 and 2.3).
The principal difference between Boethius’s blueprints for topics
consists in his handling of the first and most important division: that between
internal and external sources of information. Figures 2.2 and 2.3 are both
Figure 2.2. Boethius’s twofold division of Topics derived from

Cicero.*
Topics
Intrinsic Extrinsic
From the whole From authority
From parts
From a sign
From conjugates
From genus
From kind
From similarity
From differentia
From a contrary
From associated things
From antecedents
From consequents
From incompatibles
From causes
From effects
From comparison
either of greater things or
of lesser things or of equal things
*List derived from Eleonore Stump’s in Boethius, De Topicis Differentiis, translated by

Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, Cornell University, 1978), 74.
Ciceronian, although figure 2.2 shows the more complicated version of In

Ciceronis Topica. The first division of topics, as Boethius taught, required
distinguishing between the arguments that “inhere in a thing” that a reasoner
“himself uncovers” and the information “located extrinsically,” that a rea-
soner “does not discover but that he takes ready-made and at hand for his
use.”60 This was the dominant tradition derived from Aristotle and Cicero.
In the Themistian model in figure 2.3, Boethius offers three divisions by
adding an intermediate group that confuses the extrinsic by adding cate-
gories from the intrinsic.
Boethius described the twofold division in both of his books on topics
while offering the threefold division only as an alternative in De Topicis
Differentiis. His threefold model most often reappeared in the dialectic
manuals of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries.61
The most frustrating aspect of this Themistian structure is that
Boethius did not give a new definition of extrinsic that makes sense of
the additions that were moved over from the Ciceronian intrinsic list.62
Figure 2.3. Boethius’s threefold division of Topics derived from Themistius.*
Topics
Intrinsic Extrinsic Intermediate

From substance From judgment [authority] From cases
From definition From similars From conjugates
From description From the greaters From division
From explanation of the name From the lesser
From consequents From opposites
From whole or genus either contraries or
From parts or species relatives or according
From efficient [causes] to privation and
From matter possession or by means
From form of affirmation and
From end negation
From effects From proportion
From destructions From transumption
From uses
From associated accidents
*List derived from Eleonore Stump’s Boethius, De Topicis Differentiis, 74.
He never fully explained himself, nor did he advocate the Themistian sys-
tem over the Ciceronian. He even specifically criticized the Themistian idea
of treating from similars as extrinsic in his commentary on Cicero.63 In
the Renaissance, the weight of Cicero and the lack of any condemnation
by Boethius would combine to undermine the influence of Themistian
topics.
In Ciceronis Topica describes authority in three places. Early in the
book, Boethius summarizes Cicero’s position: “He asserts that an external
Topic consists in testimony; the force of testimony he locates in authority,
and authority he draws out into its appropriate parts.”64 Later at the close of
book 2, Boethius listed the “ready-made” arguments available to an orator:
“testimonies, official documents, public opinion, and other things.” Finally
at the end of the whole work, he gives his most comprehensive discussion
of the subject. There he explains why testimony and authority must be con-
sidered extrinsic and gives a short overview of the two sources of author-
ity that produce credibility in testimony.
The first source of authority “comes either from things that are great or
excellent and best by nature.”65 The only example of this he gives is virtue.
The other source of authority is “beliefs held by common people.”66 This
latter includes credibility produced by a testifier’s intelligence, wisdom,
age, wealth, skills, or experience. It also includes credibility produced by
“necessity” as when people confess the truth because they are drunk, agi-
tated, guileless, unaware, or being tortured.
The Themistian structure makes fuzzy the line between intrinsic and
extrinsic by jumbling the handling of authority with the general handling
of multiple comparisons. Where Cicero or Augustine would have taught
that comparing the size of two items was strictly a matter of senses and thus
intrinsic, Themistius had his as extrinsic apparently because one item is
outside of the other item. However, speculating on the intent of Themistius
and Boethius is not germane to the traditional teaching of testimony and
authority in the art of being reasonable. Although the Themistian structure
reappears in the high Middle Ages, his Ciceronian model supported the
dominant tradition. Also, whether clearly distinguished or cloudied,
Boethius taught a role for testimony and authority in all three of his mod-
els. The teachings were perfunctory, but they did hold a place in the struc-
ture. As seen in the quote from Aquinas, Boethius was known long into the
Middle Ages as an authority on authority. His two textbooks on topics and
his theological writings were known for distinguishing reason and author-
ity as the two legs of reasonableness and for arguing that Christian theol-
ogy depended especially on the authority of holy scriptures and church
teachings.67
SPONTANEOUS AND WILLING BELIEF
Eleonore Stump translates probabilia as “readily believable” throughout her

edition of Boethius’s De Topicis Differetiis. This is justified because Boethius
himself defined probable things as those “to which agreement is sponta-
neously and willingly given, so that they are agreed to as soon as they are
heard.”68 The emphasis on immediate belief harkens back to Aristotle rather
than Cicero or Augustine. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle wrote of beliefs
as immediate. They are not the result of deliberation; rather, they simply hap-
pen. Beliefs can be true or false and are about “what we do not quite know.”69
Cicero advised deliberation when rating probable things. Cicero’s emphasized
assent rather than belief. Augustine advised the profit in believing; but laid the
responsibility for believing on believers. Like Cicero, Augustine emphasized
the decision to believe—even submission to beliefs.
Boethius did not follow Cicero or Augustine. Henry Chadwick notes
that Boethius was highly influenced by the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria
and Neoplatonic tradition of Athens, and it is safe to say that his notions of
probabilia were linked to the concept of assent and the concern for levels
of assent that were developed in those traditions.70 However, Boethius did
not teach scales of assent, levels of probability, or even no-fault decisions to
believe. He seems to advise reasonable people to go with their first instincts
rather than overthink probabilities. Because testimony and authority are
matters of probabilia, Boethius was offering a new criteria for valid assent
to testimony.
The implications of this spontaneity were not discussed fully by
Boethius, but Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century will offer similar
criteria. John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent will also press for a
Boethian immediacy as more true-to-life than deliberative assent. Boethius
himself offered two examples of extrinsic arguments that produce the
“readily believable” (probabilie):
Something is readily believable if it seems true to everyone or

to most people or to the wise—and of the wise, either to
all of them or most of them or to those most famous and
distinguished—
Or to an expert in his own field, for example, to a doctor in

the field of medicine or to a pilot in the navigation of ships.71
The authority of consensus and the authority of an expert were examples

often used in the Middle Ages. In both cases, deliberative assent is not rec-
ommended. Instead, Boethius’s spontaneous and willing belief is implied.
Of course going with an immediate gut feeling could lead to error. But
absolute protection from error was impossible. Boethius accepted the risk
of error in the way Quintilian recognized the existence of “honest error”
and Augustine recognized that submission to certain types of testimony was
“without fault.” Following classical tradition, Boethius declared that “the
truth or falsity of the argument makes no difference, if only it has the
appearance of truth.”72 Overworrying about the truth or falsity can debili-
tate reasonable society. A juror needs to go with his or her immediate gut
feeling about whether a witness is telling the truth or not. To dawdle over
the possibilities pro and con was the method of Pyrrho the skeptic that led
to indecision.
At the risk of making too much of Boethius’s advocacy for letting rea-
sonableness be rooted in spontaneous and willing belief, we can connect
this Aristotelian-Boethian textbook tradition to the medieval doctrine of
reasoning that it is better to believe too much than too little. Jaroslav
Pelikan shows this doctrine at work in the case of beliefs about Mary the
mother of Jesus.
“If it does not contradict the authority of Scripture or the

authority of the church, it seems preferable to attribute greater
rather than lesser excellence to Mary.” Or, as a later thinker
put it, “I would rather err on the side of superabundance by
attributing some prerogative to her than on the side of inad-
equacy by taking away from her some excellence that she
had”: better to believe and teach too much than too little.
Another component of this oft-repeated formula: “Whatever
was both possible and eminently fitting for God to do, that he
did [potuit, decuit, fecit].”73
Medieval handling of testimony was refreshingly open to believing

more than what modern critical thinkers would normally believe. The
medieval doctrine that it is better to believe too much than too little is the
flip side of a modern tenet to think the opposite. Certainly this doctrine
should not be traced simply to Boethius’s recommendations for sponta-
neous and willing belief, but Boethius was widely read and taught through-
out medieval Europe, and he might be considered an important support for
what appears to us to be too much willingness to believe.
In sum, Boethius’s textbooks on topics supported the tradition of han-
dling testimony as an outside source of knowledge that deserved special
consideration. Although compiling two structural models for extrinsic top-
ics, Boethius became most influential for supporting Cicero’s influence. By
advocating the productive use of one’s spontaneous and willing belief to
create credibility, Boethius tantalizingly seemed to advocate a return to a
more Aristotelian and passive acceptance of testimony. Even more tantaliz-
ing is the possible link to general medieval willingness to risk believing too
much instead of erring by believing too little. His books were long influ-
ential in the Middle Ages; and yet, in the Renaissance, textbook writers
would return to Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine.
CASSIODORUS AND THE ROMAN TEXTBOOK TRADITION
Textbooks can be pushed in two directions. Their authors can aspire to be

compendious in pursuit of precision and comprehensiveness, or they can
aspire to write mere epitomes in pursuit of usefulness and wide dissemina-
tion. The former best serve the higher reaches of education, while the latter
must often be simplified since it introduces beginning students to the essen-
tial tenets of a discipline. Boethius sought the higher road, while his friend
Cassiodorus followed the low. Cassiodorus’s dialectic could be influential only
in a culture that desired a standard format for introducing children into
systematic education. Medieval Europe was such a culture. Rooted in the
Hellenistic creation of the liberal arts curriculum, it eventually created the
standardized system of education that became one of the greatest achieve-
ments of Western civilization. Cassiodorus’s rudimentary textbook played an
important role in this achievement. Part of that role was to establish a set place
in dialectic—not rhetoric—to teach the handling of testimony and authority.
The liberal arts curriculum developed after Aristotle’s death and began to
become more standardized in the Roman Empire. Posidonius (c.135–51 B.C.)
was an early advocate of standardization. He was one of the founders of

the enkyklios paideia, the circle of knowledge or curriculum that covered
the basics of elementary education. Posidonius was well-traveled and eclec-
tic. Eventually he settled into being the well-known master of a school at
Rhodes. His fame attracted Cicero as a student. He wrote textbooks in var-
ious areas of study; but, like most textbooks, they were not saved and are
lost to history. At the height of the Roman Empire most cities supported
scholars willing to teach a basic cycle of subjects. Early in his life, Augustine
was one of many such teachers and textbook writers moving from provin-
cial to urban jobs in semi-official schools. Augustine taught in his North
African birthplace, moved to Carthage, then Rome, then Milan—the
de facto western Roman capitol. Along the way we know he at least began
to write a full curriculum of introductory textbooks.
These rudimentary textbooks were popular in what has come to be
called an encyclopedist tradition. E. F. Peters in The Harvest of Hellenism
points out that the tradition was cobbled together out of “very few original
texts” and “depended very heavily on . . . handbooks, doxographies and
potpourris for their knowledge of the philosophical past.”74 The number of
subjects covered by the curriculum varied. Nine was a popular number of
liberal arts because of the influence of Marcus Tarentius Varro’s Nine Books
of Disciplines written in the first century B.C. The nine liberal arts accord-
ing to Varro were grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astron-
omy, music, medicine, and architecture. In the early fifth century Martinus
Capella in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury codified the nine into
seven (dropping medicine and architecture). Capella’s list would continue
through the Middle Ages. Cassiodorus’s list in his Introduction to Divine
and Human Readings paralleled Capella’s in content and influence—
except when teaching the handling of testimony. It is a mark of the impor-
tance of testimony and authority that the subject was not edited out of the
brief doxographies and potpourris that passed for textbooks. Capella and
Cassiodorus might handle them differently, but both thought the material
essential.
Not much is known about Martianus Capella. He apparently was a
Carthaginian of the early or middle fifth century. He was probably
employed in law courts. What separates his book from other textbook
cycles is its dialogue form in which a goddess of each of the disciplines
presents an outline of her subject at a wedding feast. The goddess Dialectic
appears wearing Athenian dress holding a poisonous snake. She teaches
the handling of “complex and knotty utterances” more than the simple
securities of logical demonstrations.75 She also declares that all six of the
other disciplines were “under my power and authority.”76 After Dialectic has
spoken, the goddess Rhetoric arrives as “a woman of the tallest stature and
abounding in self-confidence, a woman of outstanding beauty” who “like
a queen with power over everything” could drive people where she
wanted.77 Both women were dangerous and armored for action in a messy
world.
In Capella’s story, Rhetoric, not Dialectic, describes the role of testi-
mony and authority. Testimony was mostly about communication, and the
Aristotelian tradition had taught that dialectic and rhetoric shared the topics.
The goddess Dialectic could have gone on endlessly at the wedding party,
but the audience cuts her off, saying she should stop “before you get entan-
gled in the complexities of your subject and its knotty problems.”78 The
goddess Rhetoric then speaks—a goddess of disputes, turbulence,
confusion, and conflict.
Rhetoric discusses the use of extrinsic arguments to produce credibil-
ity in a courtroom full of doubt. Capella has her present arguments “sup-
plied by the case or by the accused; they are located, as I have said, in
three areas: in documents, such as official records; in statements of author-
ity, such as those of witnesses; and in statements arising from compulsion,
such as those obtained under torture.”79 Authority is here equated only with
the second of the three types: testimony of witnesses. “Oracles and other
such statements,” according to Capella, should also be included under that
heading.80 He closes the section by noting that the prosecutor’s case and
personality is pondered against the quality of the extrinsic evidence. In
other words, working in the Aristotelian tradition, Capella delineated a role
for authoritative testimony in courtroom forensics. There was nothing new
in his discussion although it was much constricted. And like Aristotle,
Capella discussed testimony as part of rhetoric using the model of the
courtroom.
Capella’s example was influential; however, it was not as strong as is
sometimes implied in overviews of medieval learning. His story of armored
goddesses declaiming at a banquet might fire the imagination of boys and
girls, but the textbook tradition would latch onto something more straight-
forward, economical, and mundane. Cassiodorus’s utilitarian guide to
the liberal arts, complete with diagrams, was ultimately more influential—
especially in the way it placed testimony and authority under dialectic
rather than rhetoric.
Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was probably the most
successful bureaucrat and certainly the most influential liberal arts advocate
to live during the fall of the western Roman Empire. Born around 480 in
southern Italy, he energetically served a succession of Ostrogothic kings.
His contemporary Boethius could not make it through even one reign
before being executed. Cassiodorus was more adaptable. He served in high
positions through several reigns while surrounded by executions, murders,
coups, and webs of intrigue. In old age, he retired from public service in
order to construct and administer a monastery dedicated, in part, to Christian
education. There he wrote his encyclopedia of the liberal arts in the sec-
ond half of an advice manual on what good students should read. Not until
the Renaissance’s Peter Ramus would a pedagogical simplifier have so
much influence.
In An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, Cassiodorus gave
his monks “guidance” in the “extremely useful” liberal arts.81 With the con-
fidence of a high-ranking bureaucrat, Cassiodorus was a creative organizer.
Looking toward comprehensiveness, efficiency, and clarity, he developed a
six-part structure for dialectic and a three-part structure for testimony, and
seems to have invented the use of diagrams in textbooks.
The dialectic section of his Introduction to Divine and Human
Readings is not long. In the encyclopedist tradition, only an overview of
the subject was necessary. Students would later move on to more sophisti-
cated books—such as Boethius’s. As was traditional in the Hellenistic lib-
eral arts tradition, Cassiodorus fused formal logic and dialectic together.
Beginning students learned about syllogisms and testimony together in one
comprehensive system. Aristotle was presented as the founder of the sys-
tem. The first philosophers
did not possess the skill to reduce [dialectic] to an art. After

their time, however, Aristotle, diligent expounder of all knowl-
edge that he was, imposed rules upon the argumentation
employed in this subject, which had previously had no definite
principles.82
The art of dialectic was the foundation of philosophy. Philosophy

Cassiodorus defined as “the probable knowledge of divine and human
things insofar as it may be attained by man.”83 Philosophy was also “a med-
itation on death,” a discipline useful to Christians desiring to lead “a disci-
plined life in imitation of the life which they will lead in their future
home.”84 With dialectic declared to be thus broadly useful, Cassiodorus then
offered an innovative, easy-to-learn, six-part structure (figure 2.4).
The basic structure beginning with of Porphyry’s five predicables and
Aristotle’s ten categories then moving through types of syllogisms and end-
ing with extrinsic topics was a snapshot of the whole art of being reason-
able. Cappella’s structure of dialectic had followed a path of increasing
complexity: words, utterances, propositions, and syllogisms. Cassiodorus’s
structure moved from the more general to more specific. It would prove to
be the more influential.
Cassiodorus’s treatment of topics has much in common with Boethius’s
three-part Themistian system. Something must have transpired between
Boethius and Cassiodorus to interest both of them in the non-Aristotelian
tradition of splitting topics into three parts. It is pleasant to think that
around 520, Boethius and Cassiodorus, both outsiders in an Ostrogothic
Figure 2.4. Cassiodorus’s six-part dialectic.

DIALECTIC
I. Porphyry’s Five Predicables:
Genus, Species, Difference, Property, Accident
II. Aristotle’s Ten Categories (Predicaments)
Substance, Quantity, Relation, Quality, Action, Passivity, Place, Time,
Position, Possession
III. Interpretation:
Noun, Verb, Clause, Declaration, Affirmation, Negation,
Contradiction
IV. Syllogistic Figures and Forms:
Categorical Syllogism
Form 1: Nine Moods
Form 2: Four Moods
Form 3: Six Moods
Hypothetical Syllogism
Seven Moods
V. Fifteen Types of Definitions
VI. Three Types of Topics
Inherent
Affected
Extrinsic
court, might have enjoyed quiet evenings together discussing epistemology

and the role of testimony in dialectic. For different reasons that neither
explained, they both liked the idea of a three-part system. But however
pleasant the talks might have been, the three-part division of topics was not
a sustainable innovation for two reasons: First, the two bureaucrats in a
crumbling empire were up against the tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, and
second, neither agreed with the other as to what the three divisions should
be. Boethius was intrigued by Themistius’s system while Cassiodorus mod-
ified it in an idiosyncratic manner. Neither worked well and both were
abandoned in the Renaissance.
Cassiodorus’s three parts of topics were inherent (hærent), extrinsic
(extrinsecus), and affected (affecta). Boethius’s were intrinisic, extrinsic,
and intermediate (media). The half-way and undefined character of
Boethius’s third category is indicated by the name. Cassiodorus’s name,
affected, is clearer. The main issue between the two models is where to put
relational topics in which knowledge of one thing affects the knowledge of
another. For example: we know one thing is smaller or younger or similar
or opposite only when we have another thing with which to compare it.
Cicero put such relational matters in the category of inherent/intrinsic because
such relationships were apparent to an individual person. Boethius, following
Figure 2.5. Cassiodorus’s three-part Topics.
Topics
Inherent Extrinsic Affected

From the whole From character of person From cognate words
From parts From authority of nature From genus
From etymology From authority of circumstance From species
Eight modes: From likeness
Talent From difference
Wealth From opposite
Age From analogy
Luck From anterior circumstances
Art From posterior circumstances
Experience From contradictory ideas
Necessity From causes
Concourse of From effects
fortuitous events From comparison
Works and deeds of ancestors
Torments: Torture that removes
the desire to lie
Themistius, moved such relational topics from inherent/intrinsic to extrin-

sic, leaving gray the matters in the intermediate category. Cassiodorus
moved relational topics from inherent/intrinsic to his third category,
affected. Boethius jumbled up, confused, and diluted the clarity of extrin-
sic topics. Cassiodorus left them with Ciceronian clarity and created a
special category for relational topics. There was much to recommend this
new structure. However, it did have the problem of shifting so much from
intrinsic/inherent to affected that what use to be the longest list was now
the shortest (figure 2.5).
For the most part, the textbooks of the Middle Ages that would discuss
topics chose Boethius’s three-part structure over Cassiodorus’s. However,
when it comes to the actual description of extrinsic topics, Cassiodorus had
many followers. Boethius won the structure but Cassiodorus’s description
of extrinsic topics was considered better than his friend’s. Given its influ-
ence, Cassiodorus’s short description deserves to be quoted in full:
Extrinsic arguments are those which the Greeks term [atech-

noi], that is, without art, as in the case of evidence. Evidence
rests upon the following: person; the authority of nature; the
authority of circumstance, which consists of eight modes
(talent, wealth, age, luck, art, experience, necessity, and con-
course of fortuitous events); the words and deeds of our
ancestors; and torments. Evidence is everything which is

taken from some external thing to produce credence. Not
every person is the sort of individual whose evidence carries
weight in the producing of credence, but a witness ought to
be a person who deserves praise for the excellence of his
moral character. The authority of nature is the authority which
possesses the greatest excellence. There are many modes of
evidence which carry weight, to wit: talent, wealth, age, luck,
art, experience, necessity, concourse of fortuitous events.
One seeks to produce credence through the use of the words
and deeds of our ancestors when he cites the words and
deeds of the ancients. Credence is produced by torments,
after the employment of which no one is thought to have a
desire to lie. The matters which are mentioned under circum-
stances do not need defining, since their meaning is clearly
indicated by the appellations.85
Such clarity and simplicity were bound to be imitated by later textbook

writers. Isidore (c.560–636) was the most influential imitator. He was edu-
cated in a monastery, helped found schools and monasteries on the Iberian
Peninsula, and eventually became Archbishop of Seville. He wrote much,
including Etymologies, a wide-ranging compendium that served as an ency-
clopedia for scholars throughout the Middle Ages. In the section in the
Etymologies on rhetoric and dialectic, the structure and important parts were
lifted directly from Cassiodorus’s Introduction to Divine and Human
Readings. The only major difference is that Isidore added a section on law
and courtroom practice where he raises the problem of an authority testify-
ing to the impossible. Isidore affirmed that an authority speaking the truth
should be believed; however, no one is obligated to have faith in accounts
of the fabulous.86 The irony here is that in modern times Isidore’s Etymologies
has a reputation for naïve credulity. He apparently believed Roman reports
of monsters such as men with dogs’ heads, men with no heads but mouths
and eyes in their chests, and a race of one-legged Ethiopians with feet so big
they could shade themselves by lying on their backs with their one foot in
the air. If these testimonies were not too fabulous to discount, it is hard to
imagine what testimonies he would reject. It is likely that, like Herodotus,
Isidore wrote as much for entertainment as education.
One last matter before leaving Cassiodorus: like Boethius he offered no
special designation for divine testimony. Quintilian, described by
Cassiodorus as “a surpassing instructor,” included divine testimony in his
discussion of authority.87 Why would Cassiodorus leave it out? His defini-
tion of philosophy and comprehensive diagram of philosophy includes
divine things. He knew of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and believed
fully that the liberal arts were applicable to Christian apologetics. He knew
of Augustine’s emphasis on the authority of divine testimony. In his section
on divine readings, Cassiodorus stated that holy scriptures “describe the

past without falsehood” and that “human reason did not discover these
books, but heavenly virtue communicated them to holy men.”88 Cassiodorus
went on to recommend Christian historians such as Eusibius, Socrates,
Sozomenus, and Theodoretus, and “learned authors” such as Ambrose,
Jerome, and Augustine as “extraordinary witnesses because of their various
merits.”89
Why didn’t Cassiodorus or Boethius give divine testimony a place in
his model curriculum? Maybe their sense of economy led them to avoid the
distinction. Maybe it was a bow to Aristotelian purity since Aristotle men-
tioned oracles without distinguishing a separate type of testimony. Maybe
at one of their after-dinner discussions they both agreed that divine testi-
mony should be handled by the same principles as human testimony.
Whatever the reason, a special designation for divine testimony largely dis-
appeared from the textbook tradition until the return of heavy Roman influ-
ence in the Renaissance.
THE HIGH ROAD OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE DIALECTICAL TRADITION
Boethius and Cassiodorus were much read for a thousand years. Their text-
books were canonized in the liberal arts curriculum of the Middle Ages—
Cassiodorus’s for use among beginners and Boethius for the more
advanced. But as noted earlier, aspiring philosophers were usually more
interested in developing and using the more powerful formal logic taught
within dialectic and less interested in the weaker and messier parts—espe-
cially parts concerned with the sources of knowledge. Philosophers have
naturally tended to explore the power of their own minds rather than tin-
ker in the social arts of reasonableness. Rhetoricians also have tended to be
more interested in talking than listening. In the age of developing univer-
sities the Great Thinkers were seldom interested in the art of being rea-
sonable, of listening, of assent and submission. Augustine was a great
model; however, few who aspired to be philosophers, rhetoricians, or even
theologians like him were as interested in the mundane matters that inter-
ested the Bishop of Hippo. The curriculum, as it was developed beyond
the elementary liberal arts, supported special fields of philosophy and the-
ology that tended to chart a high road that left behind small matters of
social reasonableness. Plotinus, the Egyptian neo-Platonist, had advocated
the high road in his essay “On Dialectic.” He began by declaring that dialec-
tic “will take us up there” to “the Good, the First Principle.”90 Dialectic was
the science which can speak about everything in a reasoned

and orderly way. . . . It discusses good and not good, and the
things that are classed under good and its opposite, and what
is the eternal and what not eternal, with certain knowledge

about everything and not mere opinion. It stops wandering
about the world of sense and settles down in the world of
intellect, and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and
feeding the soul in what Plato calls “the plain of truth.”91
The call of the Platonic high road empowered most of the philosophers and
theologians of the Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages, the call can be
heard in the work of Alcuin and John Scottus Eriugena.
Alcuin (732–804), aside from being a textbook writer, was the private
tutor to Charlemagne and his family, and organizer of Carolingian schools. In
Alcuin’s dialectic and rhetoric textbooks we see the beginnings of how
medieval education emphasized the high road of Plotinus while it deem-
phasized extrinsic topics in logic. In a letter written in 798, Alcuin told
Charlemagne that some of his students at Tours asked him why certain eccle-
siastical terms should be used:
If I reply that this is the practice of the church and that the
rule is established by the authority of Rome, they think it an
insufficient answer, based on custom and authority alone,
unless some reason supports the authority.92
Alcuin, their teacher, is probably the source for this antagonism to

argument from authority even though he does not claim credit. Evident in
the students is a devotion to the philosophic high road that would inspire
the monks of Bec to request a meditation without use of authority from
Anselm. What the students and Alcuin believed about authority is not clear
in his letter to Charlemagne; however, we see in it and in Alcuin’s
textbooks a rather curt dismissal of the role of testimony or authority in
dialectic.
His textbook De Dialecticae is a question-and-answer dialogue between
Alcuin and Charlemagne. Alcuin probably thought that dialogue would help
his students better remember what was said. In a schoolmasterly way, he also
wanted to cut out anything superfluous. Although Alcuin follows Cassiodorus
and Isidore in general and uses the same terminology to describe a
Cassiodoran three-part topics, he never says anything more about extrinsic
topics than to say they exist.93
Alcuin has more about testimony in another textbook, Rhetorica,
where he focuses on legal definitions and courtroom practice rather than
reasoning. “How many parties,” Charlemagne asks, “are customarily pres-
ent in the courts of law?” Alcuin answers four: “the plaintiff, the defendant,
the witness [testes], and the judge.” Charlemagne asks, “What official duties
does each discharge?” The witness, says Alcuin, inhabits the “domain
of truth” while the judge is in possession of justice. The other two trade
back-and-forth positions either building up or undermining the witness’s

statements.94
John Marenbon considered Alcuin’s circle to be innovative and original
thinkers, a judgment seemingly borne out by Alcuin’s small show of inter-
est, in his letter to Charlemagne, in courtroom use of testimony and antag-
onism to reasoning by authority.95 John Scotus Eriugena (b. c.810), the most
innovative and vital of these intellectuals in the circle of Alcuin, shared
Augustine’s Christian idealism about the usefulness of dialectic and the lib-
eral arts; however, like Alcuin, he wanted to diminish integration of author-
ity into reasoning. In the Periphyseon, written in the middle of the ninth
century, Nutritor and Alumnus discuss the liberal arts, dialectic, and the
relationship of reason to authority:
ALUMNUS: You strongly press me to admit that this is rea-

sonable. But I should like you to bring in some supporting
evidence from the authority of the Holy Fathers to confirm it.
NUTRITOR: You are not unaware, I think, that what is prior
by nature is of greater excellence than what is prior in time.
A: This is known to almost everybody.
N: We have learnt that reason is prior by nature, authority in
time. For although nature was created together with time,
authority did not come into being at the beginning of nature
and time, whereas reason arose with nature and time out of
the Principle of things.
A: Even reason herself teaches this. For authority proceeds
from true reason, but reason certainly does not proceed from
authority. For every authority which is not upheld by true rea-
son is seen to be weak, whereas true reason is kept firm and
immutable by her own powers and does not require to be
confirmed by the assent of any authority. For it seems to me
that true authority is nothing else but the truth that has been
discovered by the power of reason and set down in writing
by the Holy Fathers for the use of posterity. But perhaps it
seems otherwise to you?
N: By no means. And that is why reason must be employed
first in our present business, and authority afterwards.96
If we take Alcuin’s and Eriugena’s work together, we can see a

Carolingian desire by aspiring intellectuals to follow Plotinus’s high road
and even denigrate the low road of extrinsic topics. In the high Middle
Ages, the new universities seem also to have not encouraged the social
dialectic of authority. John of Salisbury (c.1115–1180) in his Metalogicon
highly recommended the subject of topics—citing Aristotle, Augustine,
Capella, Boethius, Isidore and Alcuin—but ignored the subject of extrinsic
topics.97 Peter of Spain (c.1210–1277)—who as Pope John XXI has been
criticized for being more interested in science than leading the church—in
his short and popular logic textbook called Tractatus or Summulae

Logicales, offered a cursory statement on extrinsic topics: “any expert ought
to be believed within his science.”98
Peter Abelard’s (1079–1142 or 1144) Dialectica was much influenced
by Boethius and Cassiodorus. It follows Boethius’s example of fully ana-
lyzing topics, even to the extent of analyzing the Themistian three-part
model and offering a new model. On the other hand, Abelard’s Dialectica
is much larger than any of the Boethian or Cassiodoran dialectic manuals
of the Middle Ages—over six hundred pages in a modern edition. Over all,
Abelard is a good example of following the high road of philosophy with
no interest in the proper role of extrinsic topics in the workings of reason-
able people.
Abelard probably wrote his first version of Dialectica while lecturing in
Paris sometime before his affair with his student Héloïse. The Dialectica’s
workmanlike, comprehensive, and solid form seems out of character with
its author’s unsettled, calamitous, and controversy-filled life; however, for
all its calamities, Abelard never ceased to travel a high lonesome road not
unlike the one advocated by Plotinus. In the introduction to his The Story
of My Misfortunes, Abelard declared his ardor for the life of a logician. The
prizes the sought were in the “battle of minds” and “going withersoever”
the study of logic flourished. He desired to be “such an one as the
Peripatetics.”99 L. M. De Rijk believes that Abelard probably worked on mul-
tiple versions of Dialectica throughout his peripatetic life. The manuscript
De Rijk transcribed and used here can be dated to his last years.100
Abelard was not interested the social aspect of dialectic. Aristotle taught
in Topics that his treatise had three uses: “intellectual training, casual
encounters, and the philosophical sciences.”101 Abelard’s Dialectica dropped
the middle of Aristotle’s three uses. For Abelard, dialectic’s “distinct theoret-
ical character is removed from pure exercise and practical ability.”102 Abelard
did not want logic muddied with creating credibility out of weak evidence
in casual encounters.103
Abelard’s Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian shows
that even in Christian apologetics, he had little interest in the use of extrin-
sic/inartificial topics in the way Augustine advised. Written in the last years
of his life while also revising his Dialectica, Abelard’s Dialogue offers a
direct commentary on Dialectica’s minimal statements on authority.
The Christian in the dialogue at one point argues that the pagan
philosopher should become a Christian on the example of pagan philoso-
phers before him who converted. The Philosopher replies:
We don’t yield to their authority in the sense of not discussing

their statements rationally before we approve them.
Otherwise we would be ceasing to do philosophy if while
disregarding the investigation of reasons we mainly used

topics from authority. The latter are declared inartificial and
are entirely disconnected from the reality itself, consisting of
opinion more than truth.104
At this point, the Christian backtracks on his point and agrees. He and the
Philosopher then carry on for several paragraphs of dialogue denigrating
testimony, authority, and opinion and those who build a foundation on
them. It is impossible to imagine Augustine responding in the same way.
Citing definitions directly from Boethius, Themistius, and Cicero, the
Philosopher dismisses orators who do not seek true arguments and lazily
use “prepared and given testimonies.”105
The Philosopher and the Christian then combine against the Jew! It is
the Jews who rely on authority rather than reason. Jews “put their defense
in another person’s words” and think it is “easier to judge about the author-
ity or text of someone absent than about the reasoning or view of some-
one present.”106 The Christian then agrees that, though using scripture is
important to Christians, “the declared truth of reason is stronger than point-
ing to an authority.”107
Abelerd’s Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian
exemplifies an attitude among the most famous of the medieval philoso-
phers that reasoning was weakened by testimony, so much weakened that
Abelard believed it should be avoided even in Christian apologetics. The
historical aspects of Christianity that relied on scriptural testimony of events
were the weakest parts of Christian apologetics. Although St. Paul had
rooted Christianity in the historical event of the resurrection and the role of
eyewitness accounts was initially emphasized in the New Testament, we
saw with Clement of Alexandria how Christian theologians tended to seek
a faith based on a higher certainty. Plotinus’s call to the high lonesome road
of reasoning without recourse to others became so much the highest stan-
dard of The Thinker that authority was no longer one of the two pillars of
knowledge. Authority seemed only to drag reason into the gutter. For
Abelard it was the Jews who allied reason with authority.
Certainly the boys at the cathedral and monastery schools—and prob-
ably the girls with their tutors and in convent schools—read Cassiodorus to
start learning the art of being reasonable. A little later in their education
they moved on to Boethius. With such an education they could become
teachers themselves, write history, join the bureaucracy of the government
and the courts of law, or become canon lawyers, inquisitors, physicians, or
missionaries. In all these duties the art of thinking learned from Cassiodorus
and Boethius would be useful. But in philosophy and in much of theology,
the student aspiring to the highest respect at the new universities put away
childish things learned from elementary textbooks.
This attitude is clear in Abelard. It is also evident in St. Bonaventure

(1217–1274), professor at the University of Paris and Minister General of the
Franciscan Order. As a biographer of St. Francis, Bonaventure followed the
practice exemplified by Herodotus, Plutarch, and Luke of describing the way
he investigated testimonies and judged the credibility of witnesses; how-
ever, when it came to writing the ultimate guide to the art of reasoning—
The Mind’s Journey to God—the individual mind, aided by grace, can walk
the highest of high roads without reliance on any other person except for
limited reference to sacred scripture.108 For Bonaventure, writing history
was the low road of dialectic. The mind’s journey to God is the high road
of reason. The former is messy and social. The latter seeks purity and is
best pursued alone. Neither Anselm, Abelard, nor Bonaventure ever denied
the role of testimony in the art of being reasonable—especially in practical
matters such as the courts and writing history. However, they exemplify
a tendency even among the Christian intellectual elite not to follow
Augustine’s example of claiming two legs for being reasonable. At the risk
of an absurd allusion, Isidore of Seville taught the dialectic of standing on
two legs, but many of the Great Minds of the Middle Ages sought to
became like his one-legged monopeds who could shade themselves by
lying on their backs with their single foot in the air.
ARISTOTELIAN DIALECTIC AMONG THE JEWS, ARABS,

AND MUSLIMS
Given the fact that the Greeks and Romans had nicely developed a place
in dialectic textbooks for teaching testimony, it is reasonable to suspect that
the Jews, Arabs, and Muslims would have also found a place for testimony
in theirs. It appears, however, that they didn’t. First, the liberal arts tradi-
tion of textbooks was not as strong as among European schools. Jewish,
Arab, and Muslim education retained the Greek emphasis on personal oral
tutorial that seems to have limited the need for often copied, widely used,
elementary textbooks. Second, like the Christian philosophers, the Jewish,
Arabian, and Muslim philosophers who became most famous were inspired
by the Platonic ideals that, for the most part, make testimony and author-
ity uninteresting.
Birger Gerhardsson, studying authoritative transmission of traditional texts
and eyewitness accounts, looks at the pedagogic traditions where we would
expect to find dialectic textbooks dealing with testimony, and finds none
designed to serve the needs of these Jews and Christians.109 E. F. Peters notes
how the Hellenistic encyclopedia tradition continued in the Roman Empire
but points out that for the Arabs the intellectual influence of Alexandria
tended toward neoplatonism and natural science, not topics or rhetoric.110
After the fourth century, Jewish systems for handling Midrash were
developed, but emphasis on personal transmission from teacher to student
did not lend itself to producing textbooks. Jacob Neusner finds within sixth-
and seventh-century Midrash compilations “four logics of intelligible dis-
course” but mentions no topic of extrinsic argument.111 There seems to have
been no systematic place for discussing the handling of testimony.
E. F. Peters’ catalogue of textbooks used among the Arabs and Muslims
indicates little emphasis on Aristotle’s topics or rhetoric. Even though the
Islamic emphasis on submission might have found resonance with
Augustine’s emphasis on submission to divine testimony and human tra-
ditions of testimony, a Muslim tradition of topics probably needed a
Boethius and Cassiodorus. The closest Muslim to fit this model was al-
Farabi (c.870–950). Al-Farabi wrote commentaries on Aristotle, including
his Rhetoric and Topics. Raymond Lull in the fourteenth century, and
some later Renaissance publishers brought some of al-Farabi’s commen-
taries into the Western textbook tradition. However, al-Farabi and Muslim
dialectic in general shared the medieval West’s intellectual interest in the
high road of individual philosophy rather than corporate trust. This anti-
probabilistic bent was described in the fourteenth century in ibn
Taymiyya’s polemic against Greek logic. Ibn Taymiyya specifically con-
demned Muslim logicians for undermining the divine testimony of the
prophet in the Quran and hadith. He condemned “those who claim that
what has been multiply transmitted from the prophets does not constitute
proof for them”112 and also the inconsistency evident in the way they
blindly accepted as propositions useful for proofs other things transmitted
by other authorities.
On the other hand, I must admit so much ignorance that I can only
encourage more study by others. Islam, like Christianity, is foundationally
constructed on historical knowledge being passed through generations.
Muslim concern for its history took the form of teaching the rational han-
dling of divine revelation (Quaran) and the reported sayings, deeds, and
decisions of the Prophet (hadith). By the ninth century, Muslim leaders
developed categories of authority for eyewitnesses (companions of the
Prophet) and hearsay transmitters (successors). Character and proximity—
chronological and geographical—were important factors in the authority of
companions and successors. Authoritative hadith had to begin with a
description of the chain of successors that culminated in a companion
before reporting the Prophet’s saying, deed, or decision.113
In practical Islamic religious education there has been both the need
and the interest in teaching methods of handling testimony and authority;
however, such religious education does not seem to have had a textbook
tradition accompanying it. The teaching of hadith in a madrasah tended
toward private instruction that led to “notarized attestation that a student
had heard and had recited in the presence of an accredited scholar specific
traditions which he was then licensed to transmit himself.”114
Al-Ghazzali (1058–1111) in Deliverance from Error and Attachment to
The Lord of Might and Majesty, described four classes of seekers, the sec-
ond of which are the “Batiniyah who consider that they, as the party of
“authoritative instruction” (ta ’lim), alone derive truth from the infallible
imam.”115 He found the way of the Batiniyah mired in danger and weak-
ness. He quoted Muhammad himself as saying in one instance, “I judge by
the more probable opinion, based on the account of the witnesses, but the
witnesses may be mistaken.”116 In The Confessions of Al-Ghazzali he wrote
that certainty about a particular prophecy is attained by “reliable tradition.”117
The Aristotelian tradition was obviously strong in al-Ghazzali.
Later among the Jews of the twelfth century, Moses Maimonides
(1135–1204) had much interest in rules for handling testimony in legal
cases and related matters. In Guide to the Perplexed he advised that when
judging a prophet’s authority to transmit divine testimony,
we must examine the merits of the person, obtain an accurate

account of his actions, and consider his character. The best
test is the rejection, abstention, and contempt of bodily pleas-
ures; for this is the first condition of men, and a fortiori of
prophets; they must especially disregard pleasures of the
sense of touch, which, according to Aristotle, is a disgrace to
us; and, above all, restrain from the pollution of sensual inter-
course.118
Ibn Rushd (c.1126–c.1198), often called Averroes, was apparently

encouraged to write an array of commentaries on Aristotle while serving as
a judge in Spain. Given that an Islamic judge’s duties were both civil and
religious, Ibn Rushd had special interest when commenting on Aristotle’s
discussion of nontechnical knowledge in Rhetoric. He specifically noted the
importance of a group relying on the authority of another group’s testi-
mony and offered the example that this is how we know of “the sending
of the Prophet, the existence of Mecca and Medina, and other things.”119 Ibn
Khaldun (1332–1406), most famous for methodical thinking about history,
wrote a logic textbook for tutoring the son of a ruler in Granada, but I
could not find a translation.120 James Franklin seems to share my predica-
ment in The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal
(2001) since he also is able to offer only short statements on Jewish and
Islamic teachings.
Certainly Christians, Jews, Arabs, and Muslims had similar ties to the
Aristotelian tradition of dialectic. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had impor-
tant religious reasons to educate each generation in methods of handling
testimony and authority. Competent scholars need to study the subject in
the history of Jewish and Muslim education. What I have found in the
Christian West is a strong textbook tradition. Among the Jews, Arabs, and
Muslims, no strong textbook tradition is apparent—possibly due to the per-
sonal and oral character of education and the tendencies of the Platonic
philosophic tradition. Later in the Renaissance of the Christian West there
will be a boom in logic textbooks discussing testimony and authority based
largely on a revival of interest in Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine. I do not
have evidence that Jews and Muslims were influenced by this development
or experienced any boom in dialectic textbooks discussing testimony.
Given what evidence I have, the rest of this book will follow Western text-
book traditions designed to serve Christian education.
NOTES
1. Acts 7.
2. Acts 10:39 (New International Version).
3. Galatians 1:11 (NIV).
4. 1 Corinthians 15:14–15 (NIV).
5. Luke 1:1–4 (NIV). Debates about Luke as a historian and the historicity of the
Gospels in general are ongoing and illuminate modern struggles with handling inarti-
ficial knowledge. For good discussions of the struggles and the conservative conclu-
sions I favor, see Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987) and C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and The
Jesus of Faith: Incarnational Narrative as History (New York: Oxford University, 1996).
For the way the Gospels and Acts compare with Roman teachings on the dialectic of
historians, see Richard A Burridge, What are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-
Roman Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1992).
6. Hebrews 2:1–4 (NIV).
7. Tertullian, On Prescription Against Heretics, trans. Peter Holmes in vol. 3
of Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Cleveland Cox (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers,
1995), chap. vii.
8. Jerome, Letters, trans. W. H. Fremantle in ser. 2, vol. 6 of Library of Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1952), 35.
9. 1 Corinthians 1:20–31 (NIV).
10. Salvadore R. C. Lilla, Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Platonism
and Gnosticism (Oxford: Oxford University, 1971), 123. See also Henry Chadwick,
“Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Later
Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1970), 169.
11. Lilla, Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Platonism and
Gnosticism, 119.
12. Herbert Braun’s article on pistis in the Theological Dictionary of the New
Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids:
Wm. B. Eerdman’s, 1968) points out that there was a “decisive development” in early
Christian usage indicated in the Apocrapha to emphasize Jesus as the “liberator from
error” and ties this to Athanasius, the history of the Canon, and warnings against het-
erodoxy. Braun’s statements make no reference to Roman logic, but his evidence
seems to show that early Christian usage of pistis/fides did not emphasize a realm of
faith where the possibility of error existed. Robert M. Grant in Greek Apologists of the
Second Century (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988) writes that Theophilus used
Carneades’s images of “faith” as a farmer entrusting his seed to the soil and a sailor
entrusting himself to a ship, images that exemplify the probabilistic side of faith; but
otherwise, Grant’s book indicates a general early Christian lack of interest in the
technical matters of reasoning with opinions.
13. Long into the Renaissance, many assumed that Augustine was the author
of Categoriae Decem ex Aristotele Decerptae and De Dialecticae. The Categoriae is
no longer thought to be written by Augustine but in the Renaissance it served to
bolster the Christian use of Aristotelian categories. De Dialecticae was possibly writ-
ten by Augustine, but is an unfinished textbook with nothing on inartificial argu-
ments. Late in life, Augustine reported that as a young teacher he had begun a
dialectic manual as part of a curricular cycle of textbooks. The book was written
just after he was baptized. De Dialectica fits what we know from Augustine, in that
it is unfinished and not influenced specifically by Christianity. The book had few
direct ties to medieval European textbooks.
14. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. J. F. Shaw, ser. 1, vol. 2, Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids:
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988), IV.i.2.
15. Ibid., II.xl.60.
16. Ibid., xxxvii.55.
17. Ibid., xxxi.48.
18. Ibid., xxxi.48, xxxvi.55.
19. Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Arthur West Haddan, ser. 1, vol. 3 Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, XV.xii.22.
20. Ibid., 21.
21. Augustine, Faith of Things not Seen, trans. C. L. Cornish, ser. 1, vol. 3, Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, sect. 4.
22. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.xxiii.35. It should be noted that
Augustine accepts the authority of a Erythraean sibyl who supposedly prophesied
about Christ (The City of God, XVIII.23.)
23. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, ser. 1, vol. 2, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, XL.i.
24. Ibid., XI.3.
25. Ibid., XIX.18.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Romans 13:1 (NIV).
29. 1 Peter 2:13 (NIV).
30. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.vii.10.
31. Ibid., viii.12.
32. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 1355a.15–20.
33. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, trans. R. G. Bury, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1935), bk. I.171–85.
34. Quintilian, Instutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1921), V.viii.7–8, x.8–17.
35. Ibid., x.12–13.
36. Augustine, Against the Academics, trans. John J. O’Meara (New York:
Newman Press, 1951), III.viii.17.
37. Ibid., v.12, II.x.23.
38. Ibid., III.xx.43.
39. Augustine, On the Profit of Believing, trans. C. L. Cornish, ser. 1, vol. 3,
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, sect. 12.
40. See also Dewey J. Hoitenga, Jr. Faith and Reason from Plato to Plantinga:
An Introduction to Reformed Epistemology (Albany: State University of New York,
1991), 57–69.
41. Augustine, On The Profit of Believing, sect. 25
42. Ibid.
43. In Letter147, Augustine stated that when it came to using information from
holy scriptures, that there was no need to say “believe”; people can instead say
“know.” See Letter147: Augustine to the Noble Lady, Pauline in Augustine of Hippo:
Selected Writings, trans. Mary T. Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 372.
44. Augustine, On the Profit of Believing, sect. 25.
45. Augustine, The City of God, I.xvi.
46. Augustine, On The Profit of Believing, sect. 25.
47. Augustine, Against the Academics, III.xx.43.
48. See Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Lipper/Viking, 1999), and
Peter Brown’s review in The New York Review of Books 46 (24 June 1999):45–50.
49. Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts (Cambridge: Harvard University,
1912), VI.v.
50. Ibid.
51. Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion, in Major Works, trans. Brian Davies
and G. R. Evans (New York: Oxford University, 1998), 5.
52. St. Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings, trans. Anton C. Pegis (New York:
Random House, 1945), I.8.
53. Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York:
Penguin Books, 1974), v.6263.
54. Bonaventure, The Life of St. Francis in Bonaventure, trans. Ewert Cousins
(New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 183.
55. Anselm of Canterbury, “Letter to Archbishop Lanfranc” and “Prologue,” in
Monologion; and R. W. Southern, St. Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge:
Cambridge University, 1990), 65–66, 113–37.
56. Anselm, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Benedicta
Ward (New York: Penguin Classics, 1973), 244.
57. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S. J. Tester (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1973), I.85–95.
58. See Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology,
and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) and the pleasant character of Boethius
in Louis de Wohl’s historical novel Citadel of God (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987).
59. See John Vanderspoel, Themistius and the Imperial Court: Oratory, Civic
Duty, and “Paideia” from Constantius to Theodosius (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1995).
60. Boethius, In Ciceronis Topica, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell
University, 1988), 4.23–24.
61. Niels Jørgen Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of Topics in the Middle Ages:
The Commentaries on Aristotle’s and Boethius’ “Topics” (München: Philosophia Verlag,
1984), 107.
62. Ibid., 111.
63. Boethius, In Ciceronis Topica, 19.73.
64. Ibid., 2.8.
65. Ibid., 19.73–20.76.
66. Ibid.
67. Henry Chadwick comments on the paganess of Boethius when writing in
the pagan tradition in Boethius, 22. See Boethius, “The Trinity” and “On the Catholic
Faith” in The Theological Tractates, trans. H. F. Stewart, H. F. Rand, and S. J. Tester
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1973), 33, 53, 57, 71.
68. Boethius, De Topicis Differentiis, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell
University, 1978), 1180d.30–35.
70. Henry Chadwick, Boethius, 16–22.
71. Boethius, De Topicis Differentiis, 1180b.15–35.
72. Ibid.
73. Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of
Culture (New Haven, Yale University, 1996), 196.
74. F. E. Peters, The Harvest of Hellenism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970),
378. See also David L. Wagner, “The Seven Liberal Arts and Classical Scholarship,”
in The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, ed. David L. Wagner (Bloomington:
Indiana University, 1983), 17–18.
75. Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. William
Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Burge, in Martianus Capella and the
Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University, 1977), 106.
76. Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 110.
77. Ibid., 156.
78. Ibid., 153.
79. Ibid., 184.
80. Ibid., 185.
81. Cassiodorus Senator, An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings,
trans. and intro. Leslie Webber Jones (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), I (Divine
Letters), preface, 1.
82. Cassiodorus, II (Secular Letters), iii.1.
83. Ibid., 5.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 19.
86. Isidore of Seville, in Patrologiae Latinae, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris:
1844–1891), v.82.132.
87. Cassiodorus, II (Secular Letters).ii.10.
88. Ibid., I (Divine Letters). xvi.1–2.

89. Ibid., xvii.1, 3.
90. Plotinus, Ennead, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Harvard University,
1966), I.3.1.
91. Plotinus, Ennead, I.3.4.
92. Alcuin of York, Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters, ed. Stephen Allott
(York, England: William Sessions Limited, 1974), Letter 81, p. 96.
93. Alcuin of York, De Dialecticae, in Patrilogiae Latinae, ed. Jacques-Paul
Migne. (Paris: 1844–1891), v.1.968.
94. Alcuin of York, The Rhetoric of Alcuin and Charlemagne: A Translation,
with an Introduction, the Latin Text, and Notes, ed. & trans. Wilbur Samuel
Howell (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 400–10.
95. See John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre:
Logic, Theology, and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1981).
96. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams (Dublin:
The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968), I.69. See also Dermot Moran, The
Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989).
97. John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Gloucester,
MA: Peter Smith, 1971), III.v–x. He briefly mentions testimony and authority in
Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990), 108.
98. See Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of Topics in the Middle Ages, 50. As a
less influential comparison, William of Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic, trans.
Norman Kretzmann (Minneapolis: University of Minnisota, 1966), 93, defined author-
ity as “the confirmed opinion of some wise man or, alternatively, a saying worthy
of imitation.” Sherwood who studied at Oxford or Paris or both and later taught at
both was a slightly younger contemporary of Peter of Spain.
99. Peter Abelard, The Story of My Misfortunes, trans. Henry Adams Bellows
(New York: Macmillan, 1922), 1–2.
100. L. M. De Rijk, “Introduction,” to Peter Abelard’s Dialectica (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1956), xxiii.
101. Aristotle, Topica, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge in The Works of Aristotle,
ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 101a.25–30.
102. Maria Teresa Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli, The Logic of Abelard
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 13.
103. See Alexander Brodie, Introduction to Medieval Logic (2nd ed., Oxford:
Clarendon, 1993), 5. Otto Bird discusses how Abelard attempted to isolate and
emphasize a formal element even within topics in “The Formalizing of the Topics
in Mediaeval Logic,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1 (1960): 138–49. Otto
Bird discusses this movement more broadly, focusing on Peter of Spain and William
of Ockham, in “The Tradition of Logicial Topics: Aristotle to Ockham,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 307–23.
104. Peter Abelard, Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian in
Ethical Writings, trans. Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 157 (p. 95).
105. Ibid., 166 (p. 97).
106. Ibid., 167 (p. 97). See also the Jew’s statement: 36 (p. 66).
107. Ibid., 172 (p. 98).

108. See Bonaventure’s use of testimony in The Life of St. Francis, especially
“prologue,” sect. 4; and his limited reference to the role of the Bible in reasoning
appears in The Mind’s Journey Into God, chapter 4, sects. 5–6.
109. Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written
Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, trans. Eric J. Sharpe
(Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961), 19, 280–88.
110. E. F. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam
(New York: New York University, 1968), 7–11.
111. Jacob Neusner, The Midrash Compilations of the Sixth and Seventh
Centuries: An Introduction to the Rhetorical, Logical, and Topical Program, vol. 1
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 89–95.
112. Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians, trans. Wael B. Hallaq (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), 305 (p. 166). Note also his remarks on a scale of probabil-
ity in 314 (p. 170).
113. See John Burton, An Introduction to the Hadith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University, 1995), and Muhammad Mustafa Azami, Studies in Hadith Methodology
and Literature (Indianapolis, 1977).
114. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs, 70.
115. Abou Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammed Al Ghazzali, The Faith and
Practice of Al-Ghazali, trans. W. Montgomery Watt (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1953), 26–27.
116. Ibid., 48.
117. Abou Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammed Al Ghazzali, The Confessions of
Al Ghazzali, trans. Claud Field (New Anarkali, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraff,
1992), 62.
118. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1947), 234.
119. Quoted in James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and
Probability Before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001), 121.
120. See Nathaniel Schmidt, Ibn Khaldun: Historian, Sociologist, and Philosopher
(New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1.
CHAPTER THREE
TWO RENAISSANCE TRADITIONS: CICERONIAN

AND AUGUSTINIAN
Renaissance teachers of logic loved Cicero and Augustine more than

Abelard and Peter of Spain. They preferred the eclectic and practical val-
ues of the Romans over the medieval tendency to high formalism. The
humanists of Renaissance Europe appreciated the earthy optimism evident
in the following from Cicero:
[Dialectic] extends widely over all aspects of knowledge. This
is the branch of learning that defines and classifies, draws log-
ical consequences, formulates conclusions, and distinguishes
the true from the false. In other words, it is the art and sci-
ence of reasoning: which is not only supremely useful for
evaluating arguments of all kinds but also offers its devotees
a noble satisfaction which merits the name of wisdom.1
Committed to teaching the practical wisdom of evaluating all kinds of argu-

ments, Renaissance textbooks revived discussion of testimony and author-
ity in two ways. The first was classical with an emphasis on the Ciceronian.
Rudolphus Agricola and Petrus Ramus were the two most influential figures
in this tradition. The second was classical but also eclectically Augustinian.
The latter followed the way Augustine drew epistemology, psychology, and
theology into a dialectic that served Christianity. Philipp Melanchthon was
the most influential figure in this tradition. The art of handling testimony
and authority was promoted in both traditions.
AGRICOLA AND RAMUS REVIVE CLASSICAL TOPICS
Rudolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485) wrote the first major Renaissance

logic textbook: De Inventione Dialectica. Circulating in manuscript after the
1470s and first published in Louvain in 1515, it gained enormous influence
in the 1520s and ’30s. By 1569, Petrus Ramus wrote that “thanks to Agricola
the true study of genuine logic had first been established in Germany and
thence, by way of its disciples and emulators, had spread through the
whole world.”2 Lisa Jardine, even though noting that the published version
of the book was probably a result of “collaborative editing” and its fame an
aspect of a pedagogic myth created by Erasmus, describes De Inventione
Dialectica as the logic textbook “most widely specified, bought, and used
in schools and universities throughout Protestant Europe, between the early
decades of the sixteenth century and the mid seventeenth century.”3 Jardine
warns against placing too much weight on De Inventione Dialectica as the
source of the new Renaissance emphasis on classical dialectic; but we are
not too concerned here with the sources of ideas. Textbooks are rarely
such sources. As we shall see, many influential textbooks, especially as the
education market proved lucrative, are cut-and-paste ventures, and author-
ship a loose concept. The value is in usefulness not in originality, and in
fact, originality can weaken a textbook. Societies usually want their chil-
dren taught what is common knowledge, not what is cutting edge. The
benefit of studying textbooks comes from their conservatism and sociality.
They are better indicators of the thought of their constituency than higher
forms of writing. So Jardine is correct to warn that Agricola’s De Inventione
Dialectica was not very original, but the fact that it was much used in class-
rooms is more important.
Important to note is the conflation of dialectic, rhetoric, and logic into
single textbooks. Logic had long been a rather loose term, but dialectic and
rhetoric had been more clearly delineated. Cicero had merged Aristotle’s
Topics and Rhetoric into general textbooks for orators without any space
given to formal syllogistic reasoning. The liberal arts tradition had initially
split dialectic and rhetoric in an Aristotelian fashion while inserting formal
syllogistic reasoning into dialectic. Inartificial matters involving testimony—
apparently because they involved communication—were first placed in
rhetoric. Cassiodorus, however, led the way in moving inartificial topics
over into dialectic. In Agricola’s revival of Cicero, all of what was earlier
and later distinguished as logic, dialectic, and rhetoric came into one dialec-
tic textbook. Dialectic became awash in all matters of reasoning and per-
suasion. As can be noted in the quote from Ramus in the above paragraph,
the term logic came to be equated with this overflowing dialectic. In the
nineteenth century there will begin an academic move to distinguish dialec-
tic from rhetoric and to distinguish probabilistic dialectic from the formal
structures of what will be called logic. But between 1500 and 1900, the term
dialectic and logic became commonly interchangeable. Cicero was consid-
ered a model logician.
Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica opens by orienting readers to the
structure and terms of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Following Cicero,
Two Renaissance Traditions 89
he used the term external to describe the fundamental epistemological dis-

tinction between internal topics and those gained from external sources. He
wrote that what some people call authority, Cicero and Aristotle called tes-
timony.4 He, himself, recommended the alternate term: pronunciata (pub-
lic declaration).5 In general, however, Agricola stuck to the term testimony.
Aside from reviving Aristotelian-Ciceronian structure and terms, Agricola
freely used their phrases and examples: inartificial arguments were “ready
made” before coming to the reasoner, testimony “produced faith,” and the
chief types of testimony were tortures, documents, laws, and votes.
Testimony, for Agricola, was mostly a matter for courts of law.
Following classical precedent but not medieval, Agricola revived the
division of testimony into human or divine. All pronunciata, he taught, are
either human or divine. We should note his description of divine testimony.
The clearest markers of the Ciceronian tradition of testimony in the
Renaissance are the descriptions of divine testimony. Medieval logicians—
from Boethius and Cassiodorus on—did not teach a separate category of
divine testimony. Agricola revived it as a separate category of testimony
and drew his list of types from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Divine tes-
timony, for Agricola, included divine voices, mystical experience (amore
afflatis), priests and prophets (sacerdotes vatesquae). There is nothing
specifically Christian in the list.
Agricola led a revival of the Ciceronian handling of human and divine
testimony in dialectic textbooks. His handling was classical with no specific
reference to Christian applications. Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) was among
the many who were impressed with Agricola’s revival of classical dialectic
and contributed his own two textbooks: Scholarum Dialecticarum seu
Animadversionum in Organum Aristotelis, libri xx (1544) and Dialecticae
Libri Duo (1555 in French, 1556 in Latin, and final revision in 1572).6 The
former was a large textbook, similar in size and content to Agricola’s
De Inventione Dialectica. The latter was much shorter and much more pop-
ular. Ramus was a master reductionist and systematizer of classical dialec-
tic. He had nothing new to say about inartificial arguments but widely
revived Cicero’s simplest thoughts on the subject. Lisa Jardine sums up the
best modern scholarship when she notes that Ramus was primarily an
aggressive pedagogical reformer who did not make any significant innova-
tions within the content of dialectic.7
In the history of logic that opened Scholarum Dialecticarum, Ramus
began with a nonclassical source of logic: the Urim and Thummim that God
gave Moses and the priestly descendants of Aaron. With this bow to the mys-
terious Old Testament tradition of two stones sown into priestly robes to
which the ancient Hebrews could address questions, the rest of his history
followed the standard path through Greeks and Romans, ending with Galen.
Although the history implies that there were no developments in logic in the
late Roman or medieval periods, Ramus does begin the work in Cassiodoran
fashion with Porphyry’s five predicables and ten categories.8
Ramus’s Dialecticae Libri Duo honed the larger Scholarum down to an
efficiently organized two books, a clear Ciceronian division between
“invention” and “judgment.” Book one dealt with invention—listing the
types of places arguments could be found. The subject of inartificial argu-
ments was given a spot at the end of this first book, with all the various
manifestations of Ramist logic.
Ramus used the one term testimony to designate inartificial argument.
He notes that testimony is weak when seeking exact truth; however, in civil
and human affairs it can produce faith based on the moral character of the
source. Following Agricola’s lead when describing divine testimony, Ramus
uses the language of Cicero’s De Inventione to distinguish two types: that
which is received directly from oracles (fatidicorum) and those received
through prophets or soothsayers (vatum).9 Given the fact that Ramus would
soon be raised to the status of Protestant saint after his supposed martyr-
dom in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it is surprising that he made
no attempt to give a Christian spin to divine testimony. Even the example
of divine testimony given by Ramus was not from the Bible; rather, he
offered Cicero’s description of natural portents—meteors, lightning, and
such—from Against Catiline.
Ramus was obviously committed to the classical tradition as developed
by Cicero. His famous pedagogical commitment to reducing complex mat-
ters to simple bifurcations can even be attributed to Cicero through the
mediation of Boethius’s In Ciceronis Topica. Boethius appreciated the sim-
plicity of cutting things in two. (Note the bifurcations of figure 2.2 in chap-
ter 2 and Boethius’s statement that “every comparison is twofold.”10) In this
spirit, Ramus divides human testimony into two types: common or proper
(commune aut proprium).11 Common testimony is dichotomized into law or
proverbs. The laws can be either written or unwritten—he does not rank
them in the manner of Aristotle.12 The proverbs are simplistic: examples,
including “know thyself” and “you were born in Sparta, so adorn that city.”
Ramus then quickly moves to proper human testimony. Proper testimony
is dichotomized into that received from the dead or from the living. In clas-
sical fashion, testimonies from dead people have much force. The force of
testimonies from the living—whether by inquiry, obligation (promise), con-
fession, or oath—rely on the moral character of the testifier. Confession was
split into that freely given or extracted by torture (see figure 3.1). Harkening
back to Aristotle, Ramus focuses optimistically on truth telling rather than
on liars, forgers, or deceivers in any form. The structure implies Aristotle’s
dictum that truth is “naturally superior” and “more persuasive” than its oppo-
site.13 Ramus closes his discussion of testimony by including what he called
reciprocation—a traditional rule, more fully discussed later, that linked
Figure 3.1. Ramus’s scheme for testimony.
Dialectic
Invention Judgment
Artificial Inartificial
Testimony
Divine Human
Oracles Through prophets Proper Common
Living present Ancient absent

person person
Inquiry Law Proverbs

Obligation
Oath
Confession
Written Unwritten
Free Coerced
testifier and testimony and was especially applicable in situations where the
testimony was hard to believe.
Agricola and Ramus exemplify the core of the Ciceronian version of
Renaissance teaching on testimony and authority. Medieval tenets of educa-
tion had limited divine testimony to theology and in philosophy had mini-
mized the role of trusting others for information. Following Cicero and
Quintilian, Agricola and Ramus reunited human and divine testimony in
their all-inclusive hope to teach a general art of reasoning. Their textbooks
were successful in supporting the vision of the fast-growing number of edu-
cational institutions being founded in the Renaissance. But given the fact that
much of the support for new schools and universities was coming from var-
ious churches adamantly advocating the reasonableness of Christianity, it
should not be surprising that mere reliance on Cicero and Quintilian would
not go far enough. Almost everybody could appreciate Cicero and Quintilian,
but many found a better model for the art of reasoning in the works of
St. Augustine. Philipp Melanchthon led the way in developing in textbooks
an Augustinian method of weaving the reasonable use of testimony into
deep matters of psychology.
MELANCHTHON AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF

TESTIMONY, FAITH, AND ASSENT
With Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), testimony and authority got
more complicated. In the textbook tradition he began, testimony or author-
ity became deeply tied to the psychological faculty of the will and, by
extension, the divine grace necessary for a well-functioning will. With
Melanchthon there are no medieval sound-bites about testimony of experts
in their field of expertise being authoritative or classical short lists of
sources such as torture. He reached deeply into the works of Aristotle,
Augustine, and the best medieval theologians in order to strengthen not
only the role of dialectic as the foundation to all aspects of the liberal arts
curriculum but also as the foundation of a Christian reasonableness in gen-
eral. Not wanting to simply provide educational theory for his fellow
humanists, Melanchthon wrote textbooks. He had a high view of textbooks.
He wrote orations in praise of textbook writers and believed that it
took genius to write a long-lived and widely used textbook.14 He ranked
Rudolphus Agricola as one of these geniuses, but Melanchthon proved to
have this genius also.
Melanchthon first read Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica in 1514 while
earning an M.A. degree at the University of Tübingen. In an oration on the
life of Agricola, Melanchthon wrote that Agricola “first improved the style of
speech and dialectic in Germany, and showed a better method of learn-
ing.”15 He praised the power of Agricola’s intellect and his enthusiasm. His
textbooks were designed “to cleanse the art, and by leading it from the dark
into the light and into view, to show its use.”16 Melanchthon was inspired by
Agricola’s textbook. Reading Agricola “spurred him on constantly to intel-
lectual reform.”17 By the end of his life, Melanchthon had gone beyond Agricola
and written at least four textbooks on the art of reasoning: Compendiaria
Dialectices Ratio (1520), Ciceronis Topica cum Commentariis Boe[thius]
(1524), Dialectices (1528), and Erotemata Dialectices (1547). The last was his
most full and influential textbook on the subject.
Melanchthon’s own fame as an educator eventually rivaled Agricola’s.
Certainly his close relationship with Martin Luther at the University of
Wittenburg boosted that fame; however, Melanchthon’s influence on edu-
cation would have been great even if he had not been one of the leaders
of the Lutheran Reformation. He became known as Praeceptor Germaniae,

the Teacher of Germany. Henry VIII tried to recruit his services for England.
Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1551, enlarged 1552) used the following
statement as an example of a logical connection: “Melanchthon liveth and
readeth. Therefore there is great learning to be had where he is.”18
In his Erotemata Dialectices, Melanchthon revived and organized
Augustine’s views on the importance of using classical dialectic for the cor-
rect understanding of Christian scriptures and dogma. But Melanchthon
also found much to support Augustine in the writings of Aristotle. What
made Melanchthon’s textbook distinctively different from Agricola was the
way he brought Aristotelian and Augustinian confidence into the Ciceronian
form. Renaissance humanists tended to appreciate Cicero’s skepticism and
desire to emphasize probability and lawyerly manipulation of information.
Melanchthon also believed in teaching levels of probability; however, he
also desired to assure his students that there were many strong foundations
for knowledge. By emphasizing the epistemological and psychological
writings of Aristotle and Augustine, Melanchthon hoped to give his students
more confidence in their reasoning than Agricola did.
Of crucial importance was an Augustinian tradition of psychology that
emphasized the role of divine grace in orienting the human will. A properly
oriented will guided assent to true testimony. Right thinking, especially right
thinking about testimony, even more especially right thinking about
divine testimony, was a grace. Wrong thinking could mean a lack of
God’s grace, but often it was simply the outgrowth of human frailty.
Melanchthon’s art of reasoning was a human art that needed God’s active
help. His was an absolutely God-centered system that fully appreciated the
diverse obstacles in the way of human reasoning. For Melanchthon humans
were small and absolute certainty illusive. But the ecclesia, a Christian soci-
ety with its schools, political structures, and social functions, could become
reasonably founded upon some truths while encouraging toleration and
mutual trust and proper recognition of authorities. Melanchthon envisioned
a system of social reasonableness, derived primarily from his study of
St. Paul and St. Augustine, that was much more sophisticated than
Aristotle’s or Cicero’s. Working side-by-side with the most dynamic and
influential man of the era, Martin Luther, Melanchthon believed that he
lived in a special time of reformation in Christian history and was not afraid
to jettison some classical traditions while restructuring others.19 With this
mentality, he inaugurated an Augustinian tradition of textbooks teaching
the art of being reasonable.
Melanchthon’s Augustinian tradition manifested itself in subsequent
textbooks in two ways. The first was structural and more limited. The sec-
ond infused the content with confidence in Christian reasonableness and its
influence was widespread for several centuries. The structural innovations
came in his handling of topics and in the way he discussed testimony as part
of the Aristotelian category of quality. These technical innovations were
rather quirky and only pop up irregularly in later textbooks. However, the
second and larger manifestation of Melanchthon’s influence was in the gen-
eral way Christian concerns, terms, and examples replaced pagan classical
concerns, terms, and examples. The Ciceronian tradition exemplified by
Agricola and Ramus supported Christianity only tangentially. The Augustinian
tradition, popularized by Melanchthon, was specifically designed to support
Christianity. This larger model, more than his more technical innovations,
led the way to hundreds of religiously oriented and dogmatically inclined
logic textbooks that were written from the sixteenth through nineteenth
centuries.20
MELANCHTHON’S INNOVATIONS IN TOPICS
Given Melanchthon’s appreciation of Aristotle and Augustine, it is surpris-

ing that Erotemata Dialectices does not distinguish between inartificial and
artificial topics. Cicero had noted that this primary epistemic division of
topics was not as clean as he would have liked and some medieval logi-
cians had fiddled with adding a third division, but Melanchthon tried a
completely new bifurcation. He divided topics into personal and circum-
stantial (personarum and rerum). Authority and testimony, in this instance,
were treated as circumstances. Few would follow Melanchton’s structure on
this subject (see figure 3.2). Ramus would soon reduce the Ciceronian two-
part structure into a more easily memorized ten places, nine artificial and
one inartificial. But no one had gone so far as Melanchthon in tossing out
the old division and creating a whole new double list of topics.
Melanchthon’s innovation fits his tendency to root dialectics in psy-
chology. Like Augustine when arguing against skeptics, Melanchthon
believed that who the thinker is, especially the thinker’s personal relation-
ship with God, the church, the state, and the community, affects the rea-
soning. Having emphasized the personal, the more traditional topics could
be jumbled together in a separate list with authority and testimony taking
their traditional role at list’s end.21
Although jettisoning the most basic division of Aristotelian topics,
Melanchthon retained the division between human and divine authority that
had disappeared from medieval textbooks. Dividing topics into the personal
and the circumstantial was not persuasive to later textbook writers, but the
way he handled human and divine authority was very persuasive. Like
Aristotle, he noted that human authority should be recognized for its weak-
ness while divine authority is most firm.22 But in addition, like Augustine, he
insisted that people willing to listen to divine authority would find it in
Christian scripture and church teachings. With sagacity and diligence,
Figure 3.2. Melanchthon’s division of Topics.

Loci personarum Loci rerum
Patria (Citizenship) Definitio et definitum
Regula (Highest values) Genus
Sexus (Male or Female) Species
Parentes (Parentage) Differentia, Proprium
Educatio (Studiousness) Etymologia, Nomen
Mores (Character) Coniugata, Casus
Vitae genus (Kind of life) Totum, Partes
Res gestae (Actions) Divisio
Eventus (Handling of life events) Causae
Aetas (Maturity) Effectus
Mors (Handling of death) Antecedentia
Consequentia
Ab absurdo
A necessario
Ab inpossibili
Adiuncta
Connexa, Circumstantiae
Communiter accidentia
Similia
Paria
Ex maiore
Ex minore
A proportione
Pugnantia
Disparata
Signa
Exempla
Autoritas, Testimonia
Melanchthon believed, a wise person could separate the uncertain from the
certain. A wise person can discern true from false human testimony. By
God’s grace, humans can also recognize divine testimony.23 Divine grace
working in the human will would guide assent to the divine authority
behind the teachings of the prophets, the scriptures, the church, and reports
of miracles such as resuscitation of the dead.24
Within the discussion of human and divine testimony, the direct appli-
cation to Christian matters was highly influential. Textbooks did not merely
have to repeat the maxims of tradition; rather, Melanchthon led the way to
applying the terms of reasoning specifically to Christian issues. Many text-
books would follow his lead of orienting themselves to support revealed
Christianity. Although the general orientation was influential, the quirky
reorganizing of topics into personal and circumstantial was not.
Melanchthon’s specific innovations were less successful than his general
interest in direct application to Christian concerns. This is true also of his

second specific innovation: placing an additional discussion of testimony
into the category of quality.
TESTIMONY IN THE CATEGORY OF QUALITY
Aristotle’s lecture notes on categories were one of the least developed

aspects of his logic. The Latin translates from the Greek as either categor-
iae or predicamenta and therefore the term comes into English as either
“categories” or “predicaments.” In the late Roman and early medieval eras,
Aristotle’s lectures on categories were included in the Organon and revised
systems of them appeared in most dialectic textbooks—the most common
being by Porphyry. Cassiodorus presented Porphyry’s system as the first
two parts of his popular six-part dialectic. Boethius also wrote a commen-
tary on categories called Liber Aristotelis De Decem Praedicamentis.
Medieval logicians also had access to a synopsis believed to have been
written by Augustine called Categoriae Decem ex Aristotele Decerptae.
Although weak in origin and subject to revisions, the idea of the categories
as a major part of logic came well-recommended into the Renaissance.
Melanchthon took this weakness as an opportunity. In the long run, the
Melanchthonian use of the category of quality proved to be one of the most
distinctive dead-ends in the history of testimony and authority.
The categories help define words, dissect meanings, discover unde-
tected ambiguities in statements, and generally give confidence to the
dialectician. John of Salisbury described categories as “the ABC’s” dialec-
tics.25 Ramus deemphasized them in the more strictly Ciceronian tradition
of topics. However, to those less narrowly Ciceronian and more broadly
Aristotelian, for example Porphyry, Cassiodorus, and John of Salisbury, the
categories were a solid foundation from which to add topics.
The traditional ten categories were substance, quantity, relation, qual-
ity, action, passivity, place, time, position, possession. Of the ten, quality was
the least manageable and most broad. Melanchthon divided quality into
four parts: habits, natural potential, affections, and figure. The middle two
of these dealt with human capacities and feelings while the last dealt with
mathematical qualities. Most of Melanchthon’s interest, however, was in the
first: habits. Melanchthon packed habits with an Augustinian view of testi-
mony, assent, and faith (see figure 3.3).26
What is the precedent for such freight being attached to habits under
quality? Melanchthon found the precedent in two of Aristotle’s books,
Categories and Nichomachean Ethics, and in Augustine’s writings on testi-
mony, faith, and the mind needed to counteract skepticism. In Categories,
Aristotle lectured that quality always included “habits or dispositions,”
which were either “infused or acquired.” For Aristotle, an “infused habit”
Figure 3.3. Testimony in Melanchthon’s category of quality.
Quality
Natural potential Habits Affections Figures
Will Intellect
Notions
Certain Uncertain
Science Art Prudence Faith
Assent or reject notions Most firm assent
Faith is a notion, through which we most Human testimony

firmly assent to the teachings from God Honest history
passed through the church such as
Salvation Hope in heaven Enjoyment Fear of Toleration

through the and love of God
son of God God
was an “inborn capacity.” He used the example of a boxer or wrestler who

acquires the skills of the sport but has infused capacities to be a boxer or
wrestler.27 Melanchthon split habits into will and intellect rather than
infused and acquired. Augustine had promoted the deeper interest in the
relation of will to intellect, especially the will’s role in assenting to knowl-
edge gained by divine or human testimony. Under the subject of intellect,
Melanchthon drew heavily from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics where
Aristotle described “five states in which the soul grasps the truth”: science,
art, intelligence, wisdom, and understanding.28 Melanchthon shrunk these
to three and added a fourth: faith. Faith is the firm assent given to certain
propositions and to the stories told by true testifiers. Through the consci-
entious testimony of the multitude and books we know that Alexander
was the king of Macedonia.29 Melanchthon believed it appropriate to put
assent to testimony into the category of quality because it was the appro-
priate place to show that being reasonable is in humans most deeply
“a deliberative desire.”30 “What reason asserts,” Aristotle declared, “is what

desire pursues.”31
Note that Melanchthon distinguished two types of faith, one resulting
from human testimony and the other from divine testimony, the former
derived from habits of intellect and the latter from habits of will. The his-
tory of Alexander the Great was discussed under the heading of the intel-
lect, while the teachings of God passed through the traditions of the
church appear under the heading of the will.32 Augustine had never sepa-
rated so starkly the role of the will from the intellect. In practice both were
necessary.
There was medieval precedent for the general way Melanchthon
used the subset of habits in the category of quality to make epistemo-
logical distinctions. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica analyzed
habit as a disposition in the tradition of Aristotle but asked further
“whether any habits are infused in man by God?”33 Aquinas’s answer was
that God did in fact infuse some habits into man for two reasons. The
first was that God wants to dispose man to some things that are higher
than humanly possible, such as ultimate and perfect happiness. The
second can loosely be applied to Melanchthon’s discussion of divine
testimony.
He infuses into man even those habits which can be caused
by a natural power. Thus he gave to the apostles the science
of the Scriptures and of all tongues, which men can acquire
by study or custom, though not so perfectly.34
Aquinas also affirmed in this query that God “gives certain things to
some, which he does not give to others.”35 William of Ockham also waxed
epistemological when discussing habits. In Logic and again in On the Notion
of Knowledge or Science, Ockham defined knowledge as “a certain quality
which exists in the soul” dividable into an act of knowledge and a habit of
knowledge.36 Of the types of knowledge, Ockham discussed testimony.
Both Aquinas and Ockham linked testimony to habits in the category of
quality.
Although working in line with the thought of Aristotle, Augustine,
Aquinas, and Ockham, Melanchthon more starkly than any other textbook
writer created a place in the section on quality to include as habits the
two traditional forms of testimony. Divine testimony he treated as a matter
especially dependent upon the will of the reasoner. In the economy of
Renaissance textbooks, it was an eccentric innovation. Agricola had led the
way in emphasizing the more simple oratory of Cicero’s topics, and Ramus
would become even more popular as a simplifier antagonistic to the
logomachies of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics. Melanchthon seemed
to be taking a pedagogical step backward by expanding his section on the
categories to include material on testimony. The general tendency was to

reduce the space given to discussion of categories and, since testimony was
dealt with traditionally in topics it would be redundant to introduce it a
second time into the structure of the text.
The overall benefit of Melanchthon’s textbook structure was that it
found the strongest place in traditional logic where epistemological dis-
tinctions could be discussed in the context of theology and psychology.
The textbook structure encouraged classrooms to note the link—an espe-
cially crucial link for confidence in divine testimony. Given the benefit it is
understandable that this innovation by Melanchthon would find its way into
some textbooks for the next few centuries. Melanchthon’s weird way of
handling topics was a failure but this one had staying power.
Probably the most influential textbooks that followed Melanchthon’s
lead were Bartholomäus Keckermann’s logical works, which were widely
disseminated and were the foundation for Johann Heinrich Alsted’s ency-
clopedia and textbooks. Keckermann was born in 1571 in Danzig. He was
educated partly at Wittenberg after Melanchthon’s death, but eventually
returned to Danzig as a schoolmaster. Keckermann was one of the most
influential second-generation educational reformers in Protestant Germany
after Melanchthon led the first generation. Alsted proclaimed Keckermann
to be “a Ramus in method, a Melanchthon in facility, and an Aristotle in
genius.”37 On the subject of testimony, he was definitely a Melanchthon.38
His section on quality mirrors Melanchthon’s. Among Roman Catholics,
the Spanish Thomist, John of St. Thomas (1589–1644), also produced a
long and widely used logic textbook that seems to have relied on
Melanchthon as well as Aquinas in the way it expanded quality to include
testimony. In England Melanchthon’s influence is evident in the very
popular Oxford logic textbook by Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis
Compendium, which was first published in 1615.39 Sanderson did not put
testimony in his discussion of quality but in the “Appendix Posterior”
under the category of “miscella” is a long discussion of habits of the
mind that includes a Melanchthon-style handling of testimony, faith, and
assent.40
In the third generation of textbooks influenced by Melanchthon, the
furthest afield was written by Charles Morton (1627–1698) and became
popular at the provincial college of Harvard in North America. Morton was
a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford. He ended his life in the English
colonies as a vice president at Harvard College. During the late 1670s and
early ’80s he ran a London Dissenting Academy. At some point he wrote A
Logick System, which was eventually used in England and New England.41
The legacy of Melanchthon is evident in the energy Morton showed in link-
ing habits to the psychology and theology of assenting to divine and
human testimony (see figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4. Testimony in Morton’s category of quality.
Quality
Sensible Insensible
Habit Natural power
Infused Acquired
By God immediately as grace By human industry in

teaching and learning
Inclination of the will
Moral Intellectual
Virtue Vice Doubt Assent
No fear Fear
certainty uncertainty
Error True proposition Human faith Opinion

Human testimony
Heresy Schism
‘‘Infused divine faith Acquired

from testimony
of God’s’’
Science Art Prudence Understanding Wisdom
Word Spirit
Unlike Melanchthon, Morton has both divine and human testimony

influenced by the “inclination of the will.” Yet, the spirit of Melanchthon is
evident: quality was a place to discuss the interminglings of theology and
psychology with epistemology. Note that doubt is distinguished from two
types of assent: fear and no fear. The two types of assent are each linked
to their own type of testimony and faith—divine or human. Morton was an
innovative pedagogue himself. He offered diagrams of each chapter and
even offered poems to aid memorization and encourage classroom discus-
sion. The following summarized the habit of assent:
The Privative of all assent is Doubt—

Assents are some with & some without—
Opinion, Humane Faith give weak assent,
False Error Heresie Scism are evident—,
Assur’d in Truth is Faith Divine Assent,
Intelligence Sapience, Science Prudence Art.42
To discuss such matters under the heading of quality made good sense
only if the writer desired to emphasize the usefulness of categories in
support of revealed Christianity. Morton found in Keckermann and
Melanchthon a structure of support for his Puritanism. Heresy and schism
were all around, but the right-thinking logician could be “assur’d in Truth
is Faith Divine Assent.”
But as already noted, not many textbook authors followed Melanchthon’s
two specific innovations. None that I know of seriously considered abandon-
ing the traditional bifurcation of topics and only a few expanded their sections
on categories to include habits and testimony. Economy and simplification
were more the tendency of the humanists who desired to create art of rea-
soning texts for boys (Morton was one of the few specifically interested in
having girls read his text). Melanchthon’s innovations in topics and categories
complicated the tradition rather than streamlined it.
However, Melanchthon’s long term influence was more general than
his specific innovations in topics and categories. Melanchthon’s
Erotemata Dialectices was a watershed in the history of textbooks on the
art of being reasonable. A watershed collects from various streams, releas-
ing a new stream. He developed a new stream of textbooks oriented
specifically to support Christianity by emphasizing an Augustinian tradi-
tion of psychology and epistemology that supported the authority of
human and divine testimony. The textbook tradition he founded was
designed to do what Augustine wanted: teach a Christianized version of
classical reasoning that clearly supports the authority of sacred scriptures.
Neither Boethius nor Cassiodorus, nor Peter of Spain nor Petrus Ramus
had actually oriented the text to support Christian apologetics.
Melanchthon’s was the first of many that were designed primarily for the
purpose of supporting Christian reasonableness at the foundation of the
liberal arts curriculum.
TEXTBOOKS AND THE SUPPOSED CRISIS

OF AUTHORITY
In 1620, Francis Bacon declared: “For rightly is truth called the daughter of
time, not authority.”43 The declaration became a motto of modern progres-
sive thinking. Bacon published the declaration in the New Organon, a book
designed to overthrow Aristotle’s old Organon. In the New Organon Bacon
insisted that “everything” in the “schools, academies, and colleges” was
“adverse to the progress of science.”44 Bacon condemned “authority” for
“masking the empire of the master over the student, the orator over the
public,” and “enslavement to accepted common sense.”45
Bacon’s declaration has often been used as evidence for a “crisis of
authority.” For example, Jeffrey Stout in his The Flight from Authority writes
that “modern thought was born in a crisis of authority, took shape in a
flight from authority, and aspired from the start to autonomy from all tra-
ditional influence whatsoever.”46 Although tantalizing, the generalization is
much oversimplified—especially when used as a means to understand
changes in the methods of reasoning used in the fifteenth through eigh-
teenth centuries. Authority as a technical term for the external sources of
information (past or present) to be used in the art of reasoning was actu-
ally being revived and expanded in Renaissance and early modern Europe.
Viewed from the trenches of education and the actual practice of science,
Bacon’s declaration is simply rhetorical bombast. As already described,
medieval education in general was dismissive of arguments based on
authority while Renaissance humanists revived the Roman value of author-
ity. Steven Shapin in The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in
Seventeenth-Century England (1994) focuses on the extensive and impor-
tant use of testimony and authority in the development of modern science
in England.47 I propose here to digress slightly from the main narrative to
show that the English schools and colleges of Bacon’s era were not teach-
ing a flight from authority in their logic curricula. In fact, by working out
of classical logic traditions, they were attempting to encourage a responsi-
ble system for using authority so as to avoid the twin evils of gullibility and
radical skepticism. Bacon’s rash statement that “everything” taught in the
“schools, academies, and colleges” was “adverse to the progress of science”
ignores the level of sophistication and responsible reasoning clearly taught
in the textbooks of the era.48
Some forty years before Bacon matriculated at Trinity College,
Cambridge, Henry VIII in 1535 decreed that logic textbooks by Agricola
and Melanchthon were to be studied at Oxford.49 The Edward VI statutes
of 1549 specifically named Aristotle’s Topica along with Cicero and
Quintilian among the philosophical requirements.50 By the middle of the
sixteenth century, students at both Oxford and Cambridge were being

taught the methods of reasoning along the Ciceronian lines of Agricola
and the Augustinian lines of Melanchthon. One typical Augustinian logic
written at mid-century, Thomas Wilson’s The Rule of Reason (1551),
taught “the skyl howe to reason probablie.”51 He advised that a reason-
able person must diligently search the storehouse of topics, including
arguments from authority, in order to reason wisely. In the traditional
manner authority was not supposed to dominate the storehouse of top-
ics; rather, it simply offered itself as another place in which to the search
for arguments.
Wilson advised that “every cunning man must be believed in his own
art,” but the modernity of this statement should not be overemphasized.52
This tenet of trusting experts in the area of their expertise is today one of
the few rules of testimony still promulgated. John Case, whose Dialecticam
Aristotelis was long a popular textbook at Oxford, cited under the heading
of Authority examples of Hippocrates in medicine, Aristotle in physics,
and Euclid in geometry as experts deserving authority in their areas of
expertise.53
These three examples of experts who should be believed in the field
of their expertise at first seems to support Stout’s theory of “flight from
authority.” Within a couple of centuries Hippocrates, Aristotle, and even
Euclid’s authority would be overthrown. It is important to note, however,
that no logic made this rule so rigorous that an expert’s advice could not
be dismissed in the context of better evidence. Wilson offered the common
example that he rejected Aristotle’s statement that “the worlde neither had
beginnyng nor yet at any tyme shall have endying.” John Case also suc-
cinctly stated that Aristotle’s authority was not absolute.54 Authoritative
statements by such a one as Aristotle were just one of a number of topics
in the storehouse of knowledge.
Related to the authority of experts was a traditional rule of granting
authority to wise and experienced individuals with high character. Aristotle
wrote plainly: “we must attend then to the undemonstrated remarks and
beliefs of experienced and older people. . . . For these people see correctly
because experience has given them eyes.”55 However, as with the advice of
experts, the level of authority given to older and wiser people was never
absolute. Such people were simply recognized as good sources of knowl-
edge. Aristotle implied this when he hedged that we should listen to “wise
men, or at the least the better part.”56
The second class of authority broadens out to reasoning “from opin-
ions that are generally accepted” or at least “accepted by every one or by
the majority or by the philosophers—that is, by all, or by the majority, or
by the most notable and illustrious of them.”57 Every logician recognized
that common opinion was not a sure source of true information, but that it
deserved respect as a valued source. Wilson’s Rule of Reason jumbles

common opinion among other respected sources:
As sentences of noble men, the lawes in anie realme, quicke

saiyings, proverbes that either have bene used heretofore or
bee now used. Histories of wise philosophers, the judge-
mentes of the learned men, the commone opinon of the mul-
titude, olde custome, ancient fashions, or anie suche like.58
In every case Thomas Wilson noted that the reasoner had free choice “to
admit or to refute” the authority of such testimony.
Ralph Lever in his quirky The Arte of Reason rightly termed Witcraft (1573)
wrote that one should accept the testimony of an authority as “likely and prob-
abile” if what the authority says chances “for the most parte” to be right. If the
authority “chance but seldome, and misse as oft as they hitte: then the reasons
gathered of them are coniecturall, and prognosticallike, as of false as true.”59
In contrast to Bacon’s bombast, no logic text demanded obedience to
authority; however, a certain respect was appropriate. “We shoulde not for-
sake wise men’s wordes rashley,” Wilson wrote, “but with a modest answer
desire the adversarie not so much to sticke to his authoritie, as to prove the
same by some good reason.”60 Essentially, this is a distilled version of
Quintilian’s wise advice on the same subject. Quintilian wrote in connec-
tion to human testimony, “in all these cases we have need of a critical judg-
ment,” but that tradition “is commended to us by the possession of a certain
majesty, I might almost say sanctity.” Quinitilian closed with the humble
note: “even error brings no disgrace, if it result from treading in the foot-
steps of such distinguished guides.”61 This concept of the honest error, the
error that brings no disgrace, implies a double understanding of the role of
authority in right reason. First is the recognition of the weakness of the
information but the necessity to reason with the information one has.
Second is the assumption that such weak evidence is always dispensable if
better information comes along. Authority, therefore, was not oppressive in
the strategies of right reason taught in Baconian England.
Divine authority, of course, required more serious treatment than
human. Almost all Tudor logic textbooks discussed the special authority of
divine revelation. In Ciceronian fashion John Seton of Cambridge in his
Dialectica (1584) described divine testimony as “from an oracle, sooth-
sayer, fortune-teller” (Oracul, Vatum, praedictiones).62 In Augustinian fash-
ion, Thomas Wilson carefully delineated the authority of divine testimony
as opposed to human testimony.
Those authorities which come from God and are spoken by
the holy ghost are undoubtedly true, neither can they be
false: therefore we ought moste reverentlie to receive the
worde of God & agre to such textes as are written & spoken
even as though we heard God himselfe speake with lively

voice unto us.63
But Bacon’s attack on authority was not an attack on the authority of

sacred scriptures. Bacon and most of educated people of his era did not, for
the most part, have trouble giving the Bible divine authority. When Bacon
attacked reports of miracles in his Advancement of Learning he seems to have
only been against extra-biblical miracles reported with weak authorization.
Bacon’s dichotomy between authority and time as the parent of truth seems
not to have been designed as an attack on the authority of divine testimony;
rather it was an attack on ancient experts. Later in the seventeenth century,
the Royal Society’s motto “Nullius in verba” (On no one’s word) was, like
Bacon’s “daughter of time,” a jab at the use of human, not divine, testimony.
Modern scholars should recognize the error inherent in the bombast of
Bacon’s New Organon. Stephen Shapin’s recent study of the role of trust
and authority in the work of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society proves
Shapin’s view that “Trust is a creative as well as a conservative force in sci-
ence.”64 Thomas Wilson in The Rule of Reason caught the tension between
creativity and conservatism when he wrote “The best thynges are first to be
learned, for so doth Quintilian teache. Nusquam tuta fides. It is hard trusty-
ing any bodie for so saieth Virgile.”65 Nusquam tuta fides is an awkward
phrase, but it means essentially “there is no place safe in faith.”
College curricula offering the art of being reasonable in Tutor England
taught the precarious role of conscientious faith and trust in the advance of
knowledge. The art of reasoning was not a safe haven of adherence to
authorities; rather, the art required the risk of error inherent in all proba-
bilistic reasoning. Textbooks of both the Ciceronian and Augustinian types
filled the college curricula that Bacon attacked in his New Organon. There
was no fundamental basis for his attack on college logic classes. There was
no fundamental “crisis of authority.” Bacon’s attack against authority was
not meaningful as a pedagogical critique. Authority had long been in the
mix of probabilistic reasoning and continued as such.
Bacon’s rhetoric fits the tradition of other high-thinking individuals
frustrated by what seemed the backwardness of their contemporaries. We
have seen how Plotinus, John Scotus Eriugena, and Abelard called individ-
ual creative thinkers to a high lonesome path in philosophy. Such calls
probably arise mostly out of a personal sense of being held back by soci-
ety rather than truly being held back by society. Some natural scientists at
times also need to assert a high individualism in order to promulgate their
new ideas. Galileo did this in “The Assayer,” published in 1619. “I cannot
but be astonished,” he wrote, that his antagonist
should persist in trying to prove by means of witnesses
something that I may see for myself at any time by means of
experiment. Witnesses are examined in doubtful matters

which are past and transient, not in those which are actual and
present. A judge must seek by means of witnesses not whether
Giovanni was injured, since the judge can see that for himself.
But even in conclusions which can be know only by reason-
ing, I say that the testimony of many has little more value than
that of few, since the number of people who reason well in
complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who
reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree
that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as
several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But
reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single
Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses.66
Galileo’s statement, like Bacon’s, is born out of frustration. But it is the

frustration of unreasonable handling of testimony and authority not the rea-
sonable use of each. Re-read Galileo’s statement and he actually affirms the
traditional teaching on authority as taught in normal textbooks. First it affirms
the limited role of authority. Authority is used to learn and think about what
has not been personally experienced. Recourse to authority is useful when
dealing with the doubtful. This was taught by Aristotle. Galileo was attack-
ing an application of authority in an issue that was not in its province.
Second, Galileo attacks the notion that what a majority think is reasonable
has more authority than what the minority think is reasonable. Here again,
Galileo is on the side of Aristotle and tradition. The number of witnesses is
always an important consideration, but it is never the only consideration. The
Aristotelian tradition always asserted the authority of experts and the author-
ity of the best and most wise over simple numbers. So, yes, Galileo criticized
recourse to authority and called for an individualistic reasoning; however, he
used traditional teaching about authority to condemn its misuse.
Eventually in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the era that
relished Baconian rhetoric and latched onto Galileo’s predicament as evi-
dence of a war between progressive science and the backward church—we
see a true “crisis of authority.” The crisis then was that reasonable methods
of handling authority ceased to be taught in the curricula as an art of being
reasonable. Authority, along with testimony, ceased to be considered an
important aspect of educating reasonable citizens. In the early modern
period, however, a wise and moderate tradition of advocating the responsi-
ble use of authority in right reasoning remained steady, without crisis.
RAMISTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
In the sixteenth century, two textbooks established the two Renaissance tra-
ditions of handling testimony and authority. The first by Agricola revived
Cicero’s lawyerly interest in using ready-made information gained from

outside sources for social persuasion. The second tradition by Melanchthon
appreciated Agricola’s revival of Cicero but was more interested in the role
of testimony and authority in Christian apologetics. Melanchthon’s interest
encouraged him to draw extensively from the thought of St. Augustine, and
through Augustine back into the psychology and ethics of Aristotle. The
third principal figure in the sixteenth century was Petrus Ramus, who was
the most influential pedagogical simplifier and codifier of the era. His most
famous textbook was a reduction of Agricola’s dialectic that had many imi-
tators. Ramus inspired tutors to write their own reductions using the struc-
ture earlier lined-out in figure 3.1 For about a hundred years from the 1570s
to the 1670s there was a run of spin-off Ramist textbooks. Frankly, the
importance of this run has been overstated; however, there are two impor-
tant aspects of this history that deserve notice in a study of how textbooks
taught the handling of testimony. The first simply teaches how malleable
textbooks were in the seventeenth century. Anthony Grafton is right to
compare Renaissance textbooks with sausage grinders.67 The tenets of tes-
timony endured the grinder and Ramists texts eventually served both the
Ciceronian and Augustinian traditions. The second important aspect of the
history of Ramist texts is that a rule called reciprocation was codified for
handling the hard-to-believe.
By the early seventeenth century, the European-wide emphasis on
education, the creation of new educational institutions, and the trend
toward pedagogical reform had conspired to produce hundreds of text-
books on the art of being reasonable—most of them called a logic or
dialectic. Many textbooks never even reached print. Several of the most
influential were cobbled together out of lectures collected after the tutors’
deaths. The culture of reform encouraged many classroom tutors to cut and
paste together their own textbooks while the economics of having only a
few students precluded having those textbooks formally published. A great
many textbooks used for decades at various institutions exist only in stu-
dent notebooks, transcribed student by student. The term “scribal publica-
tion” that has been applied to the dissemination of manuscript poetry and
epistles can also be applied to maybe even a majority of textbooks used
before 1700.68 Many of the most famous textbooks of the Renaissance first
gained fame in the humble form of unpublished manuscripts being passed
around.
Another characteristic fully developed by the early seventeenth century
was the blurring of lines between traditions and the variety of content.
“Eclectic” is the nice term for describing the way no logic tradition could
remain pure as hundreds of teachers produced texts manifesting what
Charles B. Schmitt describes as “the strong influence of humanistic tech-
niques of organization, use of examples, and adaptation of materials to the
needs of students.”69 The subject of testimony was handled in all textbooks;

however, the clear differences between the Agricola’s Ciceronian and
Melanchthon’s Augustinian traditions became less clear.
DEFLATING AND INFLATING RAMIST TEXTBOOKS
Ramist logic had a pedagogical vivacity in the 1570s that the Puritans
appreciated. Howard Hotson and Joseph Freedman have shown that
Ramist logic reached the height of its popularity in Central Europe from the
1570s to the 1630s or ’40s.70 Freedman shows that Ramus’s logic was not
generally “deemed valuable” for higher education; however, its emphasis
on definitions and dichotomies was useful in “lower level instruction.”71
Ramus’s Dialecticae Libri Duo manifested a reductionist attitude with a
goal of meeting “the needs of the arts student at the first-degree level: it
teaches him the bare minimum to enable him to carry out the academic
exercises which were required of him.”72 It was also easier to memorize
than most of its competitors. Ramist logic was present in universities but
usually in the curriculum of the youngest boys. If it was taught to older stu-
dents, especially students who were beginning to receive training in divin-
ity, modifications had to be made. Walter Ong noted that Ramist textbooks
had a pattern of inflating and deflating: “the simplicity of Ramist logic
paradoxically generated commentaries to explain what Ramus meant—
commentaries that were in turn suppressed for being too distracting or dis-
couraging and alternately revived and revised and amalgamated again.”73
The beginnings of the Puritan movement in England were tied to the
period of Ramist popularity. The Puritans appreciated the pedagogical
reductionism but shared in the reductionist/expansionist tensions Ong
noted. In the process of producing new Ramist texts, the Puritans often
Christianized the section on testimony, sometimes even fully bringing it
into accord with the Augustinian tradition.
For an example of Puritan/Ramist minimalism, there is no better text
than Increase Mather’s Catechismus Logicus. This small catechism was writ-
ten in two mornings (April 26 & 27, 1675) for the use of Mather’s eleven-
year old son, Cotton. Subsequently it was transcribed in student notebooks
at Harvard during Mather’s presidency.74 The answers in this elementary
catechism are cut directly out of Ramus’s text except the Ciceronian pagan-
isms were taken out of the section on divine testimony:
101.
Q. What is an inartificial argument?
R. An inartificial argument is that which argues not by its
own nature, but by the force which it takes from some
artificial argument.
102.
Q. This argument has faith from where?
R. This argument has faith, arguing from custom, that is, if
prudence, virtue, and benevolence are present within it.
103.
Q. Inartificial argument is called what?
R. Inartificial argument is called by the one name, testimony,
and is either divine or human.
104.
Q. What is divine testimony?
R. Divine testimony is that which is from God, and is the
strongest form of argument, not having its quality in
respect to the testimony but the testifier who has the pru-
dence, virtue, and benevolence of God on high.
105.
Q. What are among the human testimonies?
R. Among the human testimonies are laws and famous
maxims [such as proverbs and the sayings of wise men].
106.
Q. To what else can they be referred?
R. They can also be referred to an obligation, pledge, and
confession either freely given or extracted properly by tor-
ture, or trial, or oaths.
107.
Q. What is reciprocation?
R. Reciprocation is when the thing argued artificially is
applied to the testifier, and thereby argues for the verac-
ity of the testimony.75
Mather’s catechetical deflation of Ramist logic should be set against the
more famous inflations of Ramist logic. John Milton titled the textbook he
wrote in the 1640s A Fuller Course &c. In The Art of Logic Conformed to the
Method of Peter Ramus. His was “fuller” because he did not like Ramus’s
brevity:
What is the use of achieving brevity if this means we must go
elsewhere for clarification? It is better to produce a longish
treatment of an art which achieves clarity all in the course of
one work than to explicate a too brief work through a sepa-
rate commentary which results in less clarity.76
Although inflating the text, when teaching about testimony Milton clarified
Ramus only in vaguely Christian terms. Milton quotes Ramus quoting
Cicero on oracles and responses to seers and soothsayers as divine testi-
mony, but then adds:
Whether these are true or fictitious, or from a true divine
command or a false one, the logician does not consider, but
only what force of arguing any given one has. And so also in
civil and human affairs divine testimony has just as much pro-
bative force as its author is a true or a false god.77
This additional comment is appropriate from the author of Paradise

Lost. Divine testimony is more complex than Mather’s simple statement.
Milton and classical-minded Ramists could always associate the
Ciceronian list of oracles, seers, and soothsayers with the complexities of
biblical spiritual communications. The Devil can communicate along with
a host of other spiritual entities. King Saul consults a witch/seer and gains
true information. Prophets and false prophets appear in the Bible each
reporting divine communications. Milton keeps divine testimony classi-
cally complex while he remains uninterested in broadening his discussion
to include Augustinian psychology or methods of discerning true divine
communication.
ALEXANDER RICHARDSON’S “LOGICIANS SCHOOL-MASTER”
If Mather’s catechism and Milton’s fuller course both show Puritan ways of
blurring the line between Ciceronian and Augustinian traditions, Alexander
Richardson’s The Logicians School-Master: or, A Comment upon Ramus
Logicke (London, 1629, enlarged 1657) shows a definite move toward the
Augustinian. His text was very popular among Puritans and stands as one
of the transitional logic textbooks paving the way for the very influential
Port Royal Logic of 1662.
The creation of this textbook from posthumus lecture notes shared
among former students was not abnormal. Richardson taught a few years
after 1587 at the Puritan stronghold of Queen’s College, Cambridge. Long
after his death, it was reported that he also tutored out of his house in
Barking, Essex, where “divers studious young men did resort from
Cambridge . . . to be directed in the study of Divinitie, and other arts.”78
The bookseller Samuel Thomson later wrote of Richardson that “divers
Graduates from several Colledges flock unto his lectures, and what he
freely discoursed unto them in several Sciences, they eagerly took down
from his mouth in writing.”79 Richardson died having never published any-
thing; however, the manuscript notes compiled by his students were still
circulating in 1657. The first published students’ version of Richardson’s
logic lectures was entered in The Register of the Company of Stationers in
1622 and was formally published by John Bellamie in 1629. In 1657, a
larger edition including notes from other courses was published by
Gartude Dawson on behalf of Samuel Thomson. Richardson’s textbooks
were widely used in educational settings controlled by Puritans from the
1630s through the 1670s.
Richardson’s comments on inartificial arguments began with the

Augustinian point that “now whereas one man cannot see all things,
though at the first all things were made for one man, the Lord hath in wis-
dom ordained that we should receive some things by reports from others.”80
Richardson then discussed the relationship of inartificial to artificial argu-
ments, making the point that the former is a necessary category but weaker
in force than the latter. At one point he offered that artificial arguments “do
argue more subtilly,” while the inartificial “more grosly.”81
Of testimonies, he notes, there are many kinds; however, of testifiers
there are two: divine and human. Richardson’s treatment of divine testimony
was more narrowly focused on the Bible than Melanchthon’s openness to
church traditions: “Surely if God say it we are to receive it” is his rule.82
Hence doe we plead so for the truth of Scriptures, We say

that we believe that which the Church delivereth, because
God sayes it to our hearts by his holy Spirit, this is divinum:
The Church of Rome sayes we are to believe it because the
Church saith it, but that is but humanum, ergo, not so
excellent. Again, they are not content to make the Church a
witnesse of the Scriptures, but most absurdly the cause of
them. But God, as he is the Author of them, so he is the wit-
nesser by his Spirit and it is one thing to consider God as
the cause of them, and another to consider him as the testis
thereof.83
Note that God has become divine testifier and divine testator that the
original testimony is true. God the father is author and God the Holy Spirit
is witness to the fact that God the father is author. Here Richardson
answered in Augustinian fashion the fundamental question of how a rea-
soner will distinguish divine from human testimony: God will guarantee the
divinity of the source by the Holy Spirit’s secondary act of confirmation.
Richardson was bringing into his lectures on being reasonable what was
commonly taught in divinity classes. Gerhard Reedy in The Bible and
Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England
devotes a chapter to testimony and external arguments for scriptural
authority. Reedy quotes one minister who accorded the Holy Spirit a “spe-
cial convincing” role in which the “Holy Spirit fills the gap” necessary to
confirm divine testimony’s divinity.84
Having thrown, in the manner of Augustine, the certainty of divine
testimony into the Christian realm of grace and trinitarian theology,
Richardson went back to explain why Ramus, himself, was so Ciceronian
and used “devillish examples” of divine testimony.85 Richardson believed
that Ramus wrote for all students, not simply those who have the Holy
Spirit’s extra confirmation about the divinity of scriptures. By this Richardson
distinguishes his Puritan audience from Ramus’s more general audience.

Here in the section on divine testimony, Richardson opens a window into
the major distinction between the Ciceronian and Augustinian traditions.
The difference is the intended audience. Those who wrote in a more pure
Ciceronian tradition—Agricola and Ramus—were writing more broadly and
less directly serving Christian reasonableness. Those who revived and merged
Augustinianism into logic—Melanchthon, Keckermann, and Richardson—
were writing more narrowly in order to directly serve the cause of
Christian—especially Protestant—reasonableness.
Richardson, like many Ramists, was also interested in laying out peda-
gogical rules for being reasonable. His first rule for inartificial arguments
was that “common” testimony “is to be preferred and received” before indi-
vidual testimony.86 “If the witnesses stand of more together,” and are rec-
ognized to be “prudent, virtuous, and benevolent” then “we are to receive
that which is witnessed by more men sooner than the other.”87 Note that
Richardson’s rule is not absolute—the “sooner” is telling. He also immedi-
ately headed off a Catholic argument:
Now then where the Church of Rome reasons with us, [is it]
not better to go to the Church, than to private man? Yes, but
they must be prudent, vertuous, and benevolent: again, they
must see the artificial arguments of that witness, for else if
one man shall bring testimony from the word of God, we are
rather to receive his: else we prefer an humane testimony
before a divine. Again, if it be an humane testimony, and a
human testimony that we compare together, let not a private
man stand up to stir with his meer testimony against a whole
assembly.
The reason of the Creed being generally received in all
Churches, is this, because it hath a divine testimony, ergo,
next to the testimony of the Church, we are to prefer the com-
mon testimony, and then the private, as it doth not jar with
the common one.88
Such is the richness that made Richardson’s textbook so popular in

Puritan education. Like Ramus he strove for pedagogical clarity and orga-
nizational rules for reasoning while at the same time he offered a running
commentary that directs the text to Puritan children as the target audience.
Implanted early in the arts curriculum of dissenting academies, at Puritan-
friendly colleges at Cambridge, and at Harvard along with hundreds of indi-
vidual relationships between tutors and students, the book taught the art of
being a reasonable Puritan. The book has none of Melanchthon’s specific
innovations in topics and categories but it embodies Melanchthon’s
Augustinian principle Christianizing classical dialectic especially in support
of biblical authority.
Also important is to remember that Richardson’s text was a collection

of student notes collated from many of his classroom glosses on Ramus’s
text. Richardson, himself, used Ramus’s textbook. The Logicians School-
Master is, therefore, also a window into the Renaissance classroom. It man-
ifests the tutor’s ability to take the minimal statements of a text and provide
a wide-ranging but narrowly focused comment while teaching. In most
classrooms, the textbook is only a starting point. What is actually taught can
be very different from what the text merely states.
THE RULE OF RECIPROCATION FOR HANDLING THE HARD TO BELIEVE
Many teachers liked the way Ramus systemized being reasonable. If topics
was a storage and retrieval system, Ramus cleaned house. His first and fore-
most rule was to dichotomize, split a subject into two constituent parts,
each of which would subsequently be split into its two parts, and so on.
For teachers of kids that mostly ranged between ten and fifteen years old
this black and white pedagogy was easily memorized and worked well
enough. It made being reasonable seem simple. Certainly it kept the store-
house of knowledge well organized. Ramus was also good for other sim-
ple rules that he codified out of the Ciceronian tradition. The most
significant rule for our study he called in Latin reciprocatio, which was
translated into English as reciprocation. The critics of Ramus always found
his simple rules to be easy targets. Being a reasonable adult was more com-
plex than Ramus’s child-oriented, easily memorized method.
The codification of rules is important to the history of testimony. Jerry
Bently, in an article on “the principle of the harder reading”—one of the
canonized rules of handling divergent ancient texts—points out that modern
scholars have shown very little interest in the historical development of
the rules that they take for granted.89 The importance of rules in the art of
being reasonable is most evident in the courtroom. Who gets the benefit
of the doubt is probably the most important decision in any courtroom and
in decision-making in general. Such rules are not usually promulgated by
some Great Thinker; rather, they grow over time and become associated
with “common sense.” Barbara Shapiro has shown that the rise of important
rules of modern courtroom procedure must be found in the court records
and the evolution of juries—not in the canon of philosophical writings on
justice, law, and human nature.90 Anthony Grafton in The Footnote leads
readers through a meandering history of the how historians sought to increase
the credibility of their writing by simple expectations of footnoting.91
For the Ramists that thrived in the sixteenth century, the rule of recipro-
cation was a useful, simple formulation of a traditional rule. It put in codi-
fied form the central principle of the classical and Renaissance tradition for
handling hard-to-believe testimony. The Port-Royal Logic and most of the best
manuals on the art of being reasonable have agreed with the rule in princi-
ple, but few have liked the idea of stating it so baldly as universally applica-
ble. It is important for us to look at because it can be considered the clearest
statement of a traditional tactic that David Hume tried to overturn in his essay
“Of Miracles” and Kant ultimately undermined in modern critical thinking.
The rule of reciprocation, at its most succinct, has already been quoted
from Increase Mather’s catechism:
Q. What is reciprocation?
R. Reciprocation is when the thing argued artificially is
applied to the testifier, and thereby argues for the veracity
of the testimony.92
John Milton explained it little more fully:
But just as it is not the testimony by its own force but the
authority of the one giving testimony that argues the thing
testified, so in turn the thing testified argues not the testimony
itself but the authority of the one giving the testimony.93
Richardson explained it even more fully:
This teacheth us not easily to receive every testimony hand

over head, but first to look whether the testis be well
acquainted with the thing witnessed, otherwise as it may be
an error in him to give testimony of a thing he knows not, so
it may be no lesse error in us that receive such a testimony.
This we see reproved in common matters among men, and it
teacheth us to receive the testimony of a man, no so much
because ipse dixit; but because we are sure he knowes the
thing throughly.94
Richardson out of tradition going back to Aristotle noted that an inar-

tificial argument has “little force to argue of itselfe: for all his strength is ali-
unde [elsewhere].”95 The strength of any testimony is not in the testimony
but in the authority of the testifier. This traditional principle becomes
increasingly important as the improbability of the testimony increases.
Hard-to-believe reports have no force in themselves, but only through the
credibility of the reporter(s).
The history behind the rule goes back to the Greeks and Romans. As
a general principle the force of a testimony, its authority, was a function of
the character, age, access, and expertise of the testifier, of the number of
testifiers, of the agreement between multiple independent testifiers, and
various auxiliary issues such as written or oral, ancient or modern, and
under oath or not. Hard-to-believe testimony was believable if the testi-
fier(s) satisfied a commonsensical combination of the above criteria.
The structure of this fit with Aristotle’s optimism that people tend to tell
the truth and truth tends to prevail. The method encouraged trust and open-
ness rather than skepticism. The Greeks and the Romans understood that the
art of being reasonable was not a value-free system. Quintilian taught that
lawyers should be more manipulative with testimony and testifiers than his-
torians. Historians have a social obligation to risk believing, even to the
extent of honest error. The Greeks and the Romans understood that the tech-
nical matters of reasoning could sway the conclusion just as modern
Americans in their courtrooms know that rules about the benefit of the doubt
and the presumption of innocence sway the ultimate outcome of a trial.
Ramus, in codifying the rule of reciprocation, did not break with tradi-
tion. The principle was well known. The goal of keeping dialectic open
and trusting rather than closed and skeptical was understood to be good
for society. Of course no textbook writer desired to teach students to be
gullible; however, neither did any textbook writer want to teach students
to be so skeptical that it undermined the fabric of society. People in gen-
eral should be trusting and open. Ramus’s rule clearly anchored classroom
dialectic to trusting reputable authorities who reported amazing events
from the past or amazing facts from distant lands.
That the principle is of profound procedural importance can be shown
by the effect of David Hume’s indirect attack on the rule in Of Miracles.
Hume ignored the tradition that the force of a testimony is in the testifier
and instead wrote as if a testimony has a force for believability of its own
that can be measured against the experience of a listener. Immanuel Kant
would pick up on this and teach that testimony is to be handled in the
same way as personal experience. The most important question in handling
testimony would cease to be “Who is the testifier and what is that person’s
authority?” and become instead “Does the testimony fit my experience?”
This process will be more fully described in the last chapter.
Hume in the wild subtleness of his essay style did not take the time to
explain that he was rebelling against the whole of the dialectic tradition of
handling testimony. Instead he implied that his way of handling testimony
was the way of the Greeks and Romans:
I should not believe such a story were it told to me by Cato, was
a proverbial saying in Rome, even during the lifetime of that
philosophical patriot. The incredibility of the fact, it was
allowed, might invalidate so great an authority.96
Hume was referring to a statement Plutarch reported in his life of Cato the
Younger, that there was
a sort of proverb with many people, if any very unlikely and
incredible thing were asserted, to say they would not believe
it, though Cato himself should affirm it.97
In this situation Plutarch reports the saying as a means of showing how

much the people trusted Cato the Younger. It is not presented as a princi-
ple of Roman reasoning. Plutarch backhandedly affirms the tradition of
dialectic while exposing the extent of Cato’s reputation for honesty.
Certainly Hume’s argument parallels Cicero’s in On Divinity; however, as
discussed in the first chapter, On Divinity did not represent even Cicero’s
normal teaching.
Hume undermined what Ramus called the rule of reciprocation by a
rather sneaky move. Many of the defenders of miracle accounts who
attacked Hume brought this to his attention. I do not want to get too far
off track into the literature of the miracle debates. What is important in this
quick note on Hume is for us to recognize what is at stake with the rule of
reciprocation. A fundamental shift in the art of reasonableness happens
when the tradition of focusing on the testifier is changed to focusing on the
testimony. This fundamental shift has huge consequences for hard-to-
believe testimony and especially the reasonableness of the foundational
historical facts of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
Alexander Richardson seems to have understood fully that much in the
intellectual life of the seventeenth century depended upon maintaining
the rule of reciprocation. Abandoning the rule and allowing ways to split
testifier and testimony could be potentially disastrous for the credibility of
accounts of alleged spiritual events, including Jesus’ resurrection. Richardson
also wrote textbooks on science and seems to have understood that the
advance of science also depended upon reciprocation. The rise of modern
science depended much upon people abandoning their existing assump-
tions and believing testimony of what seemed inherently dubious. Steven
Shapin in A Social History of Truth shows that the astonishing testimonies
of early modern science were often made credible by appealing to the
authority of the testifier. Robert Boyle, virtuous aristocrat and conscientious
Christian, was able to help create credibility for his science by relying on
his own authority.98 Much of the history of alchemy, which is increasingly
being studied as a key factor in the rise of modern science, is based in the
relationship between testimony and authority as astonishing information
passed through near-secret networks of the illuminati.
Alexander Richardson noted that the rule of reciprocity was “obscure,”
that it needed to be handled with care, that authority was a cloudy issue.
He pointed out that a man may bear false witness when he speaks the
truth, and likewise the simple man may sometimes speak the truth as well
as the prudent man.99 However, he insisted that the testimony should not
be separated from the testifier.100 To separate the two left the testimony
with no power to persuade.
As a specific rule, reciprocation was a short-lived innovation tied to
Ramism. When Ramist textbooks lost their share of the market, the rule
disappeared from the memories of students. The principle it defined con-

tinued as it was restated in such influential textbooks as The Port-Royal
Logic and Isaac Watts’s Logick: Or the Right Use of Reason. The principle
was considered crucial to the art of being reasonable with ready-made
hard-to-believe information. Only with the dominance of Kant’s influence
would the principal almost disappear. In the last half of the twentieth cen-
tury, the only vestige left of the principle was advice to trust the authority
of an expert witness in the courtroom.
JEAN BODIN ON PRIVATE JUDGMENT
From the perspective of history and law, Julian H. Franklin points out that
Jean Bodin was the first to develop a “full-scale methodology” for handling
testimony.101 I would not call it “full-scale,” although Bodin did go beyond
his contemporaries in analyzing the practical problems of creating credibil-
ity out of historical testimony. Bodin emphasized the role of the historian’s
will and biases and the wise reader’s responsibility to take such matters
into account. He did this in a little handbook, Method for the Easy
Comprehension of History—not a textbook on the whole art of being rea-
sonable but a useful manual that fits between the Roman simplicity of
Lucian’s “How to Write History” and the seventeenth-century sophistication
of Jean LeClerc’s Parrhasiana.102 Important in the history of testimony are
the practical examples Bodin offered dealing with private judgment when
confronted by contradictory testimony.
Jean Bodin (1520–1596) studied and taught law at the University of
Toulouse but spent most of his life in various bureaucratic roles in gov-
ernment. What fame he has in history is tied to his political defense of
absolute state supremacy. He was a diligent information-gatherer and
amazingly well read. His books—on government, history, and witchcraft
cases—are full of evidence and examples. Like the dialecticians of his era,
he was highly interested in “method,” as the title of his 1566 work on his-
torical testimony shows: Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem.103
For a man so widely read in histories, the obvious problem was that so
many famous authors disagreed with each other and were often obviously
passing on rumors. Bodin heaped disdain on anyone who purposely dis-
torted history and understood that, for a moral purpose, some historians
might employ an honorable lie; however, he believed most historians, most
of the time, were trying to the best of their abilities to tell the truth. The trou-
ble lay in the historians’ natural abilities, training, experiences, and “enthusi-
asm and labor in collecting the materials of history.”104 Such optimism is
solidly in the tradition of Aristotle. But gullibility is never a virtue. There is a
reasonable middle ground. “Aristotle,” Bodin writes, “sagely said, that in
reading history it is necessary not to believe too much or to disbelieve

flatly.”105
Discussing ancient reports on the effects of climates on peoples, Bodin
notes a contradiction between the majority of reports, including those by
Hippocrates and Aristotle. Hippocrates, Bodin decides, “represents the
highest authority.”106 But this does not mean he simply dismissed all the
other testimonies. Rather, he spends much time showing that much of what
seems contradictory can be harmonized—that “each one spoke truly.”107
Bodin was sensitive to the complexities of historical truth. The historian
does not simply pick and choose what evidence fits his fancy; rather, the
goal is to recognize the higher authority while still attempting to harmonize
apparently contradictory testimonies. In another instance we can see his
concern for “just standards” of evaluation:
At this point it seems necessary to speak about the correct

evaluation of histories. There would be no reason to impugn
history, or to withhold agreement, if those who ought to have
had the highest standards had had regard for truth and trust-
worthiness. Since, however, the disagreement among histori-
ans is such that some not only disagree with others but even
contradict themselves, either from zeal or anger or error, we
must make some generalizations as to the nature of all peo-
ples or at least of the better known, so that we can test the
truth of histories by just standards and make correct decisions
about individual instances.108
Although working firmly within the dialectical tradition, Bodin on the

whole seems to emphasize private judgment more than was traditional. We
have seen how Carneades introduced assent into dialectic and discussed
how emphasis on assent increased the power of the receiver of testimony
at the expense of the authority testifying. On the other hand, Quintilian had
recommended veneration of the ancient historians and insisted that there is
no dishonor in trusting them. The art of being reasonable with testimony
had long required interplay between the self-reliant reasoner and the com-
munity of reasonable thinkers. However, Bodin was a proponent of indi-
vidual choice. Unlike Cassiodorus who recommended to his readers the
canon of works by widely accepted authors, Bodin recommended that the
“cautious reader of history . . . will strike a mean between the vices vanity
and stupidity and will make individual choice of the best authors.”109 Bodin
often stated the necessity of relying on “individual choice.”
Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century certainly overstated what
he called “The Development of the Individual” in Renaissance Italy.
However, in France Bodin’s manual for historians can serve as an indicator
of the new level of subjectivity and objectivity that Burckhardt found.110
Historical testimony became more of an object to study than to venerate.

The historian became more responsible for personal judgment.
JUAN LUIS VIVES

In Ferdinand Buisson’s ranking of the most popular sixteenth-century
educational works, Juan Luis Vives’s is fourth after those of Ramus,
Melanchthon, and Erasmus.111 Vives (1492–1540) was a much-traveled Spanish
humanist. Thomas More asked Erasmus rhetorically: “Who teaches better,
and more efficiently, or more charmingly than Vives?112 The late eighteenth-
century Scottish logician, Dugald Stewart, said of Vives: “In point of good
sense and acuteness . . . he yields to none of his contemporaries. . . . Of all
the writers of the sixteenth century Luis Vives seems to have had the liveliest
and most assured foresight of the new career which the human mind was
about to enter.”113
Vives, like most Renaissance humanists, rowed into the future by look-
ing backward. In Against the Pseudo-Logicians (1520), a raucous attack on
high medieval logic textbooks, Vives heaped disdain on Peter of Spain for
head-in-the-clouds logic chopping that undermined the practical reasoning
of Cicero:
I beseech all of you who go under this name [logicians] to

answer me this: if Cicero were to say that the statement,
“Socrates homo non est,” means categorically “Socrates is not
a man,” while Peter of Spain, or some other of these sophists
possibly more ignorant than he should say that it means
“there is some other man who Socrates is not,” whom should
we believe? Is there anyone so shameless and brazenly impu-
dent that he would dare to maintain that in questions involv-
ing the nature of the Latin tongue we should have more faith
in Peter of Spain than in the prince of Roman eloquence?114
Vives was similar to Agricola in that he venerated Cicero, Quintilian,

and Roman dialectic. He was similar to Melanchthon in the way he believed
education should serve Christian reasonableness. “We cannot help feeling
a certain pride in our age,” he wrote.115 That pride was rooted in belief that
they were restoring and reinvigorating the continuity of history. Peter of
Spain and his fellow high medieval logicians were guilty of breaking the
continuity. “The logician,” he declared, “does not create new rules or
expound the true essence of language, but rather teaches rules that have
been observed in inveterate and familiar usage.”116 Traditional, practical
dialectic, he believed, would serve Christian Europe better than the techni-
cal wranglings of formal logic.
Like Agricola he believed topics needed to be revived. “For study in

forming judgment,” teachers should
expound at length the Topica of Cicero, and will add the

Dialectica of Rudolph Agricola, most eloquentily and ingen-
iously expounded in three sections. Let the pupil read several
times for himself Cicero and Boethius, for to M. Tullius we
owe almost the whole of this art, which was discovered
indeed by Aristotle, though what he wrote was only
expounded in a slight manner, not nearly enough for those
who wish to know the subject thoroughly. Let the pupil also
read privately the fifth book of Quintilian and two books de
Inventione of Cicero, which work he says he completed
when a youth.117
And like Melanchthon he believed that proper understanding of topics,

especially the topic of divine testimony, would strengthen true Christianity.
When recommending contemporary logicians, Vives cited three, one being
Melanchthon.118 He also believed a pupil “should know thoroughly” the
dialectic works of Aristotle, but also recommended the benefit of reading
quietly to oneself Augustine and Boethius.119 “The authority of the Holy
Scriptures,” Vives wrote in De Tradendis Disciplinis (1532), “is to be
impressed with great awe on the heart of pupils, so that when they hear
anything out of them, they may think that they hear the almighty God
Himself.”120 For Vives, Christian authorities trumped classical: “If Plato,
Aristotle, Xenophon, Cicero, and other philosophers cite evidence from
Homer and other poets to confirm their own opinions, how much more
fitting is it for us to seek in the oracles of God, not only evidence, but
supreme authority.”121 And as for the Augustinian emphasis on having the will
directed toward God, given by divine grace, when reading pagan authors
Let the scholar begin the reading of the heathen, as though

entering poisonous fields, armed with an antidote, with the
consciousness that men are united to God by means of the
reverence which has been given them by Him; that what men
think out for themselves is full of errors; that whatever is
opposed to piety, has sprung from man’s emptiness and the
deceits of his most crafty enemy, the devil.122
To sum up: There were two traditions for logic textbooks in the Renaissance,
Ciceronian and Augustinian. Both were revivals of classical dialectic while
the Augustinian was especially directed toward supporting Christianity.
Both traditions evolved, and in the seventeenth century came the Ramists
who could inflate and deflate their system while tweaking it toward Cicero
or Augustine.
Vives along with almost all Renaissance pedagogues recommended

keeping one or more commonplace books or notebooks organized along
the lines of topics to help one’s memory. For the most part, these com-
monplace books stored human testimony. Vives, for example, offers this
advice on how students should organize their blank books:
In a separate division, let him make history notes; in another

anecdotes; in another, clever expressions and weighty judg-
ments; in another witty and acute sayings; in another,
proverbs; in other divisions, names of well-known men of
high birth, famous towns, animals, plants and strange stones.
In another part, explanations of difficult passages in the
author. In another, doubtful passages, which are still
unsolved. These beginnings seem simple and bare, but later
he will clothe and ornament them.123
Ann Moss notes in her Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring

of Renaissance Thought that “the commonplace-book is a valuable clue to
distinctive features of Early Modern culture in general and the working prac-
tice of individual writers in particular.”124 The proliferation of commonplace
books is a window into the Renaissance mind in general, and particularly it
is a window into the perceived importance of organizing testimony and
authority. Commonplace books stand beside logic textbooks in showing how
the proper handling of inartificial arguments flourished in the Renaissance.
Vives shows us how education in the Renaissance could embrace both the
Ciceronian and Augustinian traditions of testimony and authority as part of
a revived interest in practical reasonableness rather than formal reasoning.
NOTES
1. Cicero, Discussion at Tusculum in Cicero on the Good Life, trans. & ed.
Michael Grant (New York: Penguin, 1971), 90.
2. Ramus is quoted and translated by Lisa Jardine in “Distinctive Discipline:
Rudolph Agricola’s Influence on Methodical Thinking in the Humanities,”
Rudolphus Agricola Phrisius 1444 –1485: Proceedings of the International
Conference at the University of Groningen, 23–30 October 1985, eds. F. Akkerman
and A. J. Vanderjagt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 39.
3. Lisa Jardine, “Inventing Rudolph Agricola: Recovery and Transmission of
the De inventione dialectica,” Erasmus: Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University,
1993), 83. See also Gerda C. Huisman, Rudolph Agricola: A Bibliography of Printed
Works and Translations (Nieuwkoop: DeGraaf, 1985).
4. Rudolphus Agricola, De Inventione Dialectia Libri Tres (Argentinae: 1521),
I.xiv. Note that not all editions of the text have the same organization. This 1521
edition that is easily available on microfilm is not the same as the 1539 edition pub-
lished in facsimile by B. DeGraaf in 1967.
5. Agricola, De Inventione Dialectica, I.xiv, I.xxiv. Use of the term pronun-
ciata in later logic textbooks is a good indication of direct influence form Agricola.
Almost a century later at Cambridge University, John Seton’s Dialectica (London:
1584) recommended pronunciata.
6. For a complete bibliography of Ramist editions, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus
and Talon Inventory (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1958). Ong’s Ramus,
Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1958) is an early and very influential study of Ramist
logic; however, it tends to overemphsize the distinctiveness of Ramus’s thought.
7. Lisa Jardine, “Humanistic Logic,” The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1988), 173–98.
See also Roger Sharratt, “Recent Work on Peter Ramus (1970–1986),” Rhetorica 5:7–58
for a discussion of the literature on the whole of Ramus’s influence.
8. Petrus Ramus, Scholarum Dialecticarum seu Animadversionum in
Organum Aristotelis, libri xx (Francofurti: 1544), I.3–31, in Scholae in Tres Primas
Liberales Artes (Francofurti, 1581, reprint Frankfurt: Ninerva G.M.B.H., 1965).
9. Petrus Ramus, Dialecticae Libri Duo (1555 in French, 1556 in Latin, and
final revision in 1572), I.xxxii.
10. Boethius, In Ciceronis Topica, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell
University, 1988), 18.68 (p. 171).
11. Ramus, Dialecticae Libri Duo, I.xxxiii.
12. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York:
Penguin, 1991), 1375a.25–1375b.25.
13. Ibid., 1355a.15–20, 35–40.
14. Philipp Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. Sachiko
Kusukawa, trans. Christine F. Salazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1999), 105.
See also Charles B. Schmitt, “The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook,” in The
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt (Cambridge:
Cambridge University, 1988), 792–804.
15. Melanchthon, Orations, 228.
16. Ibid., 231.
17. Translated in John R. Schneider, Philipp Melanchthon’s Rhetorical Construal
of Biblical Authority: Oratio Sacra (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 16.
18. Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970),
140th page.
19. Melancthon’s willingness to see his own era as a reformation, specially
designed into Church history, is evident in his oration on “Luther and the Ages of
the Church.” See Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from
Herodotus to Herder (New Haven: Yale University, 1998), 170.
20. This tradition is more fully discussed in the introduction to Aristotelian and
Cartesian Logic at Harvard: Morton’s “Logick System” and Bratle’s “Compendium of
Logick,” ed. Rick Kennedy (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1995).
21. Philipp Melanchthon, Erotemata Dialectices, in Corpus Reformatiorum, ed.
Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1963, original 1846),
vol. 13, cols. 659–63.
22. Ibid., col. 709.

23. Ibid., col. 646.
24. Ibid., cols. 650–51.
25. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Gloucester, MA:
Peter Smith, 1971), III.2.
26. Melanchthon, Erotemata Dialecticies, cols. 535–41.
27. Aristotle, Categoriae, 8b.25–30, 10b.1–5, trans. E. M. Edghill, vol. I in The
Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928).
28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1985), 1139b.15.
29. Melanchthon, Erotemata Dialectices, col. 538.
31. Ibid.
32. Melanchthon, Erotemata Dialectices, col. 538.
33. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Basic Writings, ed. Anton C. Pegis
(New York: Random House, 1945), Q. 51, art. 4 in the First Part of the Second Part.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. & trans. Philotheus
Boehner (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1957), 3.
37. Quoted in Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted: Encyclopedism,
Millenarianism, and the Second Reformation in Germany (Ph.D. diss: Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, 1991), 86. For the best study of the relationship of Ramus
and Melanchthon among the second generation educational reformers, see Howard
Hotson’s Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588 –1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation,
and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000).
38. See Bartholomäus Keckermann, Gymnasium Logicum (London: 1606),
82–85.
39. The influence of this book is discussed in E. J. Ashworth’s edition of
Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendium (Bologna: CLUEB, 1985), and Wilbur
Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton
University, 1971), 14–28.
40. Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendium, 6th ed. (Oxford, 1664),
324–27.
41. Morton is more fully discussed and his textbook reprinted in Kennedy,
Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard.
42. Ibid., 169.
43. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis:
Macmillan/Library of Liberal Arts, 1960), I.lxxxiv.
44. Ibid., I.xc.
45. Michel Malherbe, “Bacon’s Critiques of Logic,” in Francis Bacon’s Legacy
of Texts, ed. William Sessions (New York: AMS, 1990), 77.
46. Jeffrey Stout, The Flight From Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest
for Autonomy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1981), 2–3.
47. Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in
Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984).
48. Bacon, The New Organon, I.xc.
49. Lisa Jardine, “Humanism and the Teaching of Logic,” The Cambridge
History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and
Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982), 801.
50. Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England
(Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University, 1983), 41.
51. Thomas Wilson, Rule of Reason, 129th page.
52. Ibid., the section on argument, bk. I, np.
53. John Case, Dialecticam Aristotelis (Frankfort: 1593), 274.
54. Ibid., 273.
55. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1143b.5–15.
56. Wilson, The Rule of Reason, I, np.
57. Aristotle, Topica, trans. W.A. Pickard-Cambridge in The Works of Aristotle,
ed. W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 100a.30–100b.25.
58. Wilson, The Rule of Reason, bk. I, np.
59. Ralph Lever, The Arte of Reason rightly termed Witcraft (London: 1573),
189–92.
60. Wilson, The Rule of Reason, bk. I, np.
61. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1921), I.vi.1–3
62. Seton, Dialectica, bk. 4.
63. Wilson, Rule of Reason, 167th page.
64. Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 25.
65. Wilson, Rule of Reason, bk. 1, np.
66. Quoted in Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science,
Faith, and Love (New York: Walker and Co., 1999), 92–93.
67. Anthony Grafton, “Teacher, Text, and Pupil in the Renaissance Class-
Room: A Case Study from a Parisian College, History of Universities 1 (1981): 45.
68. See Harold Love, Scribal publication in Seventeenth-Century England
(New York : Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Thomas Knoles, Rick Kennedy,
and Lucia Zaucha Knoles, Student Notebooks at Colonial Harvard: Manuscripts and
Educational Practice, 1650 –1740 (Worchester: American Antiquarian Society,
2003).
69. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England, 39. Schmitt
warns readers not to “overestimate” differences in logic textbooks and to recognize
“threads of continuity” (38). Testimony is one of the threads of continuity.
70. Howard Hotson, “Philosophical Pedagogy in Reformed Central Europe
Between Ramus and Comenius: A Survey of the Continental Background of the
‘Three Foreigners’,” Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in
Intellectual Communication, eds. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, Timothy Raylor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29–50; and Joseph Freedman,
“The Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c.1570–c.1630,”
Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993): 98–152.
71. Freedman, “Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus,” 140.
72. Lisa Jardine, “The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth-Century
Cambridge,” Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 59.
73. Walter Ong, “Introduction,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, eds.
Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger (New Haven: Yale University, 1982), 8: 168.
74. See Rick Kennedy and Thomas Knoles, “Increase Mather’s Catechismus
Logicus: An Analysis of the Role of A Ramist Catechism,” and “Increase Mather’s
‘Catechismus Logicus,’ ” trans. and ed. Rick Kennedy and Thomas Knoles, Proceedings
of the American Antiquarian Society 109 (1999): 145–223.
75. Kennedy and Knoles, “Increase Mather’s ‘Catechismus Logicus,’ ” 199–201.
76. John Milton, A Fuller Course &c. In The Art of Logic Conformed to the
Method of Peter Ramus, 1672, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8: 210.
77. Milton, A Fuller Course, 319.
78. George Walker, A True Relation (London: 1642), 6.
79. Samuel Thomson, “The Book-Seller to the Reader,” in Alexander Richardson,
Logicians School-Master: or, A Comment Upon Ramus Logick (London: 1657), np.
80. Richardson, Logicians School-Master, 232.
81. Ibid., 235.
82. Ibid., 237.
83. Ibid., 237–38.
84. Gerhard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late
Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985),
57–58.
85. Alexander Richardson, Logicians School-Master, 238.
86. Ibid., 240.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Jerry Bently, “Erasmus, Jean Le Clerc, and the Principle of the Harder
Reading,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 (1978): 309–21.
90. Barbara Shapiro “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” and “Probable Cause”:
Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University
of California, 1991).
91. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1997).
92. Kennedy and Knoles, “Increase Mather’s ‘Catechismus Logicus,’ ” 201.
93. Milton, A Fuller Course of Logic, 322.
95. Ibid., 235.
96. David Hume, Enquires Concering Human Understanding and Concerning
the Principles of Morals, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), sect. X,
part I (p. 113).
97. Plutarch, “Cato the Younger,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans, trans. John Dryden (rev. trans. Arthur Hugh Clough), vol. 14 in Great
Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1952), 627.
98. Shapin, A Social History of Truth.
100. Ibid., 236–37.
101. Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the
Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University, 1963), 137.
Franklin offers two chapters on the less sophisticated work of Melchior Cano and
François Baudouin, who both precede Bodin.
102. Lucian, “How to Write History,” trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge: Harvard

University, 1959), 3–73), and Jean Le Clerc, Parrhasiana: Thoughts upon . . . Criticism,
History, Morality, and Politics, trans. anonymous (London: 1700), 97–191.
103. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice
Reynolds (New York: Octagon Books, 1966).
104. Ibid., 43.
105. Ibid., 42.
106. Ibid., 86.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid., 85.
109. Ibid., 42.
110. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of Renaissance Italy, trans. S. G. C.
Middlemore (New York: Penguin, 1990), 98. Note that Burckhart shows that the
Italians did venerate their ruins and antiquities while at the same time encouraging
archeology, research libraries, and textual scholarship (see his chapter on “The
Revival of Antiquity,” 120–84).
111. Ferdinand Buisson, Répertoire des Ouvrages Pédagogiquies du XVI siècle
(Paris: 1886), cited in Carlos G. Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1970), 1–2.
112. Quoted in Noreña, Juan Luis Vives, 78.
113. Ibid., 283.
114. Juan Luis Vives, In Pseudodialecticos, ed. and intro. Charles Fantazzi
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 60–62.
115. Ibid., 26.
116. Ibid., 68.
117. Juan Luis Vives, On Education: A Translation of the “De Tradendis
Disciplinis,” intro. Foster Watson (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971), 178.
118. Ibid., 164.
119. Ibid., 165.
120. Ibid., 89.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid., 125.
123. Ibid., 108.
124. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance
Thought, vii.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LONG INFLUENCE OF

THE PORT-ROYAL LOGIC
The Port-Royal Logic was first published in French in 1662 and was initially
titled La Logique ou l’art de penser. For its first half century of European use,
its popular Latin translation was called Ars Cogitandi. Over two centuries
of common use, it was sometimes referred to as the Jansenist Logic but
most often simply called The Port-Royal Logic. Like Quintilian’s Institutio,
The Port-Royal Logic is pleasantly readable, wisdom-filled, and organized
for easy use by young students and old teachers. Although rooted in the
mathematics-inspired reasoning methods of René Descartes, the textbook
also offered a longer, stronger, and deeper recommendation for testimony
in the art of being reasonable than any previous textbook. Most importantly
it dismissed the Aristotelian tradition of topics, modeled a new four-part
structure in which the first three parts described reasoning in geometrical
fashion and the fourth advised on the broader matters of reasonableness.
Testimony, probability, and degrees of assent were important aspects of
this larger reasonableness. As the Ars Cogitandi—the Art of Thinking—it
became the most influential general education textbook of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Key to The Port-Royal Logic’s discussion of testimony was, first, a tra-
ditional Aristotelian optimism about the persuasiveness of truth even
among humans prone to error and deception. Second, it overflows with an
Augustinian emphasis on the rightly oriented will and simple good sense.
Laziness and lack of concern for the truth were presented as the enemies
of reasonableness. Vigor, conscientiousness, and trust along with a measure
of good sense were the start-up qualifications for thinking well and decid-
ing wisely. “Right reason,” The Port-Royal Logic states, “accords all things
their appropriate status. It makes us doubt those that are doubtful, reject
those that are false, and recognize in good faith those that are evident.”1
Third, in Renaissance humanist fashion, The Port-Royal Logic advocates the
naturalness of reasoning well. Technical terms, memorization of syllogistic

forms, and frustrating added baggage were logomachies to be jettisoned.
Finally, the book advocated mathematicizing good judgment. Dialectical
probability was given more rigor through mathematics, and The Port-Royal
Logic spurred long-influential attempts to treat testimony like a math prob-
lem. Disarmingly written, the book synthesized classical traditions, Cartesian
reasoning, and Augustinian reasonableness in a way that encouraged and
empowered readers. This should not be surprising since it was written pri-
marily by one of the seventeenth century’s most comprehensively interest-
ing thinkers, Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694).
AUGUSTINIAN-CARTESIAN LOGIC
The names Port Royal, Jansenism, and Arnauld are complexly entwined
with the history of the textbook. Port Royal is the name of two convents,
one in the Valley of the Chevreuse near Versailles and the other in Paris.
The two convents were the beginning of a new Augustinian religious
order—The Order of the Holy Sacrament—founded in 1632 by Mère
Angélique ( Jacqueline Arnauld 1591–1661). Mère Angélique was the focal
point of an extended family of Arnaulds who tended to be or to marry
lawyers and high civil servants. A multitude of Arnaulds became nuns in the
new order, or male solitaires who lived piously associated with the order,
or patrons of the order, looking after its financial and political interests at
court.2 Antoine Arnauld was the youngest brother of Mère Angélique. He
became the intellectual spokesman for the order’s Augustinian theology
and values. His position on the faculty of the Sorbonne and his correspon-
dence with the proponents of Cartesianism put him at the forefront of a
growing philosophical school, and his family connections and his close
association with Blaise Pascal’s writings made him one of the most public
figures of the Jansenist movement, which was threateningly unafraid of
both the Jesuit order and the crown. Antoine Arnauld believed himself to
be the best kind of churchman and patriot, upholding traditional
Augustinian ways of thinking, but found himself hated by many in both the
church and court as a Jansenist.
Jansenism is the term first used to describe the Augustinian sacramen-
tal theology of the Mère Angélique’s new order. A book, Augustinus
(1640), by the bishop Cornelius Jansenius, had much influence over Mère
Angélique’s spiritual advisor. Beginning as a spiritual discipline that
accorded great honor to the sacraments, the term, “Jansenism” eventually
came to be indiscriminately attached to a volatile political/religious move-
ment. Mère Angélique, her order, and her convents were considered
by the crown to be the fount of the trouble, and were increasingly
Long Influence of The Port-Royal Logic 129
persecuted. Antoine Arnauld was forced out of his professorship at the

Sorbonne and eventually died in exile in the Spanish Netherlands. The
ensuing fame of Jansenism, the Port-Royal convents, and the Arnaulds
helped spur widespread interest in the innovative textbook that was asso-
ciated with them.
The Port-Royal Logic was written mostly by Antoine Arnauld, but we
must remember that authorship of textbooks is usually complex. A short
version of the logic textbook was probably written initially in 1656 or
1657, soon after Arnauld lost his position at the Sorbonne and took up res-
idence as a solitaire at Port-Royal-des-Champs, a former Cistercian abbey
in the valley of the Chevreuse. The solitaires were males who loosely
attached themselves to the abbey. They could come and go as they
pleased and do as they wanted. The hope was that they would be spiri-
tually uplifted and find good service to perform. Since a good education
was a foundation to piety, some of the solitaires devoted themselves to
tutoring children. Although “Little Schools” is an overblown title for the
institutionally chaotic program of Port-Royal education, the solitaires
tended to be open to and shared new ideas about the form and content
of the traditional curriculum.
Temporarily living as a solitaire, Antoine Arnauld was inspired by the
free spirit of educational reform. He wrote that he was at dinner marveling
at the “sound and discerning mind” of a boy (who would someday become
the next Duke of Chevreuse) when the idea of writing a better logic text-
book for such a young man was broached. In four or five days Arnauld,
probably in consultation with some of the other solitaires and his secretary,
Pierre Nicole, wrote the first version of the logic.3 The solitaires then began
having students transcribe copies as part of their studies. This initial use of
the textbook went underground when the schools were officially closed in
1659 as part of a royal repression of Jansenism. Arnauld and probably
Pierre Nicole put together the 1662 published version of the logic after
hearing that handwritten copies were spreading widely. Arnauld was rec-
ognized in his own time as one of the great thinkers of Europe, a theolo-
gian and philosopher who could bring out the Augustinian orthodoxy in
the new philosophy of Descartes; therefore, it is not surprising that the
logic textbook associated with him was much sought after.
Arnauld’s Cartesian and Augustinian commitments first became public
when, as a young theologian, he was asked to write what became the
“Fourth Set of Objections” to Descartes’s Meditations. In his “objections”
Arnauld is credited with first noting the problem of Descartes’s “reasoning
in a circle.”4 But the objections turned to praise as he compared
Cartesianism favorably with Augustinianism. He believed Descartes’s way
of attacking radical skepticism was rooted in Augustinianism. “St. Augustine
realized long before Descartes,” Arnauld elsewhere declared, “that in order
to arrive at the truth we cannot begin with anything more certain than this
proposition: I think, therefore, I am.”5
The vitality of the new Cartesian version of Augustinian reasoning
methods called for a wholly new way of structuring a logic textbook.
Textbooks are usually conservative. They are not supposed to be radical.
But the unstructured “little schools” of Port Royal—along with the
instance of a post-dinner challenge lubricated by fine wine—encouraged
boldness. Arnauld’s textbook turned the textbook tradition on its head.
Instead of starting with the most general and moving to the most specific
as topics demanded or Cassiodorus did with Porphyry’s Tree or Ramus
did with his insistent bifurcations, Arnauld started with the simple, and
dynamically moved toward more and more complexity. His logic had four
parts and four-part logic textbooks began to flourish throughout Europe.
The first three parts were strictly Cartesian and modeled on geometry:
conceiving, judging, and reasoning. The fourth stage recapped the whole
and was called method or ordering. Method had been a section popular-
ized by various humanists, but Arnauld gave it greater responsibility for
teaching the higher and broader art of being reasonable. It was here that
he took on the importance of reasoning with testimony after previously
following the Cartesian principle of warning against authority. Method,
Arnauld claimed, was “doubtless one of the most useful and important
parts” of logic.6 It became a post-Port-Royal tradition to extensively
discuss testimony, degrees of assent, and probability in this last, most
practical, section.
AGAINST TOPICS
Topics, Arnauld declared, were “useless” (181). The statement is a major

turning point in the history of testimony. Since Aristotle, topics had been
the area of dialectic that structurally described the relationship between tes-
timony and other types of information or sources of arguments. Topics had
traditionally been the place in textbooks where they distinguished what we
know or work up internally from what we receive ready-made from exter-
nal sources. With no trace of humility Arnauld dismissed the tradition and
created a new place to discuss testimony.
“We know that the ancients made a great mystery” of topics, Arnauld
wrote (181). “Quintilian and all the other rhetoricians, and Aristotle and all
the philosophers spoke about it in the same way, so it would be difficult
not to share their view if general experience did not appear entirely
opposed to it” (182). Topics were unnatural. They required the reasoner to
keep a file system in his or her head with which to either store or search
for information. A reasonable person was supposed to be always referring
to a memorized list of topics. Arnauld asked the simple question: “Is there
a single person who can truly say that when he was required to deal with
some subject, he reflected on these topics and looked to them for the argu-
ments needed?” (182). Arnauld challenged his readers to “consult as many
lawyers and preachers as there are in the world, as many people who
speak and write” to see if any of them actually run through the list of top-
ics in their mind every time they are making a persuasive argument (182).
Presumably there were none. Topics had not served the purpose for which
they had been designed. Ramist topics were especially useless because they
“were too complicated by subdivisions” (184). For a useful dialectic,
Arnauld suggested, look first to the general experience of thinking. The
Port-Royal Logic was dedicated to bringing rigor to the way people natu-
rally think. Not that Arnauld believed natural reasoning did not need to be
structured by rules, but rather, that the rules of reasoning should be
designed to support the practice of reasoning. Arnauld actually reintro-
duced several medieval developments in organizing syllogisms because
such developments helped thinkers understand what was happening in
their minds. Topics never really happened in the mind; therefore, they were
useless in understanding the art of thinking.
Dismissed along with topics was the technical language that distin-
guished between technical/non-technical, intrinsic/extrinsic, artificial/inarti-
ficial. The subject of the distinction would receive greater attention than
ever before—“the mind and common sense” demanded it. (181). But
encrusted technical terms were of no interest to Arnauld. “The mind is too
large, life too short, and time too precious to occupy oneself with trivial
matters” (5). St. Augustine had not used such terms in On the Trinity or his
other famous discussions of testimony. Augustine had simply shown how
the reasonable person distinguishes between what is worked up by reason
and what comes ready-made from divine or human authorities. To Arnauld
it made good sense to use simple terms for the distinction. However, as a
follower of Descartes, he wanted to be avoid the term “authority.” With
Arnauld we have entered the early modern age of Baconian and Cartesian
rhetoric that sets the individual against authority. Arnauld condemned
thoughtless regard to intellectual authorities while affirming thoughtful
assent to testimony.
THE FALLACY OF AUTHORITY
Following hard after Arnauld’s critique of topics was a long section on

sophisms that twist or even destroy the art of thinking. Sophisms, for
Arnauld, were caused not only by technical errors in the process of rea-
soning but also by the psyche of the thinker. Like Augustine, Arnauld
emphasized the role of the will in being reasonable. Laziness, egoism,
feistiness, complacency, pursuit of fame, and disregard of society can
destroy good judgment. Sprinkled throughout almost every paragraph in

the section are lines such as these:
䊉 People are readily led to do what is easiest. (220)

䊉 The human mind is not only naturally enamored of itself,
but is also naturally jealous, envious, and malicious towards
others. (207)
䊉 Among the different ways self-love leads us into error, or
rather entrenches us in it and prevents us from getting out
of it [is] our commitment to maintain some opinion to which
we are attached by considerations other than truth. (212)
䊉 When this vice [a spirit of contradiction] is excessive it con-
stitutes one of the main traits of the spirit of pedantry, which
takes its greatest pleasure in quibbling with others. (212)
Like his friend Blaise Pascal, Arnauld considered Montaigne a popular

model of bad thinking:
But we would be wrong to accuse Montaigne of this bad

inference. He has no intention of speaking reasonably, but
only of creating a confused mass of everything that might be
said against mankind. [His is] a vice quite contrary to the
mental accuracy and sincerity of a good person. (213)
Like the classical orators, Arnauld was sure that good thinking was
done best by good people. But not just a good person alone; rather, good
thinking was both individual and social. It was as much a result of good
temperament as it was a result of being capable of good friendship, citi-
zenship, and social commitment. Of course it was the result of rigorous
study and intellectual abilities, but good thinking also required a willing-
ness to trust outside sources of information.
Assured of this, it is understandable why Arnauld would give more space
than any previous logic textbook to handling testimony. Good handling of
testimony depended upon being open and trusting while being wise and dis-
cerning. “Right reason accords all things their appropriate status,” Arnauld
had written in the introduction; “it makes us doubt those that are doubtful,
reject those that are false, and recognize in good faith those that are evident”
(7). Wisdom and discernment were especially important when handling
authority since it could so easily be abused by the powerful while at the same
time so many people are willing submit to authority for the wrong reasons.
A section on logical errors required discussing the “sophism of authority” in
which outward matters take precedence over internal truth (220–25).
“No fallacies are more frequent,” Arnauld wrote, “than those people com-
mit, either by judging the truth of things hastily based on some authority
insufficient to assure us of it, or by deciding what is essential to something

by appearances” (220). Fundamental to the Augustinian tradition of rea-
sonableness is human depravity and depravity’s little brother, laziness. “All
humans are liars” was a maxim for Arnauld (261). The Devil is a deceiver.
Human sinfulness mires society in lies and deception. For Augustinians
truth calls one to move toward it. The Devil encourages staying in one
place. Arnauld paraphrased Aristotle “that nothing is demonstrated so well
that it may not be denied by an obstinate person” (246).7 The obstinate per-
son refuses to be moved. Obstinacy destroys method by immobility. The
easiest path for lazy thinkers is to refuse to act on the basis of good sense
and remain mired in deceptions and appearances.
Authority was wrongly appealed to if only for the purpose of avoiding
the work of thinking. Yet authority was a necessary part of good reason-
ing, especially in matters of Christianity. Following Augustine’s defense of
the specific reasonableness of submission to decisions about divine revela-
tion made by the majority and the most important churches, Arnauld
declared that “Faith in the authority of the universal Church is entirely deci-
sive. . . . we fall into error only when we depart from her authority and
refuse to submit to it” (220).
Here in the section on the fallacy of authority, Arnauld affirms sub-
mission—but only reasonable submission that comes after according every-
thing its proper status. Remember that this textbook was written in the
context of the Jansenists being repressed by an alliance of Jesuits and the
churchmen of the French royal court. Its author published the book while
living in exile. Submission to reasonable authority was a crucial matter for
Arnauld and the Jansenists, but it was not a lazy submission. In the life of
Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal, and the other solitaires of the “little schools,” an
appeal to the authority of the universal Church undercut the authority of
the state church.
Having laid out the principle of avoiding “being led to do what is
easiest,” Arnauld then goes on to note “gross errors” in the way people
have applied the traditional Aristotelian rules for testifiers and witnesses.
For example:
People often consider only the number of witnesses, without

thinking about whether the number makes it more probable
that they have discovered the truth. This is not reasonable.
As a modern author has wisely observed, in difficult matters
where each person has to find his own way, it is more likely
that a single individual will find the truth than that several will
discover it. Thus it is not a good inference to argue: Such-and-
such an opinion is accepted by the majority of philosophers,
therefore it is the truest. (221)8
Aristotle had written in the context of opinions along with facts.

Arnauld advised greater discernment as to when the number of witnesses
is important versus when it does not matter. Similar discernment applies to
another misapplied Aristotelian rule:
People are often persuaded by certain qualities that are irrel-

evant to the truth of the issue being discussed. There are a
number of people who unquestioningly believe those who
are the oldest and more experienced, even in matters that
depend neither on age or experience, but only on mental
insight. (221)
Here again, the issue of authority is the unquestioning belief. Reasonableness

is an art. It is work. It is not easy obstinacy or lazy reliance on some other
thinker.
On the whole, Arnauld’s discussion of authority is a discussion about
reasonable handling of other people’s opinions. It is not about the need to
rely on other people for information about historical events or foreign geog-
raphy. Of course Arnauld understood the Aristotelian principle that listening
to testimony often entails opinions interwoven with facts. But at the end of
book 3 of The Port-Royal Logic, Arnauld wanted to follow the old pattern of
closing the section on reasoning with a warning about fallacies and
sophisms. By adding the “Fallacy of Authority,” he affirmed the early mod-
ern concern with freeing the individual thinker from the bonds of unrea-
sonable traditions and authoritarian institutions. Many textbooks would
follow his example. Today the section of the “Fallacy of Authority” is
Arnauld’s most direct legacy in modern textbooks on “critical thinking.” The
problem is that these most modern texts are much more superficial in their
praise of “Thinking for Yourself.” To Arnauld, the danger was not in com-
munal thinking; rather, it was that too many people “simply do not like to
make distinctions. Discriminations confuse them; they want things to be all
or nothing” (221).
Age, knowledge, study, experience, intellect, energy, disci-

pline, precision, and work are useful for finding the truth in
hidden things. So these qualities deserve our consideration.
But we must, however, weigh them with care, and compare
them later with opposing reasons. For from each of these
items in particular, nothing can be concluded with certainty,
since some quite false opinions have been accepted by per-
sons of very sound intellect who have a good number of
these qualities. (223)
The art of being reasonable requires raising an eyebrow at authority,

not a Baconian dismissal. Arnauld could offer no set of rules and warned
against black and white simplicities. It was a pardonable error for good
people to humbly defer to authorities more than they should; however, the
politically exiled Arnauld noted that too much humility can dangerously
work against reasonableness (221).
METHOD AND TESTIMONY
Arnauld divided his text into four parts with the last being “Method,” some-
times called “Ordering.” This section dealt with complexities of higher rea-
sonableness whereas the earlier sections had been focused on simple
reasoning. The section opens by distinguishing three types of knowledge:
certainty, opinion, and faith. The early chapters deal with the relationship
of certainty and opinion as thinkers use the model of geometry. Chapter 12
moves to the third: “What we know by faith, whether human or divine.”
The term “faith” is equated with “belief”; Augustine’s On the Profit of
Believing is cited: “What we know we owe to reason; what we believe, to
authority.” Belief, according to Arnauld, was “another kind of knowledge
that often is no less certain or evident in its own way” (260). Knowledge
and belief, authority and certainty, reason and faith: all these terms were
important to a higher reasonableness that was more complex than geo-
metrical reasoning.
If we compare the two general routes—reason and faith—that

make us believe that something exists, it is certain that faith
always presupposes some reason. As St. Augustine says in let-
ter 122 and many other places, we could not be led to believe
what is beyond reason if reason itself had not persuaded us
that there are things that it is good to believe although we are
not capable of understanding them. (261)
For Arnauld, this complex mixture of reasoning and faith beyond reason
was actually the most common lived experience of thinkers. It was “common
use of good sense” and “takes place every day in human affairs” (262).
Reason itself persuades us that there is a broader and more commonly used
art of thinking bigger than reasoning. The first three sections of the book
deals with reasoning, but the conclusion of the book turns to the art of rea-
sonableness.
Testimony first shows up in the method section in a list of eleven
“important axioms that may be used as principles of great truths,” the last
three of which “are the foundation of faith” (251–52). Axiom 9: “It is the
nature of a finite mind not to be able to understand the infinite” (251).
Arnauld and Blaise Pascal were intimate colleagues and shared many ideas
between them about bringing the mathematical concepts of infinity and
probability into logic and Christian apologetics.9 The role of mathematical
probability in our history will be discussed later in this chapter; here we

can note the all-important backdrop to Arnauld’s logic—that it was
anchored in a finite realm while the fullness of truth resided in an infinite
realm. In Axiom 9 Arnauld’s purpose was to confirm that a realm of faith
exists distinct from science, that neither attained the fullness of truth,
and that the faith yielded by authority was not necessarily less certain than
scientific demonstration.
Axiom 10 was a new formulation of the traditional reliability of divine
testimony as a source of absolutely secure knowledge. Axiom 11 was
Arnauld’s definition of the highest form of human testimony:
When the facts that the senses can easily judge are witnessed
by a great number of persons from different times, different
nations, and diverse interests, who speak about them as if
from personal experience, and who cannot be suspected of
having conspired to maintain a lie, they should be considered
as constant and indubitable as if we had seen them with our
own eyes. (251)
Although he had abandoned topics and avoided the old humanist tendency
to quote Cicero and Quintialian and instead relied heavily on Augustine,
Arnauld maintained the classical tradition of distinguishing two types of
testimony, divine and human, that, in certain circumstances of fact, yield
a faith that is equal (or greater) in certainty to demonstrations from self-
evident principles.
Moving from this list of important axioms to the section of the book
devoted to the subject of testimony, Arnauld noted that even though
humans are deceivers and easily deceived, some human testimony is
absolutely certain.
Human faith is in itself subject to error because all humans are

liars, according to Scripture, and it can happen that people
who assure us that something is true may themselves be mis-
taken. As we have already indicated above, however, some
things we know only by human faith, which we ought to con-
sider as certain and as indubitable as if we had mathematical
demonstrations of them. Such are the things we know from
the constant testimony of so many people that it is morally
impossible that they could have conspired to assure us of the
same thing if it were not true. For example, people naturally
have some trouble in conceiving that there are antipodes.
However, even though we have never been there, and thus
we know nothing about them except by human faith, we
would have to be insane not to believe them. Similarly we
would have to have lost all sense to wonder whether Caesar,
Pompey, Cicero, or Virgil ever existed, or whether they were

only imaginary characters, such as those of the Amadis.
It is true that it is often fairly difficult to mark precisely
when human faith has attained this certainty and when it has
not. This leads us astray in two opposite ways. One way is
taken by people who believe too readily based on the least
rumor; the other is taken by people who absurdly set their
mental powers to not believing the best testified things when-
ever they conflict with their prejudices. We can, however,
mark certain limits that must be reached in order to attain this
human certainty, and beyond which we definitely have it,
leaving a middle ground between these two kind kinds of
limits which is closer to certainty or uncertainty, depending
on whether it approaches one or the other set of limits.
(260–61)
The first thing to note in this important passage is that Arnauld affirms
the traditional distinction between reason and authority. The former is
wholly within the mind of the reasoner. The latter begins with learning pre-
packaged information from other people. The former yields science. The
latter yields faith. The second notable point is that even though humans are
liars and error is easily possible, good sense requires understanding the
limits of reasoning and reasonableness, thereby avoiding the dangers of
either gullibility or radical skepticism. The third important point is the tri-
partite categories of certainty. At the top is the faith that we would be fools
not to believe. At the bottom is the utter absence of human certainty. In the
large middle between the two extremes believability slides closer to either
certainty or uncertainty.
Arnauld goes on to devote a chapter to reported miracles where he fur-
ther warns against the twin evils of gullibility and being overly skeptical.
Both extremes he considers unthinking banality. The Port-Royal Logic can
be considered the most influential first-generation book in the great debate
over miracles that spilled over into textbooks on reasonableness through-
out the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arnauld followed the tradition
that the Ramists called the rule of reciprocation—that when dealing with
the hard-to-believe the reasonable person should rely most heavily on the
character and circumstances of the testifier. If the testifier was trustworthy
and the circumstances of the testifier’s knowledge reassuring then the tes-
timony should be trusted. Arnauld used the example of Augustine as a
trustworthy testifier: “persons of good sense, even if they are devoid of
piety, ought to recognize as authentic the miracles St. Augustine relates in
his Confessions or in the City of God as having taken place before his eyes,
or about which he testifies to having been particularly informed by the
persons themselves to whom these things happened” (267). Augustine,
Arnauld declared, was “a very enlightened and sincere man” (269).
As much as Arnauld supported the old rule or reciprocation, he also

had no desire to oversimplify the issue. Testifiers and testimony had to be
viewed from all sides. Good judgment required a matrix of considerations.
Just as Aristotle had implied that a boy could do math but not lead a state,
so too determining the truth of historical events should not be simplified
into mere geometry.
In order to decide the truth of an event and determine

whether or not to believe it we must not consider it nakedly
and in itself, as we would any proposition of geometry.
But we must pay attention to all the accompanying circum-
stances, internal as well as external. I call those circumstances
internal that belong to the fact itself, and those external that
concern the persons whose testimony leads us to believe in
it. (264)
External and internal circumstances, the testifier(s) and the testimony

itself, all together create a matrix upon which a judgment is based. Arnauld,
as usual, offered an example to illustrate his point:
Suppose, for example, someone asks us whether the story

of Constantine’s baptism by St. Sylvester is true or false.
Baronius thinks it is true; Cardinal du Perron, Bishop Sponde,
Father Petau, Father Morin, and the most competent church-
men think it is false. If we focus on its mere possibility we
would be wrong to reject it, for it contains nothing absolutely
impossible. It is even possible, speaking absolutely, that
Eusebius, who testifies to the contrary, wanted to lie to favor
the Arians and that the Fathers who followed him were
misled by his testimony. But if we use the rule we just estab-
lished, namely to consider the circumstances of both accounts
of the baptism of Constantine, and which ones have the most
indications of truth, we will find that it is the circumstances of
the latter. On the one hand, there is no good reason to
depend on the testimony of a writer who is as much a fabu-
list as was the author of the acts of St. Sylvester, who was the
only ancient to speak of Constantine’s baptism at Rome. On
the other hand, it is unlikely that anyone as competent as
Eusebius would have dared lie in recounting something as
famous as the baptism of the first emperor who gave freedom
to the Church, which would have been known to all the
world when he wrote it, since it was only four or five years
after the death of that emperor. (264–65)
On a polemical and symbolic historical issue, the spirit of being neither

gullible or overly skeptical requires juggling the testimony, the authorities,
and the circumstances touching the whole question.
Implied within this and other examples given by Arnauld is the third tech-
nical issue that always underlies judging testimony: Who gets the benefit of
the doubt? and Who has the burden of proof ? In the above example and a
following example dealing with dating irregularities in the Bible, the benefit
of the doubt goes to the testimony and testifiers. The event is not impossible
nor is the harmonization of dates impossible; therefore, we should tend to
accept the original testimony. The burden of proof is on those who want to
reject a testimony. Even if the testimony and testifier are obviously biased,
“there must be some significant reasons to make us believe the contrary,
notwithstanding this bias” (271). Arnauld believed this tendency to give the
benefit of the doubt to what is received and shift the burden of proof onto
those who want to reject was crucial; otherwise, almost all of history and
almost all of what we know would crumble. For Arnauld, reason must be
applied so as not to be irresponsibly destructive. Reason must be productive.
For Descartes and his followers reason’s productivity could be
enhanced by principles and methods derived from mathematics and geom-
etry. Arnauld’s last chapter on testimony and a final chapter on future acci-
dents mark the inauguration of mixing the new mathematics of probability
with social knowledge. More will be said of this at the end of this chapter
since it is one of The Port-Royal Logic’s most evident and lingering contri-
butions in the history of handling testimony. Here we can see in Arnauld’s
conclusion to chapter 15 his vital desire to encourage rigorous good sense,
serious questioning, and respect for long-held and socially dominant beliefs
in the art of thinking:
It is a common circumstance for many deeds to be signed by

two notaries, that is, by two public persons who ordinarily
have a great interest in not saying something false, because
not only do their conscience and honor depend on it, but also
their welfare and livelihood. This consideration alone suffices,
if we know no other details of the contract, to make us
believe that it was not antedated. Not that there could not be
antedated contracts, but because it is certain that out of a
thousand contracts, 999 are not antedated. Consequently it is
considerably more likely that the contract I see is one of the
999 than it is the unique one among a thousand that is ante-
dated. If the probity of the notaries who signed it is perfectly
well known to me, I will then take it to be very certain that
they committed no falsehood.
But if this common circumstance of being signed by two
notaries—which when it is not refuted by others is a sufficient
reason for me to have faith in the date of the contract—is
connected with other particular circumstances, such as that
these notaries have been accused of being without honor and
conscience, or that they may have had a great interest in
falsifying this contract, this would still not make me conclude

that the contract is antedated. But it would diminish the
weight that the signature of the two notaries would otherwise
have had in my mind to make me believe it was not ante-
dated. If, further, I can discover other positive evidence that
it was antedated, either through witnesses or strong argu-
ments, such as the inability of someone to have lent twenty
thousand crowns at a time when shown that he was not
worth a hundred crowns, I will then be determined to believe
that this contract is false. It would be a highly irrational
expectation to require me either not to believe the contract
antedated, or to acknowledge that I was wrong to suppose
that the other contracts where I did not see the same indica-
tions of falsity were not antedated, since they might have
been like this one.
All this can be applied to matters that often cause dis-
putes among the learned. People ask whether a book is really
written by an author whose name it has always carried, or
whether the acts of a Council are true or fictitious.
It is certain that the presumption is in favor of the author
who has been in possession of a work for a long time, and
for the truth of the acts of a Council that we read about every
day. There must be some significant reasons to make us
believe the contrary, notwithstanding the bias. . . .
These are some remarks that may be helpful in making
judgments of this kind. But we should not suppose that they
are so useful that they will always prevent us from making
mistakes. The most they can do is to make us avoid the crud-
est errors, and to accustom the mind not to let itself be carried
away by banalities that, although they contain some general
truth, are nonetheless false on many specific occasions, which
is one of the greatest sources of human error. (270–73)
The Port-Royal Logic was most influential among Christian educators

with an Augustinian bent. Many Roman Catholics and Protestants were
enthusiastic about Augustine in the seventeenth century; however, there
were also many others, such as many Jesuits and Oxford Anglicans who
were not. The Jesuit Manuductio ad Logicam (1678) shows no influence
from Arnauld or renewed interest in Augustine. Henry Aldrich, Dean of
Christ Church, Oxford and author of the popular Oxford textbook Artis
Logicae Compendium (1691), had no use for Arnauld’s antagonism to top-
ics and meanderings into Augustinian authority issues. Aldrich attacked
The Port-Royal Logic as the work of a dogmatic mind afraid for the course
of civilization. “Everything which [Arnauld] puts forth on his own behalf
he pronounces haughtily, as if ex cathedra,” Aldrich complained. He “per-
spires” to explain his points “as if he were giving assistance to a collaps-
ing world.”10 Aldrich, in his text that continued to be used at Oxford
throughout the eighteenth century, handled testimony in the traditional

fashion as argumentum inartificial.11
Granting the fervor of its antagonists, The Port-Royal Logic was the
most widely influential manifestation of what the era often called simply
“the new logic.” The new logic was perceived to be freed from all the
encumbrances of classical, medieval, and Renaissance logic. A teacher or
student could embrace the new logic in the manner almost of religious
conversion. A young provincial grammar-school teacher in Connecticut
marked the month of his conversion at the end of a manuscript Ramist
textbook he had earlier written for his boys: In November 1715 “I was
wholly changed to the New Learning.”12 To the north in Massachusetts,
Cotton Mather, writing to ministerial candidates in 1726, heaped disdain on
the logomachies of the old textbooks but advised future ministers to read
The Port-Royal Logic. In the next sentence, Mather backhandedly noted
that The Essay Concerning Human Understanding was also “much in
Vogue.”13
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH TRADITION
The web of Arnauld’s influence spread throughout Europe during a period

of a publishing and educational explosion that encouraged the production
of hundreds of vernacular textbooks locally produced for specific regional
or educational needs. Many textbooks were never even formally published.
Instead they exist today only in student notebooks. My limited language
skills and limited access to European archives necessarily hinder my ability
to survey even a majority of the logic textbooks of the last few centuries.
Happily for me, however, there appears to have been more interest in tes-
timony and authority as part of logic education in the English-speaking tra-
dition than anywhere else. This is probably largely due to John Locke’s
interest in the subject and the commitment of English-speaking evangelical
Christians to liberal arts education.
THE NEGATIVELY CAUTIOUS JOHN LOCKE
John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) can be

read as a cautionary companion to The Port-Royal Logic. Both have four
parts modeled on geometry, beginning with the smallest bits of knowledge,
proceeding to combinations, then devoting the last chapters to handling
testimony and authority. Both pinpoint the role of the will as crucial for
assenting to truth. Both find in probability the key to walking the tightrope
between gullibility and skepticism. Neither wants anything to do with top-
ics or useless vestiges from medieval logic. On the other hand, Locke’s
Essay warns explicitly against Descartes’s definition of intuitive knowledge

and implicitly against Arnauld’s willingness to follow Augustine too closely
concerning degrees of assent and human testimony. Locke’s caution is
especially evident in the way he agrees with the tradition that divine testi-
mony must be granted the highest certainty, but then vaguely warns against
too easily defining what is divine and what isn’t. For the most part, Locke
affirms the basic structure of The Port-Royal Logic while advocating a some-
what negative caution. Although he never mentioned Arnauld or The Port-
Royal Logic in his Essay—rarely, for that matter, did he cite any other
thinker or work—he probably would have criticized Arnauld for being
overanxious and overzealous. Like Henry Aldrich at Oxford, Locke proba-
bly found Arnauld a little too breathless, perspiring too much to save the
intellectual foundations of society against maddeningly urbane skeptics
such as Montaigne. Locke, like Arnauld, had suffered exile in Holland, but
he did not have Arnauld’s hot temperament. More calm and more secure,
Locke responded to The Port-Royal Logic’s teachings on testimony by
encouraging a hesitant caution.
Like Arnauld, Locke wanted “to enquire in the Original, Certainty, and
Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of
Belief, Opinion, and Assent.”14 And like Arnauld he believed that “God has
set some Things in broad day-light,” but that such things were few. As for
the greatest part of our concerns God “has afforded us only the twilight.”15
The twilight of judgment embraced two categories. The first entailed the
mind combining and comparing ideas without perceiving the full, demon-
strative evidence required for absolute certainty. The second entailed
“Truths delivered in Words.”16 For this category he offered the following
famous checklist:
In the Testimony of others, is to be considered. . . .

The number of testifiers.
The integrity of the testifiers.
The skill of the witnesses.
The design of the author, where it is a testimony out of a
book cited.
The consistency of the parts, and circumstances of the relation.
Contrary testimonies.17
This six-part checklist nicely fits within the textbook tradition and expresses
implicitly what the Ramist called the rule of reciprocation. Testimony was
to be considered in its context—especially the context of its testifiers.
Arnauld would have had no trouble with the content of the checklist.
Arnauld also would have appreciated the way Locke discussed testi-
mony that is of such high probability that it compels assent. What Arnauld
had described as one category, Locke described as three different types of
compelled assent. As a reminder, here is Arnauld describing the highest

form of human testimony:
When the facts that the senses can easily judge are witnessed
by a great number of persons from different times, different
nations, and diverse interests, who speak about them as if
from personal experience, and who cannot be suspected of
having conspired to maintain a lie, they should be considered
as constant and indubitable as if we had seen them with our
own eyes.18
Of Locke’s three types, the first he named “Assurance”:
when the general consent of all Men, in all Ages, as far as it

can be known, concurs with a Man’s constant and never-
failing Experience in like cases, to confirm the Truth of any
particular matter of fact attested by fair Witnesses.19
The second he named “Confidence”:
attested by many and undoubted Witnesses: v.g. History

giving us such an account of Men in all Ages; and my own
Experience, as far as I had an opportunity to observe, con-
firming it, that most men prefer their private Advantage, to
the publick.20
The third he described as “unavoidable assent”:
when any particular matter of fact is vouched by the concur-

rent Testimony of unsuspected Witnesses, there our assent is
unavoidable. Thus: That there is such a City in Italy as Rome:
That about 1700 years ago, there lived in it a Man, called
Julius Caesar. . . . being related by Historians of credit, and
contradicted by no one Writer.21
Below compelled assent were the descending gradations of probabil-

ity: “Belief, Conjecture, Guess, Doubt, Wavering, Distrust, Disbelief, etc.”22 So
many gradations existed that it was impossible to reduce them to precise
rules. Arnauld had said much the same thing. The difference, however,
between Locke and Arnauld was more in the attitude of the examples each
gave in this realm of probability below compelled assent. Locke followed
Arnauld in offering three examples: history, reports of miracles, and the
special case of divine testimony. Whereas Arnauld supplied positive exam-
ples of instances where the history and reports of miracles should be taken
as true and divine testimony accepted without reservation, Locke was neg-
atively cautious about them all.
Arnauld’s example of probable history, quoted earlier, was of the bap-

tism of Constantine. Arnauld recognized the problem in the testimony, but
showed his readers how a good historian would give the benefit of the
doubt to Eusebius’s attestation to the truth of the baptism. Locke, on the
other hand, discussed the instability of history in general and desired to
inspire more doubt. Here Locke affirmed a standard view that eyewitness
testimony is stronger than accounts of reports learned by historians: “That
any Testimony, the farther off it is from the original Truth, the less force
and proof it has.”23 Locke offered no example of mitigating circumstances
that could justify giving the benefit of the doubt to a historian’s reports of
hearsay evidence. Locke did not try to compare compelled assent to the life
of Julius Caesar to a less compelling historical testimony. As if he had The
Port-Royal Logic open before him, Locke also responded to Arnauld’s dis-
cussion of notarized written documents, writing that “though the attested
Copy of a Record be good Proof, yet the Copy of a Copy never so well
attested, and by never so credible Witnesses, will not be admitted as a
proof of Judicature.”24 Finally in a patronizing tone, he attacked historical
traditions:
I would not be thought here to lessen the Credit and use of

History: ’tis all the light we have in many cases; and we
receive from it a great part of the useful Truths we have, with
a convincing evidence. I think nothing more valuable than
the Records of Antiquity: I wish we had more of them, and
more uncorrupted. But this, Truth forces me to say, That no
Probability can arise higher than its first Original. What has
no other Evidence than the single Testimony of one only
Witness, must stand or fall by his only Testimony, whether
good, bad, or indifferent; and though cited afterwards by
hundreds of others, one after another, is so far from receiving
any strength thereby, that it is only the weaker.25
Neither Arnauld—nor Augustine—would disagree with Locke’s basic

warnings; however, they would raise an eyebrow at the negativity.
Augustine, Arnauld, and Locke all agreed that the will of the reasoner
greatly influenced the direction and conclusion of reasoning. Obvious in
Locke, however, was caution that dampened the confidence that Augustine
and Arnauld encouraged.
This caution is evident also in Locke’s discussion of miracles. Arnauld
had offered recent and old miracle accounts and pointed his readers to the
long list of miracles that Augustine had reported. He warned against gulli-
bility but counseled belief when reported by a credible testifier. Locke was
not antagonistic to the general idea that miracles happened. In the Essay
and later tracts on The Reasonableness of Christianity and A Discourse on
Miracles he affirmed that fair testimony of a miracle should override the

strangeness of the event. However, he did not simply rely on fair testimony.
For Arnauld, the mere fact that Augustine carefully testified to random mir-
acles made the reports credible. For Locke, a report of a miracle must not
only be well attested, but also “find Credit themselves” and fit a larger pat-
tern of Christian truth.26 Here again, as if responding directly to Arnauld,
Locke wanted to set up controls on the credibility of miracles. Just because
Augustine reported them is not enough to make them credible. They must
be intuitionally compelling themselves and they must be useful in helping
to affirm Christianity.27
Finally, Locke needed to discuss the special case of divine testimony.
As for Arnauld, the issue for Locke is reasonableness. Arnauld, quoting
Augustine and sounding like Pascal, affirmed that faith and reason were
always intertwined in that sometimes reason demanded assent to what is
beyond reason. Locke agreed that divine testimony could overrule what
humans would normally believe as “common Experience” or “the ordinary
course of Things.”28 He even agreed with the tradition that a faith derived
from divine testimony could reach the level where it “absolutely determines
our Minds, and as perfectly excludes all wavering as our Knowledge it
self.”29 By this Locke affirmed the tradition of two levels of faith, one prob-
abilistic and the other equal to science.
But here again Locke was negatively cautious. Arnauld had declared it
reasonable to be a captive to God’s authority “whenever he has given us
sufficient evidence, such as miracles and other prodigious events, which
oblige us to believe that he himself has revealed to us the truths we ought
to believe.”30 Alexander Richardson, the English Ramist, had affirmed the
English Protestant tradition that the Holy Spirit had the job of confirming the
divinity of divine testimony. Locke, however, cautiously declared that it was
human reason that must confirm such divinity. He was much worried by the
dangers of enthusiasm. Warrant for divine testimony must not come from
seeing prodigious events or being moved by the Holy Spirit, but rather,
through human reason:
Only we must be sure, that it be divine Revelation, and that

we understand it right: else we shall expose our selves to all
the Extravagancy of Enthusiasm, and all the Error of wrong
Principles. . . . Our Assent can be rationally no higher than
the Evidence of its being a Revelation.31
Once again, it is the tone and direction of the argument, not the actual
words, that separate Arnauld from Locke. In the long run of Anglo-Scottish
logic, Arnauld’s The Port-Royal Logic and Locke’s An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding would work together while supporting two traditions.
The first tradition was overtly supportive of biblical history and especially
adamant about the veracity of miracle accounts. The second tradition was
more circumspect and concerned that nobody get excited too fast.
As for testimony and authority in general, Locke paralleled the
Augustinian-Jansenist recognition that much of human understanding was
dependent on sources of information outside of the reasoner. Such infor-
mation brought the reasoner into a realm of probability and degrees of
assent. Some of this information could compel assent and was due the
highest assurance and confidence. On the other hand, testimony and
authority were weak. Neither Arnauld nor Locke advocated gullible sub-
mission to authority, but Locke more than Arnauld wanted to keep the indi-
vidual reasoner in control. Arnauld was willing to advocate submission to
the universal Church and be compelled to assent to the miracle accounts
of such a good testifier as Augustine. He believed that much of common
life involved judgment on matters beyond reason. And he was intensely
pious. Locke believed in the same structures, but his sense of reasonable-
ness was rooted not in intense piety but in commitment to decency and
good order.
ISAAC WATTS’S “LOGICK: OR THE RIGHT USE OF REASON”
John Locke’s Essay was a watershed in the history of English-speaking intel-

lectual life. Barbara Shapiro in her Probability and Certainty in
Seventeenth-Century England writes that
while English thinkers shared a great deal with their Conti-

nental counterparts . . . their many-pronged efforts to maintain
a scriptural, Protestant, and yet rational Christianity led them
to a distinctively probabilistic approach to knowledge that
culminated in John Locke, perhaps the most English of English
philosophers.32
Elsewhere Shapiro notes that “Locke’s focus on the importance of testi-

mony” and his rules for handling testimony much influenced the increas-
ingly important genre of legal manuals.33
As Shapiro attests, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
had an Englishness that encouraged deep thinking about the role of testi-
mony in English intellectual life. Much of that English interest was tied to
a deep evangelical Protestant desire to relate Christianity to reasonableness.
Schools and colleges devoted to this relationship sprung up though out the
English-speaking world. Since Locke’s Essay was not specifically designed
for classroom use, the textbook market had room for a simpler and more
directly Christianized Lockean approaches. One of the most famous dis-
senting ministers in England, Isaac Watts (1674–1748), supplied classrooms
with the British Empire’s most popular eighteenth-century logic textbook:

Logick: or the Right Use of Reason (1724). A companion volume, The
Improvement of the Mind (1741), was also widely popular. If English rea-
sonableness combined with a decent and orderly Christian piety was what
schools wanted to teach, then Isaac Watts gave them exactly what they
wanted.
Today Watts is best remembered for his hymns, but during his life and
long after his death he was one the Anglo world’s most influential textbook
writers and theorists of Christian education. There is a story from the
American Revolution that when soldiers in Springfield, New Jersey, in the
heat of battle ran out of paper to ram powder and balls into their muskets,
the chaplain saved the day by producing an armful of hymnbooks exclaim-
ing, “Now put Watts into them, boys!”34 If the battle had been near
Princeton—or any of the college towns in the British colonies—the chap-
lain probably could have gathered Watts’s logic textbook as easily as he
gathered Watts’s hymnbook. Coming from a dissenter officially shunned by
the Anglican establishment, Watts textbook was especially popular in dis-
senting academies and colleges. By mid-century, however, John Yolton
reports that Watts’s logic had fully infiltrated the Oxford curriculum.35 In an
age when most colleges required students to take one and sometimes two
years of introductory logic, most English-speaking students at some point
encountered Watts’s Logick. In 1744, a student at the Baptist Academy at
Bristol, England described his logic class:
1. Go thro’ Dr. Watts’s Logick twice. 2. Then thro’ his Scheme

of Ontology twice . . . N.B. Also read quite perfectly thro’
Mr. Lock’s Essay on Hum. Understanding.
His goal was:
1. Make my Self (i.e. in God’s Strength) a Perfect and Compleat

Logician and Metaphysician—from Dr. Watts’ 2 Treatises on
those Subject.36
Watts began the book in the late 1690s while tutoring the son of Sir
John Hartopp in Newington Green, a rich section of London where dis-
senting education had long been strong and where Charles Morton had
written his logic textbook after Melanchthon. Morton in the middle 1680s
was persecuted and forced into exile for his educational influence, but by
Watts’s time such antagonisms had calmed to the point that Watts could
live, teach, and pastor the comfortable and pious dissenters of Newington
Green with complete security. Such a time suited Watts’s gentle tempera-
ment. He was humble, never married, seldom traveled, and enough of
a chronic invalid that for most of his life he was unable to mount the pul-
pit and instead lived in semi-isolation with a wealthy family. Antoine
Arnauld and John Locke were important men of affairs, known by kings,
and forced into political exile for parts of their lives. Both had moments of
brilliant clarity. Both had axes to grind. Watts, himself, had no axe and no
edginess. The clarity of his thinking came not from moments of brilliance,
but rather the quiet reasonableness of a chaplain trying to talk to a group
of wealthy schoolboys.
Watts much appreciated Locke’s Essay, but he also enjoyed the common
sense Augustinian Cartesianism of Arnauld’s Port-Royal Logic. Although
adopting many terms and statements from the Essay, overall he writes with
the calmer version of the Christian apologetic focus that characterizes The
Port-Royal Logic. For Arnauld and Watts education was foundationally
Christian and almost every part of logic had a Christian application.
Throughout Watts’s textbook there are features more similar to The Port-
Royal Logic than to An Essay on Human Understanding. Locke has no
chapter titles using “testimony” and his fourth section was not titled
“method.” Watts’s does. On the subject of topics, Watts does not condemn
them as useless, but otherwise follows The Port-Royal Logic in noting that
only his sense of duty leads him “to make a little delay here to treat briefly
of the doctrine of topics.”37 Watts granted that topics were sometimes use-
ful “for persons of lower genius” but “a man of moderate sagacity” and “just
diligence and enquiry” does not need them.38
What raises Watts’s textbook above Arnauld’s, Locke’s and so many
others was that Watts was one of England’s great stylists. He wrote with ele-
gant simplicity. He made even a long passage on rules so compelling that
many subsequent English textbooks on logic and jurisprudence, polemics
on miracles, and apologies for Christianity could not help but echo his
phrases and concepts. The following excerpt is long but the only way to
understand the cumulative power of Watts’s rhetoric and the comprehen-
sive way a majority of eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-American
students were taught to be reasonable with information gained from out-
side sources.
Principles and Rules of Judgment in Matters of Human

Testimony
The evidence of human testimony is not so proper to
lead us into the knowledge of the essence and inward nature
of things, as to acquaint us with the existence of things, and
to inform us of matters of fact both past and present. And
though there be a great deal of fallibility in the testimony of
men, yet there are some things we may be almost certain of,
as that the sun shines, or that five twenties make a hundred.
Who is there in London that knows any thing of the world,
but believes that there is a city as Paris in France; that the

Pope dwells in Rome; that Julius Caesar was an emperor; or
that Luther had a great hand in the Reformation?
If we observe the following rules, we may arrive at such
a certainty in many things of human testimony, as that it is
morally impossible we should be deceived, that is, we may
obtain a moral certainty.
Let us consider whether the thing reported be in itself
possible; if not, it can never be credible, whosoever relates it.
Consider farther whether it be probable, whether there
are any concurring circumstances to prove it, beside the mere
testimony of the person that relates it. I confess, if these last
conditions are wanting, the thing may be true, but then it
ought to have the stronger testimony to support it.
Consider whether the person who relates it be capable of
knowing the truth: Whether he be a skilful judge in such mat-
ters, if it be a business of art, or a nice appearance in nature,
or some curious experiment in philosophy. But if it be a mere
occurrence in life, a plain sensible matter of fact, it is enough
to enquire whether he who relates it were an eye or an ear
witness, or whether he himself had it only by hearsay, or can
trace it to the original.
Consider whether the narrator be honest and faithful, as
well as skilful; whether he hath no bias upon his mind, no
peculiar gain or profit by believing or reporting it, no interest
or principle which might warp his own belief aside from
truth, or which might tempt him to prevaricate, to speak
falsely, or to give a representation a little different from the
naked truth of things. In short, whether there be no occasion
of suspicion concerning his report.
Consider whether several persons agree together in the
report of this matter; and if so, then whether these persons
who joined together in their testimony, might not be sup-
posed to combine together in falsehood. Whether they are
persons of sufficient nations, sects, parties, opinions, or inter-
ests. For the more divided they are in all these, the more
likely is their report to be true, if they agree together in their
account of the same thing; and especially if they persist in it
without wavering.
Consider further, whether the report were capable of
being easily refuted at first, if it had not been true: If so, this
confirms the testimony.
Enquire yet again, whether there has been a constant,
uniform tradition and belief on this matter from the very first
age or time when the thing was transacted, without any rea-
sonable doubts or contradictions. Or,
If any part of it hath been doubted by any considerable
persons, whether it has been searched out and afterwards
confirmed, by having all the scruples and doubts removed.
In either of these cases the testimony becomes more firm and

credible.
Enquire, on the other hand, whether there are any con-
siderable objections remaining against the belief of that
proposition so attested. Whether there be any thing very
improbable in the thing itself. Whether any concurrent cir-
cumstances seem to oppose it. Whether any person or per-
sons give a positive and plain testimony against it. Whether
they are equally skilful and equally faithful as those who
assert it. Whether there be as many or more in number, and
whether they might have any secret bias or influence on them
to contradict it.
Sometimes the entire silence of a thing may have some-
thing of weight toward the decision of a doubtful point in his-
tory, or a matter of human faith, namely, where the fact is
pretended to be public, if the persons who are silent about it
were skilful to observe, and could not but know such an
occurrence; if they were engaged by principle or by interest
to have declared it; if they had fair opportunity to speak of it:
And these things may tend to make a matter suspicious, if it
be not very well attested by positive proof.
Remember that in some reports there are more marks of
falsehood than of truth, and in others there are more marks
of truth than falsehood. By a comparison of all these things
together, and putting every argument on one side and the
other into the balance, we must form as good a judgment as
we can which side preponderates; and give a strong or fee-
ble assent or dissent, or withhold our judgment entirely,
according to greater or lesser evidence, according to more
plain and dubious marks of truth or falsehood.
Observe that in matters of human testimony there is
oftentimes a great mixture of truth and falsehood in the report
itself: Some parts of the story may be perfectly true, and some
utterly false; and some may have such a blended confusion of
circumstances, which are a little warped aside from the truth,
and misrepresented, that there is need of good skill and accu-
racy to form a judgment concerning them, and determine
which part is true, and which is false. The whole report is not
to be believed, because some parts are as evident falsehood.39
Watts concluded this section with two observations. The first was that the
above rules fully supported the Christian religion, especially the event of
Jesus’ resurrection. The second observation was the weakness of ancient
human history. Like Locke, Watts did not think that ancient history in general
carried much authority. The authority of Jesus’ resurrection was exceptional
given the amount of first-hand testimony and surrounding circumstances.
Watts’s next chapter is on divine testimony. Here he also offered rules
that advanced and clarified the subject. Important for the many Christian
apologists who used Watts’s Logick, the initial authority behind Jesus’ alleged
resurrection was human testimony. Divine testimony overlay the initial
human testimony to give further support and supply different information.
As Locke had pointed out, human testimony was best for matters of fact but
little more. Divine testimony was the category upon which many larger mat-
ters depended. The key traditional issues with divine testimony were con-
firming its divine source and its relation to human reason. Watts, with English
gentility, offered a generally Lockean position with less negativity and less
overt antagonism to enthusiasm. Here again I transcribe all of Watts’s rules.
Principles and Rules of Judgment in Matters of Divine
Testimony
As human testimony acquaints us with matters of fact,
both past and present, which lie beyond the reach of our own
personal notice; so divine testimony is suited to inform us
both of the nature of things, as well as matters of fact, and of
things future, as well as present or past.
Whatsoever is dictated to us by God himself, or by men
who are divinely inspired, must be believed with full assur-
ance. Reason demands us to believe whatsoever divine reve-
lation dictates: For God is perfectly wise, and cannot be
deceived; he is faithful and good, and will not deceive his
creatures: And when reason has found out the certain marks
or credentials of divine testimony to belong to any proposi-
tion, there remains then no farther enquiry to be made, but
only to find out the true sense and meaning of that which
God has revealed, for reason itself demands the belief of it.
Now divine testimony or revelation requires these fol-
lowing credentials:
1. That the propositions or doctrines revealed be not
inconsistent with reason; for intelligent creatures can never be
bound to believe real inconsistencies. Therefore we are sure
the popish doctrine of transubstantiation is not a matter of
divine revelation, because it is contrary to all our senses and
our reason, even in their proper exercises. God can dictate
nothing but what is worthy of himself, and agreeable to his
own nature and divine perfections. Now many of these per-
fections are discoverable by the light of reason, and whatso-
ever is inconsistent with these perfections, cannot be a divine
revelation.
But let it be noted, that in matters of practice towards our
fellow-creatures, God may command us to act in a manner
contrary to what reason would direct antecedent to that
command. So Abraham was commanded to offer up his son
a sacrifice: The Israelites were ordered to borrow of the
Egyptians without paying them, and to plunder and slay the
inhabitants of Canaan: Because God has a sovereign right to
all things, and can with equity dispossess his creatures of life,
and every thing which he has given them, and especially such
sinful creatures as mankind; and he can appoint whom he
pleases to be the instruments of this just dispossession or
deprivation. So that these divine commands are not really
inconsistent with right reason; for whatsoever is so cannot be
believed where that inconsistency appears.
2. Upon the same account the whole doctrine of revela-
tion must be consistent with itself; every part of it must be
consistent with each other: And though in points of practice
latter revelation may repeal or cancel former divine laws, yet
in matters of belief, no latter revelation can be inconsistent
with what has been heretofore revealed.
3. Divine revelation must be confirmed by some divine
and supernatural appearances, some extraordinary signs or
tokens, visions, voices, or miracles wrought, or prophecies
fulfilled. There must be some demonstrations of the presence
and power of God, superior to all the powers of nature, or
the settled connection which God as Creator has established
among his creatures in this visible world.
4. If there are any such extraordinary and wonderful
appearances and operations brought to contest with, or to
oppose divine revelation, there must and always will be such
a superiority on the side of revelation which is truly divine,
as to manifest that God is there. This was the case when the
Egyptian sorcerers contended with Moses. But the wonders
which Moses wrought did so far transcend the power of the
magicians, as made them confess, It was the finger of God.
5. These divine appearances or attestations to revelation
must be either known to ourselves by our own personal
observation of them, or they must be sufficiently attested by
others, according to the principles and rules by which matters
of human faith are to be judged in the foregoing section.
Some of those who lived in nations and ages where mir-
acles were wrought, were eye and ear witnesses of the truth
and divinity of the revelation; but we, who live in these
distant ages, must have them derived down to us by just and
incontestable history and tradition. We also, even in these
distant times, may see the accomplishment of some ancient
predictions, and thereby obtain that advantage toward the
confirmation of our faith in divine revelation, beyond what
those persons enjoyed who lived when the predictions were
pronounced.
6. There is another very considerable confirmation of
divine testimony; and that is when the doctrines themselves,
either on the publication or the belief of them produce super-
natural effects. Such were the miraculous powers which com-
municated to believers in the first ages of Christianity, the
conversion of Jews or Gentiles, the amazing success of the
gospel of Christ, without human aid, and in opposition to
a thousand impediments; its power in changing the hearts and

lives of ignorant and vicious heathens, and wicked and profane
creatures in all nations, and filling them with a spirit of virtue,
piety, and goodness. Wheresoever persons have found this
effect in their own hearts, wrought by a belief of the gospel of
Christ, they have a witness in themselves of the truth of it, and
abundant reason to believe it divine.40
Although Watts praised Locke’s Essay overall, the testimony portion of

his Logick followed the positive tone and Christian focus of The Port-Royal
Logic. Following Arnauld’s lead in discussing miracle accounts in the con-
text of human—not divine—testimony, and Locke’s emphasis on human
testimony as establishing matters of fact, Watt’s emphasized human testi-
mony as the foundation to Christian apologetics.
Writing a logic textbook was for Watts an opportunity to discuss dog-
matism, skepticism, probability, humility, education of children, women’s
rights to education, daily prayer, travel, the narrowness of the human mind,
and responsibility to think for oneself while respecting the authority of
some of the ancients, of parents when not mistaken, and of Great Men such
as Descartes, Luther, and Calvin when they are not wrong. The tension
between authority and thinking for oneself is a major theme in the book.
Like Arnauld, Watts warned against following authority too easily but
understood its unavoidable role in reasonableness. Also like Arnauld, Watts
closed with a section on method and sprinkled the text with summary sets
of rules for “a coherent thinker and strict reasoner.”41
Overall, Watts preached that precision, proof, and truth should be the
reasoner’s constant aspiration while wisdom in handling degrees of assent
was a necessity of rational living. Watts, the reclusive and quiet poet, also
warned against any rush to judgment. “Take due time,” he advised, “and
be not too hasty to come to a determination, especially in points of impor-
tance.”42 Given the clarity, piety and gentleness that pervades Watts’s Logick,
its long popularity in British and American Christian education is under-
standable.
QUANTIFYING THE QUALITY OF TESTIMONY AND

BALANCING LIKELIHOOD
According to Ian Hacking, the high mathematical, practical, and philosoph-
ical hopes that got attached to probability fully emerged in 1713 with the
publication of Jakob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi. The direct source for this
emergence, Hacking notes, was the method section of the book Bernoulli
used as his model—the Ars Cogitandi, more commonly known as The Port-
Royal Logic.43 Since the Stoics, the history of testimony and authority had
been tied to the role of probability in logic. Levels of probability and

certainty were commonly correlated to types of testimony—divine or
human—and the relative authority of the testifier. But the old Stoic manner
of discussing probability was packed with new meaning and supposed pre-
cision when logician-mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies applied their numbers and formulas to the tradition. Antoine Arnauld
and his Jansenist friend Blaise Pascal were at the forefront of encouraging
the application of math to testimony that comes down to us in modern times
most blatantly in the method of handling testimony called “balancing likeli-
hoods.” Possibly the longest-lasting influence of The Port-Royal Logic on the
handling of testimony and authority is the implied precision of mathematics
that is submerged in references to weighing testimony, comparing the prob-
ability of testimonies, and otherwise measuring testimony and authority.
Extensive application of mathematics and the models of mathematics
and geometry were at the core of the early modern intellectual revolution
and are so common in the modern life that many seldom think about them.
Ever since at least Plato, the art of being reasonable had been influenced
by mathematics and geometry. Aristotle also linked reasoning to math, but
he also made a point of linking reasonableness to nonmathematical issues
of applied wisdom. Mathematics was a model for formal thinking, but not
much help with the informalities of good judgment. Boys could manipulate
closed systems. Age and experience was needed for open systems such as
the courtroom or politics. Aristotle had also encouraged limiting the influ-
ence of mathematics by the way he constructed his categories. We have
seen how matters of human psychology—and by extension in the
Renaissance the handling of testimony—were categorized as a quality in
the categories. Quantity was for Aristotelians a separate category; mixing
quantity and quality was a category error. Color is a quality. Size is a quan-
tity. It was simple foolishness to ask: How big is blue? By extension it
would be simple foolishness to ask what a testimony weighed. But Francis
Bacon wanted to throw out the old Organon for a new. Gallileo and
Descartes were enamored with the idea that math was the language of all
things natural. Arnauld and Locke thought that math could help make the
handling of testimony more rigorous.
The ten Aristotelian categories had traditionally insisted on the separa-
tion of quantity and quality. Of course there were appropriate combina-
tions of the two categories such as counting how many testifiers agreed
with each other and some odd leakages between the two such as consid-
eration of the age of the witness. Nevertheless, it was the law of the cate-
gories to keep issues separate:
Now principles are said to be heterogenous . . . when they are

fetched from some other science: as if one for the proving of
physical questions should make use of mathematical princi-

ples; or geometrical, arithmetical. But it is not lawful for a
demonstrator to pass from one science to another.44
The Port-Royal Logic, however, broke the law. To Arnauld, Aristotles’s

categories and topics seemed impractical, unnatural, and obstructive to
dynamic reasoning. Augustine had waxed eloquent on mathematics as the
highest language available to humans. The Cartesian-Augustinian alliance
encouraged Arnauld to construct the first three sections of The Port-Royal
Logic on the model of geometry. He recommended to his readers Pascal’s
rules for “The Art of Persuasion” that applied “The Mind of the
Geometrician” to logic. In the fourth section on method, Arnauld goes
beyond merely encouraging the application of mathematical probability to
testimonial probability—he actually encourages its use for “Judgments we
ought to make concerning future accidents.”45
Between Arnauld and Pascal, it will never be known who was respon-
sible for what ideas. Pascal’s famous wager argument manifests both the
way they shared ideas and shared especially a high hope that mathematics
could be used in Christian apologetics. The wager argument states that
even without full certainty of the truth of Christianity it is the smart bet to
be a Christian because the possibility of gaining eternal happiness is math-
ematically a better bet than embracing short-term human happiness on
Earth. Although called Pascal’s wager, the first publication of the argument
was in the last chapter of The Port-Royal Logic. Arnauld, however, may
have gotten the argument from Pascal since they were friends. Also,
Arnauld and others were the posthumous editors of Pascal’s notes that
eventually gained fame under the name Pensées. Although not directly tied
to testimony, the wager argument is an example to us of how eager
Arnauld was to apply mathematics to what were traditionally qualitative
matters. The wager argument depends on associating a mathematical con-
cept of infinity with eternal salvation then inserting it into a formula for cal-
culating probability.46 Thus, eternal salvation becomes a quantity. The effect
of applying infinity to a probability formula is to explode the formula—by
extension making it foolish to not bet on Christianity.47 The law that sepa-
rated quality and quantity was broken and, as Ian Hacking notes, the
Bernoulli family and many philosophically oriented mathematicians in the
eighteenth century followed Arnauld’s lead.
Lorraine Daston in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988)
describes several more ways The Port-Royal Logic encouraged quantifying
qualities. Aside from blatant use of numbers such as in the previously
quoted example of notaries (999 out of 1000 notarized documents are cor-
rectly dated), Arnauld quantified risks and called readers “to view geomet-
rically the proportion” of likelihoods for future contingent events.48 Daston
notes specifically that Arnauld wanted to quantify the answer to “when

does testimony warrant belief?” She points out that Arnauld’s phrases such
as ‘ “incomparably more often’ begged to be quantified.”49
The rise of mathematical probability applied to testimony had no sin-
gle source or simple cause-effect line of influence. Certainly The Port-Royal
Logic was at the forefront of the movement; but Christian apologists, court-
room reformers, and historians along with logic textbook writers, each
working within the traditions of their fields, fed off of each other, acceler-
ating a far-flung interest in handling testimony with mathematical precision.
Grand idealists such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz “envisioned a day when
all disputes would be settled by computation: ‘Let us calculate, Sir!’ would
be the challenge thrown down by opponents.”50 Given our interest in the
tradition of art-of-thinking textbooks, I shall avoid taking us too far into
extensive literature on jurisprudence, miracle accounts, and the credibility
of ancient (and biblical) historians. But it is appropriate to take a brief
excursion into mathematical literature and the advice eighteenth-century
mathematicians offered on handling testimony. In a very direct way, Jakob
Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi along with his nephew Nikolaus I’s De Usu
Artis Conjectandi in Jure (1709) picked up testimony where Arnauld’s Ars
Cogitandi left it off, developed a new calculus for the method, and offered
it back to general education textbooks.
GOOD SENSE REDUCED TO CALCULUS
In the eighteenth century the descriptive power of mathematics seemed to

have unlimited potential. Even back in the seventeenth century, Newton’s
compatriot Edmund Halley was as busy gathering quantitative data from
historical sources about deaths and baptisms as he was about comets.
Politics, capital investments, insurance risks, even small pox epidemics were
quantified in the search for formulas and numerical patterns. Probability
excited much attention as a mathematical tool for foretelling the future and
sifting through the past. This new power overshadowed its older meaning
as a general qualitative rating on the relative strength or weaknesses of
knowledge. Increasingly numbers and symbols were considered the best
tools for seeing deep, formerly invisible regularities in nature. Creating a
calculus, reducing reality down to numbers and symbols, became applica-
ble even to the common-sense, natural method of handling testimony. For
the most part, textbooks such as Watts’s Logick followed a conservative
course through this movement of mathematical idealism, although Richard
Kirwan’s Logick (1807) will later be discussed as an example of an English
textbook with extensive interest in reducing good sense to calculus. This
eighteenth-century desire to create a calculus for testimony was largely
founded on the work of Jakob and Nikolaus Bernoulli.
Jakob Bernoulli (1654–1705) was born in Basel and in 1687 became pro-
fessor of mathematics at the university there. His Ars Conjectandi was pub-
lished after his death by his nephew and collaborator Nikolas Bernoulli I
(1687–1759). Nikolaus was raised to the chair of logic at the University of
Basel in 1722, trading it for the professorship in law in 1731. Back in 1709,
when as a student pursuing a degree of doctor of jurisprudence and proba-
bly working with material that he and his uncle had earlier discussed,
Nikolaus wrote a dissertation that was published as De Usu Artis Conjectandi
in Iure (1709). This book was possibly the first attempt at quantifying
testimonial credibility with mathematical precision. He advocated judging the
credibility of a specific testimony by first measuring the veracity of the
witness. First the witness’s past lies and truth-tellings should be counted and
juxtaposed to create a ratio of general credibility. Second, that ratio should
then be used as part of the assessment of the individual testimony. As
Lorraine Daston puts it, Bernoulli thought that circumstances in history could
be assumed “to duplicate themselves closely enough for [his] proportions to
make sense.”51
No reputable mathematician or logician proposed that their numbers
and formulas measured the real character of a witness or the actual credi-
bility of a testimony with complete precision. Rather, the numbers were a
more-or-less rigorous analogies to reality. Take for example one of the most
famous students of probability, Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace
(1749–1827). In Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités (1814) the first para-
graph of his chapter on testimonies begins:
The majority of our opinions being founded on the probabil-
ity of proofs it is indeed important to submit it to calculus.
Things it is true often become impossible by the difficulty of
appreciating the veracity of witnesses and by the great num-
ber of circumstances which accompany the deeds they attest;
but one is able in several cases to resolve the problems which
have much analogy with the questions which are proposed
and whose solutions may be regarded as suitable approxima-
tions to guide and to defend us against the errors and the
dangers of false reasoning to which we are exposed. An
approximation of this kind, when it is well made, is always
preferable to the most specious reasonings.52
Note that Laplace recognizes the long tradition of handling testimony as

a conjunction of complex circumstances—the character of the variant testi-
fiers, the historical and psychological contexts of various versions of the tes-
timony, the judgments passed by others, and the levels of authority of people
and institutions involved (for instance, Arnauld’s example about the baptism
of Constantine). Still, the use of mathematics offers an “analogy,” an “approx-
imation,” that is “preferable” to the old non-mathematicized methods.
Granting Laplace’s declaration of offering only an analogy or approxi-

mation, his books were amazingly optimistic and unrealistically rigorous
about numbers being assigned to character and certainty. His most recent
biographer, Charles Coulston Gillispie, cites The Port-Royal Logic as an ini-
tial source for Laplace’s long interest in measuring certainty.53 Laplace had a
“grand faith” in a fully determined mechanistic universe where the mathe-
matical regularities of even testimony and authority could be uncovered.54
He seems to have believed that good sense could be reduced to a calculus.
THE CALCULUS OF BALANCING LIKELIHOODS
Like the Bernoulis, David Hume was an influential proponent of reducing

the problems of handling testimony—especially the extreme problem of
miracle reports—to a calculus. Due largely to Hume’s lively, even bombas-
tic, rhetoric, his essay “Of Miracles” has become a channel marker in the his-
tory of testimony.55 In his opening pages, Hume offers what has become the
classic statement of a mathematical rule usually called “balancing likeli-
hoods” as it applies to handling testimony. He presents it succinctly in the
three following paragraphs from his essay Of Miracles. Note how the tradi-
tional language of logical probability and assent become entwined with the
new language of mathematical formulas of probability. The key issue is the
ability to work with testimony as “regular,” “constant,” and “uniform” so as
to create two oppositional quantities, the lesser of which can be subtracted
from the larger to yield a single ratio.
A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
In such conclusions as are founded on an infallible experi-
ence, he expects the event with the last degree of assurance,
and regards his past experience as a full proof of the future
existence of the event. In other cases he proceeds with more
caution: He weighs the opposite experiments: He considers
which side is supported by the greater number of experi-
ments: to that side he inclines, with doubt and hesitation; and
when at last he fixes his judgement, the evidence exceeds not
what we properly call probability. All probability, then, sup-
poses an opposition of experiments and observations, where
the one side is found to overbalance the other, and to pro-
duce a degree of evidence, proportioned to the superiority.
A hundred instances or experiments on the one side, and fifty
on the other, afford a doubtful expectation of any event;
though a hundred uniform experiments, with only one that is
contradictory, reasonably beget a pretty strong degree of
assurance. In all cases, we must balance the opposite exper-
iments, where they are opposite, and deduct the smaller num-
ber from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the
superior evidence.
To apply these principles to a particular instance; we may

observe, that there is no species of reasoning more common,
more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that
which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports
of eye-witnesses and spectators. This species of reasoning,
perhaps, one may deny to be founded on the relation of
cause and effect. I shall not dispute about a word. It will be
sufficient to observe that our assurance in any argument of
this kind is derived from no other principle than our obser-
vation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual
conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses. It being a gen-
eral maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion
together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from
one another, are founded merely on our experience of their
constant and regular and regular conjunction; it is evident,
that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in
favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event
seems, in itself, as little necessary as any other. Were not the
memory tenacious to a certain degree; had not men com-
monly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were
they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood:
Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be quali-
ties, inherent in human nature, we should never repose
the least confidence in human testimony. A man delirious, or
noted for falsehood and villany, has no manner of authority
with us.
And as the evidence, derived from witnesses and human
testimony, is founded on past experience, so it varies with
the experience, and is regarded as a proof or a probability,
according as the conjunction between any particular kind of
report and any kind of object has been found to be constant
or variable. There are a number of circumstances to be taken
into consideration in all judgments of this kind; and the ulti-
mate standard, by which we determine all disputes, that may
arise concerning them, is always derived from experience and
observation. Where this experience is not entirely uniform
on any side, it is attended with an unavoidable contrariety in
our judgements, and with the same opposition and mutual
destruction of argument as in every other kind of evidence.
We frequently hesitate concerning the reports of others. We
balance the opposite circumstances, which cause any doubt
or uncertainty; and when we discover a superiority on any
side, we incline to it; but still with diminution of assurance,
in proportion to the force of its antagonist.56
There are two general ways balancing likelihood is suppose to work.

In the first application, “we balance the opposite circumstances.” Using
conformity to experience as the common denominator, the receiver of a
testimony can create two ratios. Supposing one numerator to describe the
amount of conformity with experience, subtract that numerator from the
denominator to get another numerator describing the amount of unconfor-
mity with experience. Subtract the smaller fraction from the greater, and
thereby produce the “exact force of the superior evidence.” So suppose a
testimony conforms to experience as 7/10. It then does not conform as
3/10. Subtract 3 from 7 and the “exact force” is only 4/10 in favor of the
testimony. Such is the “diminution of assurance” brought about by creating
in the receiver’s mind an “opposite circumstance.” The second general
application is not with an opposite contrived solely in one’s mind but in
relation to “the opposition of contrary testimony; from the character or
number of the witnesses; from the manner of their delivering their testi-
mony; or from the union of all these circumstances.”57
Hume, unlike Laplace, did not warn his readers that he was only offer-
ing an analogy or approximation; rather, he jumped with both feet into the
mire of applying quantities to qualities. Many supporters and critics have
tried to make sense of how either of these applications can be made to
serve a useful purpose. In the twentieth century, with the decline of sophis-
ticated interest in testimony, many consider Hume’s essay not only to be
the classic statement on handling testimony, but pretty much all one needs
to know. I was once on a panel in which a well-respected historian
declared that he had recently read Hume’s essay and found only simple
good sense. It is hard to read the above quoted paragraphs and find any-
thing simple even if you want to find the good sense.
Beginning with The Port-Royal Logic and much expanded in the eigh-
teenth century, it became common for students to be taught probabilistic
logic made over into a form that relied on the mathematical probability. As
can be seen in Hume’s essay, the language of quantities, measurement, and
formulas was relied upon to create an aura of rigor and precision. Stephen
Toulmin warns against “an excessive respect for mathematics” when think-
ing about probability.58 Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) advised readers
to be wary of mathematical notions in probability in three essays: “A
Preliminary Chapter, Toward an Examination of Hume’s Argument Against
Miracles, in its Logic and in its History,” “Hume’s Arguments Against
Miracles, and the Idea of Natural Law,” and “On the Logic of Drawing
History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies.”59 “In a sci-
entific sense,” Peirce writes, “there are no ‘probabilities’ to be judged.”60
Since probability “is the ratio of the frequency of occurrence of a specific
event to a generic event,” it cannot be applied to handling testimony. A tes-
timony “is neither a specific event, nor a generic event, but an individual
event.” 61 There are no regularities, uniformities, or constants in human
nature, experience, or observation that can be used to create a numerators
and denominators. Human life is too complex for such reductions.
“Likelihood is merely a reflection of our preconceived ideas.”62 What

Arnauld, Pascal, Bernoulli, Laplace, and Hume hoped would be an aid to
common sense is not necessarily sensible.
Having strayed into the statements of mathematicians and philosophers
working with matters first encouraged by The Port-Royal Logic, we must
now get back on track. An excellent example of The Port-Royal Logic’s long
influence, especially in terms of handling testimony and the mathematical
modeling that was perceived to be a help, is Richard Kirwan’s Logick; or,
An Essay on the Elements, Principles, and Different Modes of Reasoning
(1807).
RICHARD KIRWAN’S “LOGICK”
A Roman Catholic from Ireland, Richard Kirwan (1733–1812) studied at the

University of Poiters, then for a while was a novice among the Jesuits.
Upon gaining his inheritance, he left his noviciate to return to Ireland,
where he abandoned Catholicism and became a natural philosopher. For a
short time he pursued a legal career, but he devoted most of his life to gen-
teel scholarship and scientific inquiry. Most famous as a chemist, Kirwan
also developed a system of forecasting the weather by applying the math-
ematics of probability to data gathered over a period of forty-one years. His
mother-in-law called him a “smelly, bookish, monk.”63 Given his interest in
law and probability, when late in life he came to write his Logick, it
included close to two hundred octavo pages devoted to handling testimony
and authority. The Port-Royal Logic had divorced testimony from topics and
invigorated it with mathematical method. Kirwan hoped to further invigo-
rate the tradition. But Kirwan was not directly connected with a university
or the curricular reform movements of the era. His Logick may not have
been adopted in many classrooms, but it does show how the seventeenth-
century tenets of The Port-Royal Logic flowed into the early nineteenth cen-
tury. In the long run of Anglo-American logic, Kirwan is the most extensive
student in a tradition begun at Port-Royal in the seventeenth century that
continued into the early twentieth century.
In the preface to his Logick, Kirwan noted his desire to improve the
popular textbooks by Arnauld, Locke, and Watts by making logic more prac-
tical and to use mathematics more carefully. Like Arnauld, Kirwan insisted
that “practice has always preceded method and rule.”64 A practical logic must
increase the rigor of natural logic rather than impose unwieldy structures.
As for mathematics, Kirwan counseled careful consideration of the differ-
ence between math and dialectic before simply transferring the “skills of
mathematical demonstration into other parts of knowledge.”65 Kirwan was
more careful than Hume and Laplace. One can go too far, he believed, in
making dialectic mathematical. A mathematical mind can actually unfit
a person for the fuzzier subjects of ethics, jurisprudence, and medicine.

Mathematics has “clearness of definitions” whereas practical dialectic usually
does not.66
Testimony, for Kirwan, was “the sole medium by which we can be cer-
tain of the existence of things, persons, or facts, which our own senses
have not witnessed and of which we have no direct proof.” Authority he
defined more broadly as
the right (or in other words, the propriety and reasonable-

ness) that persons duly qualified have that the facts they
attest, or the uncontradicted decisions on objects known to
them, should be received by others, though strangers to those
facts, and unacquainted with the grounds of such decisions,
as a full proof of their truth. The first he called testimonial,
the second doctrinal authority.67
Of doctrinal authority, in keeping with early modern tradition, Kirwan

warned his readers to be wary. But, in general, testimony and authority were
the means of expanding knowledge beyond one’s self and required an expan-
sive understanding of the social responsibilities of being reasonable. Note the
way Kirwan prefaces a section dealing with “the credibility of testimony when
given to facts more or less conformable with, or adverse to experience”:
I must here premise that by our experience, I understand not

solely our personal and individual experience or observation,
which, in the greater part of mankind, are necessarily con-
fined within very narrow limits, but also that mass of adven-
titious knowledge, derived from the general and uniform
experience of all ages and countries; which being conveyed
to us by multiplied and uncontradicted testimony, and har-
monizing with our own personal experience, as far as it
extends, assimililates with it, and is relied upon with the same
degree of confidence as we repose in that, which is in the
strictest sense our own.68
Testimony was the “indirect” source of much of our knowledge.69 Credible

authorities had a right to have their testimonies received. Testimony and
authority brought breadth of experience into what would otherwise be a
parochial and isolated knowledge base.
As with Kirwan’s meteorological data gathered from four decades, a
reasonable person handling the multitude incoming testimonies could ben-
efit from mathematical skills. Although he affirmed the Aristotelian tradition
that “the frame of mind necessary to constitute a great dialectician, seems
different from that necessary to constitute a great mathematician,” Kirwan
believed that the mathematics of probability was useful as a model for
handling “probable facts [along with] probable opinions, supported and

denied by unequal authorities.”70 By reducing the interwoven qualities of
character and experience down to an estimated quantity, some principles
and relationships could be illuminated. The ability to create a mathemati-
cal analogy to a testimonial problem could be a handy tool in the new
organon of modern reasonable people.
The mathematics becomes most helpful when dealing with multiple
variables. For example, a jury member estimates the credibility of a witness:
5/10 or .5 means that the witness is as likely to be lying as to be telling the
truth, 10/10 or 1 means that the witness has to be telling the truth. That
ratio alone is not much help; however, it becomes helpful when trying to
relate the force of two weak witnesses with the same testimony against one
witness with more credibility.
The credibility or force of concordant and independent wit-

nesses, is as the product of the chances favourable to each,
multiplied into each other, (this product forms the numerator
of the fraction, that expresses their credibility,) and divided by
the product of the chances, unfavorable to each, that is, of
their several deficiencies; these two products added to each
other, present the sum of the several chances, both favourable
and unfavourable, and therefore form the denominator of the
fraction. . . . If the credibility of one of the concordant wit-
nesses, be 6/10 and that of the other 7/10, then the combined
credibility is, 42/42⫹12 ⫽ 42/54 ⫽ 77/100. Whereas the credi-
bility of the one witness may be 8/10 ⫽ 80/100.71
Since 80/100 beats 77/100, it is easy to see how one witness, slightly more
credible than two others, can still hold sway. But because the numbers are
estimates created out of the head of an individual, the benefit of a jury trial
comes by further correlating the calculations of all twelve jurors. Twelve
“intelligent” jurors make their own personal calculations, then average the
sums together to arrive at a “joint opinion” of the force of the two witnesses
against the one.72
Kirwan applied his calculus to a wide variety of models, including
plural reports, successive reports, newspaper reports, ancient facts with
corroborating evidence, ancient facts without corroborating evidence,
incredible reports, miraculous reports, and absurd reports. All along the
way he refers readers to the wide range of eighteenth-century litera-
ture—scientific journals, manuals on laws of evidence, treatises by math-
ematicians, and other logicians—contributing to the calculus of
testimony. Toward the end he even tentatively offers a scale to help esti-
mate values for the credibility of witnesses, those swearing by the Bible
and those unsworn.
Solidity of judgment consists chiefly in the just estimation of

probabilities, and when the requisite data are known, it is
seldom that any mistake can occur; but in many cases, these
are difficultly procured.
To help to form an estimate of the credibility of wit-
nesses, whether known to us, or absolutely unknown, I have
formed the following scale; which, if judged defective, may
be amended by others.
Unknown, and of the lowest class ..........12/20
Ditto, sworn73 .............................................14/20
Unknown, but of superior condition .......14/20
Ditto, sworn...............................................15/20
Known and credible .................................15/20
Ditto, sworn...............................................16/20
More credible ............................................17/20
Sworn.........................................................18/20
Still more credible .....................................18/20
Sworn.........................................................19/20
Of the highest credibility..........................19/2074
Kirwan went on to list factors in assigning a person a place on the scale

such as age, education, rank in life, and whether the witness is a profes-
sional. “Professional men” should be, in general, ranked high.
Kirwan wanted to fully develop what Arnauld had begun. He believed
that the mathematics of probability could bring greater precision to the
dialectic of probability if the limitations of analogies between the two were
accounted for and the reasoner kept in mind that the quantities being
assigned were estimates. Kirwan also wanted to fix some popular errors and
misunderstandings. Like others before and after him, Kirwan desired to
show that the testimonial foundations of Christianity were not necessarily
weakened by using mathematicized probability. In many a mathematician’s
mind, Hume had rigged his attack on miracles to look precise and mathe-
matically objective. For Kirwan, reports of miracles should be balanced for
likelihood, but in a way that was, at the outset, neither skeptical nor gullible.
Kirwan was harsh with Hume, describing his method of balancing like-
lihoods as leading to an absurdity. Kirwan did not offer a full critique of
Hume’s essay, but rather focused on Hume’s interest in the “diminution of
assurance.”75 “The method recommended by Mr. Hume,” Kirwan wrote, “for
comparing and balancing contradictory testimonies, consists of deducting
the inferior credibility from the superior, the remainder, he says, will show,
how much the superior is weakened.”76 Here Kirwan hits on the way the
structure of the formula could be rigged for skepticism. Kirwan showed
how when set up this way “the credibility of the most respectable witness
would be destroyed by the opposition of one whose credibility is doubt-
ful.”77 Hume’s formula was designed in a way to diminish the power of
a credible witness, and, in the specific case of two contradictory witnesses,

the credible witness’s credibility is linked to and dragged down by the lack
of credibility in the other. Unlike Arnauld’s example of Constantine’s bap-
tism in which the credibility of each testifier is independently judged,
allowing the reasoner to dismiss two weak testimonies and accept the full
authority of the strong testimony, Hume has the credibility of the weak tes-
tifiers subtracted from the strength of the strong testifier to arrive at a
“diminution of assurance, in proportion to the force of its antagonist.”78 To
Kirwan the formula leads to an absurdity: that simply because some unwor-
thy testifier disagrees with a respected professional, we are obligated to link
the two and diminish the authority of the obviously credible source!
Kirwan also uses the language of balancing to readdress traditional
subjects. For instance, when discussing various types of improbabilities—
extraordinary facts, supernatural facts, miraculous facts, absurd facts, and
mixed facts—one balanced the credibility of the witness against the
improbability of the fact. A credible witness within the context of certain
circumstances could make any improbability—except a metaphysically
impossible absurdity—credible.79
Kirwan not only took David Hume to task, he also took on a lingering
idea from John Locke that written testimony diminished in authority over
time, implying a mathematically measurable rate. This proposal by Locke is
one of the links between the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and
The Port-Royal Logic. Locke, in a much less sophisticated way, also wanted
to apply math to testimony but do so in a way that supported his general
theme of negative caution. Arnauld, remember, had discussed the certainty
of a deed attested by two notaries. Locke responded that there was “a Rule
observed in the law of England” that though an attested copy of an origi-
nal deed could be admitted as proof, “the Copy of a Copy never so well
attested, and by never so credible Witnesses, will not be admitted as a
proof in Judicature.”80 Locke then observed “That any Testimony, the far-
ther off it is from the original Truth, the less force and proof it has.” Further
he offered a sort of mechanical rule that “in traditional Truths, each remove
weakens the force of the proof.”81
Kirwan had the highest respect for Locke, but he could not find justi-
fication for Locke’s assertion that written testimony necessarily diminished
in authority as it was copied over long periods of time. Kirwan believed
instead that it could actually increase in authority. The subject was much
debated in the eighteenth century in the context of ancient history, the
Bible, and legal documents such as deeds.82 The most infamous expansion
on Locke’s rule was an algorithm for the diminishing credibility of the eye-
witness accounts of Jesus published by a theologian and mathematician
named John Craige. In his Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology
(1699), Craige’s algorithm has the step-by-step diminution of gospel
testimony lasting until the year 3150. Craige used this algorithm to predict
the second coming because he believed Jesus’ return would be correlated
to end of testimonial authority for his life and teachings.83 Laplace thought
Craige’s math “bizarre” but affirmed that inevitably “the action of time
enfeebles” testimony—even written and published testimony.84 In “The
Sixth Dialogue” of George Berkeley’s Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher,
Crito defends the moral certainty of histories but admits that the light of
truth “is variously weakened and obscured, by passing through a long dis-
tance or gross medium, where it is intercepted, distorted, or tinctured, by
the prejudices and passions of men.”85 It cannot be denied, he says, that
eyewitnesses to Jesus have stronger evidence than we can have.
Kirwan taught that this is not necessarily true. He asserted that
testimonies committed to paper could retain their original level of certainty.
Written testimony, in general, he believed to be “vastly stronger” than oral
testimony because not only is it preserved but a writer “has more leisure to
weigh his account, and render it more accurate.”86 In the case of passing
through centuries of the gross medium of human distortions, textual criti-
cism would be able to find the copying errors and preserve the truth.
Directly answering Locke, Kirwan wrote that the “true reason” a copy of a
copy of a well-attested deed in not acceptable to the courts is not neces-
sarily that the document is not trusted, but rather that those presenting it
are not trusted. The copy of a copy is allowed in court if it can be proved
to be the only copy.87
In sum, The Port-Royal Logic introduced the use of mathematics of
probability to textbook discussions of testimony. A century and a half later,
Kirwan’s Logick offered close to two hundred pages on testimony and
authority, much of it modeled on the mathematics of probability. Later in
the nineteenth century, as will be shown in the next chapter, the most
dynamic textbooks on the art of thinking reasonably were written by new
groups of Aristotelian sympathizers who thought it wise not to try to quantify
qualities. However, the use of math in the handling of testimony continued
to be assumed and taught. Hume’s essay against miracles continued to be
popular and to function as a talisman for the vague idea that there was some
mathematical sophistication to balancing likelihoods. I have quoted C. S.
Peirce’s attacks on the math in Hume’s essay. Careful reasoners always rec-
ognized that the math could act only as a superficial analogy to the deeper
human complexities of handling testimony. In the middle of the twentieth
century Stephen Toulmin still thought it important in The Uses of Argument
(1958) to disabuse people from assuming that the language of “weighing”
and “balancing” meant that dialectical arguments had any claim to mathe-
matical rigor.88 James McCosh, Scot logician and president of the College of
New Jersey (later Princeton University), is an example of an influential edu-
cator who at the end of the nineteenth century carried on the tradition of
Kirwan. In The Laws of Discursive Thought (1870), McCosh noted that

“sometimes we can, in a loose way, numerically estimate” the credibility of
testifiers and create a formula that will help judge the credibility of an
attested event.89 “The shrewd man of the world,” he noted, can use the math
to help judge and then present his conclusion without reference to num-
bers.90 My leisure reading recently produced an example of McCosh’s
shrewd man—showing the vestiges of Arnauld and Kirwan reaching into the
twentieth century. In John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) the
confused hero must decide the truth among several diverse narratives: “He
[wrote] down his authorities . . . and had an odd trick of giving them all
numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the reliability
of each stage of the yarn.”91 Buchan (1875–1940) was not only a novelist; he
was a Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities and later became
Governor-General of Canada. It is not out of line to think that Buchan cal-
culated numerical probabilities for testimonies as a help in governing
Canada between the world wars. Buchan called it an “odd trick” but there
was a long tradition of teaching it derived from The Port-Royal Logic.
LE CLERC AND BAYLE IN THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
Testimony and authority were increasingly vital issues in the seventeenth

century. World exploration, political and religious polemics, scientific
awakenings, codification of jurisprudential practices, and rigorous textual
scholarship all conspired to encourage thinking about the art of reasonably
handling testimony. In education, the increasing profitability of textbook
publication, together with curricular reforms that put one- and two-year
courses in dialectic at the core of general education, encouraged a flood of
textbooks discussing testimony and authority. The seventeenth century saw
the beginnings of an accelerating economy of education. New institutions,
the need for more faculty and textbooks, and the drawing of intellectual
lines between nations, denominations, and philosophies all wove together
to accelerate an early modern, Western, and Christian intellectual interest in
the reasonable handling of testimony and authority.
Weaving in and out of this accelerating economy of education in early
modern Europe was what its citizens called a “Republic of Letters,” an infor-
mal and international network of readers and writers who were often moti-
vated by the Hellenistic ideal of the encyclopedia—to master and expand
the whole curriculum of knowledge. The most influential impresarios of the
republic were Jean LeClerc (1657–1736) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Like
many other citizens of the republic, LeClerc and Bayle had geographical ties
to Holland. Descartes, Arnauld, and Locke are only the most famous of
many thinkers who found lively intellectual toleration and friendships in the
land of Erasmus and Hugo Grotius. LeClerc was a Swiss Protestant who cen-
tered his activity in Amsterdam. Bayle was a Protestant from the provinces
of southern France who worked out of Rotterdam. Both men wrote widely,
but found their initial influence in publishing magazines that reviewed and
digested the work of many of the greatest intellects of their era, such as
Arnauld, Locke, Leibniz, and Malebranche. LeClerc published and edited
the Bibiothèque Universelle et Historique (1686–93), then the Bibliothèque
Choisie (1703–13), and then Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne (1704–27).
Bayle published and edited Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684–87)
and wrote a widely read Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697).
As can be seen from the above titles, LeClerc and Bayle were both
interested in history and historical methods. Anthony Grafton has found the
roots of the modern historical footnote in both these men. Footnotes, for
Grafton, are the key to the “messy mixture of art and science” that brings
authority to modern academic history.92 They are part of a double narrative
in which the author of the text at the top of the page carries on a second
discussion with the reader about authority at the bottom of the page.
Indeed, the footnotes themselves carry a double message. One is a request
by the writer that the reader not trust him or her for accurately reporting
on the testimony of a source. “Go to the source yourself!” the writer tells
the reader. But that message is a sham because both writer and reader
know that it will be very rare that the reader checks the original sources.
The second message is “Trust me!” The writer, by encouraging the reader
to look up the sources, shows that he or she is willing to be tested and asks
for the reader’s trust. The writer gains greater authority because of his or
her willingness. So the double message is “Don’t trust me!” and “Trust me!”
In the mix of these two contradictories comes greater authority.
Bayle and LeClerc helped develop this double narrative with its double
message. Its use became an important aspect of historical writing in the
republic of letters. Bayle took the double narrative to such lengths that in
his Historical and Critical Dictionary the footnotes are often as long as,
and sometimes longer than, the text at the top of the page. But the prac-
tice of footnoting was only a small part of their concern for the problems
of testimony and authority. Bayle despairingly found himself drawn to high
degrees of skepticism about human testimony, which pushed him to an
extreme position of fideism about divine testimony. He taught historians
the duty to be critical and the responsibility to be true; however, he him-
self seems not to have found a consistent way to do both with both human
and divine testimony.93 Instead of a consistent art of being reasonable, he
sometimes fell into a despairing black and white view of reason and faith:
Reason is only suitable for making everything perplexing and

for raising doubts about everything. No sooner has it built
something than it provides the means for destroying it.

Reason is a veritable Penelope, unraveling during the night
what she has been weaving during the day. Thus, the best
use that can be made of the study of philosophy is to realize
that it is a misleading way, and that we ought to look for
another guide, which is the light of revelation.94
It is in the context of this kind of despairing offer of black and white

alternatives that The Port-Royal Logic flourished. Arnauld offered a path
between skepticism and gullibility. He first offered a strongly productive
model of reasoning that did not fall into unraveling at night what was
woven in the day. Second he taught a consistent reasonableness for han-
dling both human and divine testimony. In the context of Bayle’s frustra-
tion, Arnauld offered stability. In the context of an age bent on finding
ways of productively handling testimony and authority, Bayle’s Dictionary
and Arnauld’s logic were both popular, one exposing the frustrations, the
other offering practical method.
LeClerc, on the other hand, did not fall into the despair of Bayle. The
popularity and influence of Jean LeClerc expanded the practical application
of The Port-Royal Logic. LeClerc wrote textbooks of his own along with
practical advice about history and written testimony. In books such as
Sentimens de Quelques Théologiens de Hollande sur l’Histoire Critique du
Vieux Testament (1685), Logica: sive Ars Ratiocinandi (1692), Ars Critica
(1697), and Parrhasiana: or Thoughts upon Several Subjects; as Criticism,
History, Morality, and Politics (1699, English 1700) LeClerc pressed for
methodical handling of historical texts, especially the Bible. Like Arnauld
and Bayle, he believed people often lied, that biases distorted both the tes-
tifier and the receiver of testimony, and that the will of the reasoner played
a crucial role in the outcome of the reasoning. They stood in the
Augustinian tradition of believing that even divine testimony in the Bible
was not fully clear and that God actually wanted humans to struggle for
truth. LeClerc put it this way:
Altho’ God has discovered to Mankind by Reason and by

Revelation, what is agreeable to him, yet he has accompanied
neither the one nor the other with so great a Light, that it
should be impossible for us to take that for Reason or Revelation,
which is not really so. He permits Men to dispute. . . . ’tis every
one’s Duty to remember that he is a Man, subject to Errour as
well as another. . . . None among us Christians disagree about
these principles, and Historians in particular ought to remem-
ber them more than any other Men.95
LeClerc, like Bacon, could wax eloquent and sound very modern in
declarations such “The Republic of Letters is at last become a Country of
Reason and Light, and not of Authority and implicit Faith, as it has been
but too long.”96 However, LeClerc, in his logic textbook and other writings,
understood that faith and authority played a huge role in disputes between
rational people. When stating the importance of history, LeClerc relied on
the traditional distinction that authoritative history “supplies us with what
we want in Experience, which is always shut up in narrow bounds.”97
Testimony would always be needed to supplement knowledge by
experience; therefore, rules for handling testimony needed to be devel-
oped, just as rules for experiments needed to be developed. LeClerc has
come to be considered one of the founders of modern textual criticism—
especially Biblical criticism. Like Arnauld, who proposed rules for which
testifier gets the benefit of the doubt, who has the burden of proof, what
certainty outranks another, and mathematical models for probabilistic rea-
soning, LeClerc sought to establish rules and models for reasoning. A foun-
dational rule of modern scholarship he helped develop is sometimes called
the Principle of the Harder Reading. It states that between variations in
transcriptions of an ancient text, the transcript with more grammatical com-
plexity or awkward phrasing, or even internal contradictions, is the one
that is older and closer to the source. The acceptable assumption in this
rule is that later scribes would most likely fix problems rather than create
them.98
Rules governing issues of competing texts are the foundation of pro-
ductive scholarship. In an era that recognized that individual experience
was not sufficient, that outside information was a necessary supplement for
an individual’s rationality, the rules for deciding which text is authoritative,
what sources get the benefit of the doubt, and whether a type of testimo-
nial certainty supercedes even scientific certainty—in an era that was also
accelerating in the need for textbooks, encyclopedias, and intellectual
magazines—thinkers like Arnauld, LeClerc, and Bayle were invaluable. Of
the three, Bayle’s rather frantic swings between skepticism and fideism
show all the more why the practical rules promoted by Arnauld and LeClerc
were so influential.
NOTES
1. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. and
ed. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7.
2. For the intricacies of the Arnauld family, see Alexander Sedgwick, The
Travails of Conscience: The Arnauld Family and the Ancien Régime (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1998).
3. Arnauld and Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, 3.
4. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John

Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1984), II. 150.
5. Quoted in Steven Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University, 1989), 40.
6. Arnauld and Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, 227. Subsequent refer-
ences to this volume will be cited by page numbers in the text.
7. Also see Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora, trans. G. R. G. Mure, vol. 1 of The
Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 76b. 25.
8. Arnauld is obliquely citing René Descartes, Discourse on Method, vol. 1 of
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff,
and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1984), II, 116–17.
9. See Rick Kennedy, “The Application of Mathematics to Christian
Apologetics in Pascal’s Pensées and Arnauld’s The Port-Royal Logic,” Fides et Historia
23 (1991):37–52.
10. Translated by Wilbur Samuel Howell in Eighteenth-Century British Logic
and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University, 1971), 55.
11. Henry Aldrich, Artis Logicae Compendium (Oxford: 1691), II. i
(p. 49).
12. Samuel Johnson, Technologia ceu Technometria, trans. Herbert Schneider,
in Samuel Johnson: President of Kings College, His Career and Writings, eds. Herbert
and Carol Schneider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 2:186.
13. Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium (Boston: 1726), 34. Note:
Mather refers to The Port-Royal Logic using the Latin title Ars Cogitandi.
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), I. i. 2 (p. 43).
15. Ibid., IV. xiv. 2 (p. 652).
16. Ibid., xiv. 3–4 (p. 653).
17. Ibid., xv. 4 (p. 656).
19. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV. xvi. 6
(p. 661).
20. Ibid., xvi. 7 (p. 662).
21. Ibid., xvi. 8 (p. 662).
22. Ibid., xvi. 9 (p. 663).
23. Ibid., xvi. 10 (pp. 663–64).
24. Ibid., xvi. 10 (p. 663).
25. Ibid., xvi. 11 (p. 664).
26. Ibid., xvi. 13 (p. 667).
27. I. T. Ramsey in his introduction to The Reasonableness of Christianity and
A Discourse of Miracles (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1958) notes the troubles of
understanding Locke on the outward circumstances that must support testimony
of miracles. Ramsey thinks that Locke essentially appealed to the “intuitive character”
of Christian reasonableness (13).
(p. 667).
29. Ibid., xvi. 14 (p. 667).

(p. 667).
32. Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century
England (Princeton: Princeton University, 1983), 14.
33. Barbara Shapiro, “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” and “Probable Cause”:
Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University
of California, 1991), 196.
34. James McLachlan, “James Caldwell” in Princetonians 1748–1768: A
Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University, 1976), 261.
35. See John Yolton, “Schoolmen, Logic, and Philosophy,” in The Eighteenth
Century, eds. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell, vol. 5 of The History of the
University of Oxford, ed. T. H. Aston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 565–91.
36. Quoted in Alan P. F. Sell, “Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Dissenting
Academies of England and Wales,” in History of Universities 11 (1992):85–86.
37. Isaac Watts, Logick: or the Right Use of Reason, vol. 5 of The Works of the
Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts (London: 1810), III. vii (p. 150).
38. Watts, Logick, III. vii (p. 151).
39. Ibid., II. v (pp. 132–134).
40. Ibid., II. vi (pp. 134–136).
41. Ibid., III, iv (p. 160).
42. Ibid., III, iv (p. 162).
43. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1975), 143–45.
44. A Gentleman, Monitio Logica, or An Abstract and Translation of
Burgersdicius, His Logick (London: 1697), 110–11.
46. See Kennedy, “The Application of Mathematics to Christian Apolegetics in
Pascal’s Pensées” and Arnauld’s The Port-Royal Logic.
48. Ibid., 274.
49. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton:
Princeton University, 1988), 39.
50. Ibid., 66.
51. Ibid., 193.
52. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities,
intro, E. T. Bell, trans. Frederick Wilson Tuscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory
(New York: Dover, 1951), 109.
53. Charles, Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749–1827: A Life in
Exact Science (Princeton: Princeton University, 1997), 24.
54. Ibid., 271.
55. Much has been written on Hume and miracles. Examples of philosophers
who try to work out the problems in Hume’s essay include C. A. J. Coady’s
Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), Michael P. Levine,
Hume and the Problem of Miracles: A Solution (Boston: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1989), and Francis J. Beckwith, David Hume’s Argument Against
Miracles: A Critical Analysis (Lanam, MD: University Press of America, 1989). For a
historical study, see R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph
Glanvill to David Hume (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981).
56. David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in Enquiries Concerning Human
Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge,
revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), X. 1. 87–88 (pp. 110–112).
57. Ibid., X. 1. 89 (p. 112).
58. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1958), 69–70.
59. Page numbers I give will come from the only complete modern printing
of these works: Charles S. Peirce, Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science,
ed. Carolyn Eisele (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1985), II, 703–801, 890–913. The best
study of Peirce on this subject is Kenneth R. Merrill’s “Hume’s ‘Of Miracles,’ Peirce,
and the Balancing of Likelihoods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1991): 85–113.
See also Robert H. Ayers, “C. S. Peirce On Miracles,” Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society 16 (1980): 242–54.
60. Peirce, Historical Perspectives, 911.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 910.
63. E. F. Dixon, “Richard Kirwan, The Dublin Philosopher,” Dublin Historical
Record 24 (1971): 54.
64. Richard Kirwan, Logick; or, An Essay on The Elements, Principles, and
Different Modes of Reasoning, 2 vols. (London: 1807), I, viii.
65. Ibid., I, iii.
66. Ibid., I, v.
67. Ibid., I, 186–87.
68. Ibid., I, 247.
69. Ibid., I, 177.
70. Ibid., I, vi and II, 330.
71. Ibid., II, 310–312.
72. Ibid., II, 314.
73. “Sworn” indicates when received as sworn testimony.
74. Kirwan, Logick, II, 347–48.
75. Hume, “Of Miracles,” X. 1. 88 (p. 112).
76. Kirwan, Logick, II, 332.
77. Ibid., Logick, II, 332.
78. Hume, “Of Miracles,” X. 1. 88 (p. 112).
79. Ibid., I, 268–271.
80. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV. xvi. 10.
81. Ibid.
82. See the discussion and analysis by Coady in “The Disappearance of
History,” Testimony: A Philosophical Study, 199–223.
83. See Richard Nash’s translation and historical introduction in John Craige’s
Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1991).
84. Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 124–25.
85. George Berkeley, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, vol. 2 of The Works
of George Berkeley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1898), Sixth Dialogue, 31.
86. Kirwan, Logick, II, 339.

87. Ibid., II, 341.
88. Toulmin, Uses of Argument, 44–93.
89. James McCosh, The Laws of Discursive Thought, being a Text-book of
Formal Logic (London: Macmillan & Co. 1870, reprint 1991), 164.
90. Ibid.
91. John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth
Editions, 1996), 29.
92. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1997), 235.
93. See the long footnote to “Hipparchia” in Pierre Bayle, Historical and
Critical Dictionary, trans. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
1965), especially p. 101.
94. Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, 42.
95. Jean LeClerc, Parrhasiana: Thoughts upon . . . Criticism, History, Morality,
and Politics, anonymous trans. (London: 1700), 145.
96. Ibid., 108.
97. Ibid., 97.
98. Jerry H. Bently, “Erasmus, Jean Le Clerc, and the Principle of the Harder
Reading,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 (1978): 309–21.
CHAPTER FIVE
APPRECIATING ARISTOTLE:
THOMISTS, SCOTS, AND OXFORD NOETICS
When it comes to questions of human and divine testimony, wrote John

Henry Newman in his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870),
“Aristotle has been my master.”1 Like his mentor at Oxford, Richard
Whately, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Thomists and Scots,
Newman believed that education would be best served by reviving the rea-
soning and reasonableness of Aristotle. First and foremost, he thought, the
term “logic” should be reserved for formal reasoning—the study of the
structures of valid inference from premises to conclusions. The sources and
even the ultimate truth of the knowledge that serves as premises was not
germane to whether a valid inference had been drawn. Great advances in
the discipline of logic would come from this narrowing of focus. Secondary
to this narrowing was Newman’s interest in the venerable tradition of
Aristotelian reasonableness, drawn from Aristotle’s other writings on dialec-
tic, rhetoric, ethics, and politics. Newman, being primarily interested in reli-
gious reasonableness, reached back to the Nicomachean Ethics to affirm
one of the fundamental dichotomies of reasonableness: “a boy may be a
mathematician, but not a philosopher.”2 Syllogistic logic had its proper
applications, Newman believed, but cooks do not need to be chemists and
masons do not need to be mineralogists. The life of being reasonable was
broader, richer, and more subtle than formal reasoning. “Logic,” Newman
declared, “makes but a sorry rhetoric.”3
So logic textbooks in this revived Aristotelianism became less directed
toward teaching testimony and authority. On the other hand, academic
subjects were shuffled around as the modern university curriculum
developed, and new philosophy departments were still expected to teach
general education reasonableness. Here Aristotle was a model, since he
had taught not only logic but general reasonableness. Aristotle had initially
divided the sources of knowledge into intuition, experience, and information
communicated by other people. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle had

wrestled with intuition and experience as “preliminary problems” to syllo-
gistic demonstrations that yield certainty,4 and in Topics and Rhetoric he
taught the handling of facts and opinions gained from other people that led
often to less than certain conclusions. If philosophy departments were
going to teach about the former they should hold onto teaching the latter.
As much as professors of divinity or rhetoric might need to teach the
subject, professors of philosophy—especially in the Catholic and English-
speaking universities—tended to retain their claim to teaching not only
formal logic, but also the whole art of being reasonable. We will see in
this chapter how the logic classes of Thomist, Scot, and Oxford philoso-
phers did not jettison the teaching of testimony as they embraced the ideal
of formal logic. Just as Aristotle had given testimony its due, they were
loath to give it up—especially in their elementary or comprehensive logic
textbooks.
The creation and management of knowledge became a major nine-
teenth-century industry, in which universities played an increasingly
important role. Defining science and honing logic were important indus-
trial matters. On the other hand, the old traditions of dialectic and creat-
ing credibility remained vital in most universities as their general training
for future leaders in society. The old Hellenistic liberal arts curriculum
was still taught in early education and to university undergraduates while
it was also being channeled and professionalized into multiple compet-
ing departments. Aristotelian models—developed before the rise of the
liberal arts curriculum—were a sound foundation for those who appreci-
ated dialectical emphasis on testimony, assent, faith, and trust. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Roman Catholic Thomists, Scottish
Commonsense logicians, and Oxford’s Richard Whately (a leading mem-
ber of the Noetics) re-envisioned an Aristotelian way of handling both
formal logic and the dialectic of testimony. The Thomists worked with
inevident habits as a place to bring testimony into logic education. The
Scots emphasized what they called the “social operations of the mind”
which gave a place for teaching testimony in logic classes. And Richard
Whately at Oxford reached back to the largely discredited structure of
topics to position testimony in both logic and rhetoric.
AQUINAS, JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, AND

INEVIDENT HABITS
When Thomas Aquinas died in 1274 he bequeathed a massive apologetic
synthesis he hoped would bring intellectual confidence to Christians
and convert Muslims. As a theological, philosophical, and logical method,
Appreciating Aristotle 177
Thomas’s system has always competed with other methods. However,

beginning in the Renaissance and flourishing in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, Aquinas has had tremendous influence in theology, phi-
losophy, and logic curricula of Roman Catholic educational institutions.
After his canonization in 1323, Dominican colleges were bastions of what
came to be called Thomism. Aquinas’s influence increased in the Roman
Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation, and in 1567 he was
invested with the title “Doctor of the Church.” In the seventeenth century,
Thomism flourished especially in the universities of the Spanish Empire.
During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Thomism became the officially approved way the Roman Catholic Church
both embraced and warded off various modern academic tendencies.
A great strength of Thomism is that it encourages embracing all
true information whether it comes from pagans, Christians, or whomever.
Thomism baptizes the classical Aristotelian optimism about the power of
the human mind to confirm, strengthen, and expand human knowledge.
G. K. Chesterton, in his overheated way, declared that “nobody will begin to
understand Thomist philosophy . . . who does not realize that the primary
and fundamental part of it is entirely the praise of Life, the praise of Being,
the praise of God as the Creator of the World.”5 As such, Thomism encour-
ages many Enlightenment values, such as rationalism, natural science, and
a this-worldly common sense. Thomists promoted the separate disciplines
of theology, philosophy, ethics, rhetoric, mathematics, and logic, but also
Aristotle’s ways intertwining disciplines. Formal logic had its place, but all
disciplines were rooted in an encompassing reasonableness that distin-
guished between what humans know by reason and what they know by
authority. Aquinas had founded his Summa Theologica on the initial sepa-
ration of knowledge into that which people can generate from their own
resources and that which is attained from outside sources. Because Aquinas
was most interested in Christian apologetics, his interest in the latter was
focused on divine testimony that was further confirmed by the human tes-
timony of the authoritative Church Fathers. Certain things we can know
without any outside help—a God exists for example. However, many of the
most important doctrines of Christianity can only be known by testimony—
the Trinity, the history of God’s interactions with humans, and Jesus’ incar-
nation, death, and resurrection.
In the opening question of the Summa Theologica as to the nature of
sacred doctrine, and in article 8, as to whether that doctrine can be proven
by arguments, Aquinas cited Boethius for the Aristotelian tenet that “author-
ity is the weakest form of proof,” but then stated more fully:
although the argument from authority based on human reason

is weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine
revelation is strongest. . . . Sacred doctrine makes use of

authorities as extrinsic and probable arguments, but properly
uses the authority of the canonical Scriptures as a necessary
demonstration, and the authority of the doctors of the Church
as one that may properly be used, yet merely as probable
[my italics].6
Crucial for the history of Roman Catholic education in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries was the foundational role Thomism gave first to
the classical distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic sources of knowl-
edge, and subsequently to the distinction in Christian doctrines between
probability or certainty, based on whether the extrinsic source was human
or divine. As the Roman Catholic educational establishment became more
committed to Thomism, this distinction became increasingly important to
teaching the art of being a reasonable Christian.
In 1879, Pope Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris enjoined all Catholic students
to study Thomas because in Thomism was a structure of thought that could
meet the modern world while maintaining the crucial importance of divine
revelation. Leo praised natural reasoning and the embrace of Greek phi-
losophy. He especially named Clement of Alexandria as a model who, like
Thomas, had written well on a wide variety of subjects by “rightly exercis-
ing the art of dialectics” and keeping clear the distinction “between reason
and faith.”7 Of Thomas Aquinas he wrote:
Moreover, carefully distinguishing reason from Faith, as is

right, and yet joining them together in harmony of friendship,
he so guarded the rights of each, and so watched over the
dignity of each, that, as far as man is concerned, reason can
now hardly rise higher than she rose, bourne up in the flight
of Thomas; and Faith can hardly gain more helps and greater
helps from reason than those which Thomas gave her.8
In 1880, Thomas was named patron of all Roman Catholic universities,

and in 1923 Pius XI in Studiorum Ducem made it mandatory for all students
of philosophy and theology to study the work of St. Thomas.
One of the most influential Thomists who helped to parse Thomism into
separate university disciplines was John of St. Thomas (1589–1644). John,
initially named John Poinsot, was a Dominican professor at the University
of Alcala de Henares during the golden age of Spanish intellectual influence.
The textbooks he wrote became probably the most enduring and influential
textbooks in Thomistic education—even into the twentieth century. Jacques
Maritain, one of the most influential twentieth-century Thomists, writing in
1955 of the vitality of interest in John of St. Thomas, opined that the new
English translation of Ars Logica from the Cursus Philosophicus would be
useful in logic classes to read along with a modern textbook.9
John of St. Thomas’s Ars Logica encouraged the spirit of Thomist edu-
cation. The discipline of logic for the Thomists should be focused on the
firm certainty of valid inferences from premises to conclusions. Thomas
Aquinas was not a logician proper, but he reveled in the strength of formal
logical relationships. Thomists shared their founder’s optimism and encour-
aged separating logic classes from epistemological matters that should be
discussed in other classes. Ars Logica resisted the Renaissance tendency to
merge rhetoric, dialectic, and logic to the detriment of syllogistic logic.
A generation before John, the Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599) had
produced a series of textbooks, including the Institutionum Dialecticarum
that remained in use into the nineteenth century. Fonseca has been called
the “Aristotle of Portugal” and was also an early force in the spread of
Thomism. But his Institutionum Dialecticarum followed Renaissance ten-
dencies—especially in the prominent place given to topics with the normal
brief treatment of inartificial argument.10 Fonseca’s manual, however, was
not as interesting to later Thomists as John of St. Thomas’s. The Ars Logica
did not try to mix topics with syllogisms. John of St. Thomas followed
Aristotle and Aquinas more closely by being focused on the certainties of
formal logic rather than the Ciceronian vagueries of probabilistic dialectic.
Having said this, our interest in John of St. Thomas is how he still kept
testimony and authority in his logic textbook even though he abandoned
topics and the normal humanist conflations. John’s strategy for testimony
and authority was to sink it into a discussion of inevident habits. Somewhat
similar to Phillip Melanchthon’s way of placing testimony in the discussion
of habits within the larger context of the Aristotelian category of quality,
John of St. Thomas was mostly concerned with describing the boundary
between “science” gained from self-evident principles and the “inferior sci-
ence” that is not.11 He desired to teach a boundary line he described in his
section title: “On Science Considered Both in Itself and In Relation to
Opinion and Belief.”12
Science, for John of St. Thomas, is an evident habit while opinion and
belief are inevident habits. Habits in the Aristotelian tradition were some-
times presented with precision and sometimes more generally. In the gen-
eral sense, habits were a quality in something of deep and steady inclination.
Science and belief both have habits that deeply and permanently incline or
connect them to types of knowledge. Not only do types of conclusions and
types of information have habits but the people working with them have
habits. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas had drawn extensively from
Aristotle’s works on categories, metaphysics, ethics, and the soul to show
that a person’s habits steadily influence the intellect and especially the will.
“From the very nature of habit,” Aquinas wrote, “it is clear that it is princi-
pally related to the will, inasmuch as habit is that which one uses when one
wills.”13 Habits were a deep and guiding part of a person’s character and
psychology and were fully involved in a person’s ability to think well.

A person’s habits actually determined the directions they would point their
reasoning. Aquinas made this clear in a section discussing whether virtue
is a habit: “The rational powers, which are proper to man, are not deter-
mined to one particular action, but are inclined indifferently to many; but
they are determined to acts by means of habits.”14
The qualities of conclusions, information, and people all had habits
that steadily brought each into relation with each other. John of St. Thomas
used the term inevident habits as a way of teaching students the relation-
ship not only between science and belief, but also the role of the reasoner,
the role of doubt, and the tradition that there was one kind of non-science
that had the certainty of science: divine belief.
Figure 5.1 lays out the essential features of evident and inevident
habits. If the source of knowledge is not self-evident, especially if it comes
from the authority of some speaker, it is called an opinion, a belief, or a
suspicion. In each case, the Stoic value of assent is included and is tied by
John to acts of the will which themselves arise out of a person’s habits.
Note that doubt is not a habit because it is not steady. Doubt—especially
as a tool of skeptics—is ephemeral, haphazard, and slippery in the
Thomistic tradition. Assent, however, can be lasting, consistent, and strong
and, as such, a habit. Belief, at this point in the textbook, becomes specif-
ically tied to assent to an authority and is always accompanied by fear. In
keeping with long tradition, a divine belief is assured to lead to truth equal
in assurance to science while mere human belief must always have some
uncertainty. John is clear, however, that though divine testimony yields the
highest assurance, it still is obscure. Humans can’t know absolutely but
they can trust absolutely the divine testifier. Divine testimony creates a spe-
cial case where the subjective certainty of an inevident belief is actually “an
infallible faith and finds in faith itself principles that are actually certain,
though not evident; theology postulates evident principles in a superior
science.”15
Although figure 5.1 is just a sketch of what John of St. Thomas taught,
the use of the Aristotelian concepts of qualities and habits allowed him to
tap into a strong tradition of mixing psychology and ethics into a presen-
tation of the essential stability and productivity of true knowledge—even
in the non-formal areas of opinion, belief, and suspicion. It is unstable
doubting that is destructive and unproductive.
In the context of fear, John teaches a clear distinction between trust and
doubt. Like Quintilian’s fall-back on “honest error,” or Augustine’s encour-
agement that a reasoner is “without fault” if in some cases wrong, John of
St. Thomas pushes the positive role of assent in the midst of fear—especially
the trust put in an authority to be giving true information. In the case of the
Christian God—infinite, ineffable, and infallible—Thomas affirms a stark
Figure 5.1. John of St. Thomas’s inevident habits.*
Intellectual habits
Evident Inevident
Leads to truth Can lead to truth

(right reason) (right reason with regard
to contingent objects)
Arts Science Wisdom Prudence Understanding
Opinion Belief Suspicion

Assent whose reason and Inquisitive thought Inclines to assent
motive is merely probable with assent determined
by authority of speaker
Fear of obscurity can

never be removed
Divine belief Human belief

Infallibility of testimony Fear of objective incertitude
rules out objective incertitude cannot be absent
but the intrinsic imperfection
of obscurity is not removed
*See John of St. Thomas, The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas, VI, ques. 26 (pp. 504–549)
role for trust in the midst of fear. A habit of trust in God-given information
should be used to construct absolutely certain knowledge even when
humans are necessarily mired in the obscurity of looking through a glass
darkly when thinking about God. Trust is a habit of steady assent. It is the
root of the tree that can lead to truth by means of right reasoning using
opinions, beliefs, and suspicions. Trust is the flip-side of optimism that
humans can attain true knowledge and construct more. Doubt is not a
habit. It is not steady. John of St. Thomas gives it no role the productive
reasoning.
As with Melanchthon, John of St. Thomas found the Aristotelian and
Thomist term habit useful for understanding reasoning using testimony.
Inevident habits were useful for merging epistemology and psychology,
helping to explain the human process of bringing together into one art
what was epistemologically divided as art and non-art. The Stoic notion
of assent was joined with Aristotelian logic and ethics within a discussion
of habit in order to teach young students the borderlands between the
certainties of formal logic and the larger context of reasoning from infor-
mation that was not self-evident.
We should not make too much of John of St. Thomas’s textbook. Roman
Catholic education has never been fully channeled into a set of curricular
standards; however, Ars Logica indicates the way the increasingly dominant
values of Thomism could support logic curricula narrowly focused on
formal logic while at the same time giving due space to the foundational
epistemological distinction between reason and authority, intrinsic and
extrinsic information, that Augustine and Aquinas taught as part of a more
comprehensive reasonableness. Although logic classes in Catholic universities
followed along with other universities the path of greater specialization and
narrower interest in only valid inferences with no reference to epistemolog-
ical or psychological matters, elementary Thomistic education in many
disciplines could rely on a distinction between intellectual habits to teach
the role of testimony and authority in the art of being reasonable.
PRESBYTERIAN ARISTOTELIANISM
Thomas Reid (1710–1796), the lead thinker in Scotland’s extensive intellec-

tual influence in Anglo-American education, had a tense appreciation for
Aristotle. Born and educated in Aberdeen, like many Scottish philosophy
professors he first served as a Presbyterian minister before being appointed
in 1751 to a teaching post at King’s College, Aberdeen. In 1764 he pub-
lished An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense
and in that year was appointed to a professorship in moral philosophy at
the University of Glasgow. There he wrote his two other important works:
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active
Powers of Man (1788).
Like Ramus, Bacon, Vives, and others, Reid thought Aristotle’s charac-
ter and work needed to be reevaluated. Aristotle too full of himself, Reid
thought, too quick to criticize, too paranoid of his competitors, and com-
pletely lacking in humility. If Aristotle was the model philosopher, it was a
model Reid intended to reform. On the other hand, Reid was willing to
admit, Aristotle was a genius with an inspiring inquisitiveness into every-
thing. Also to his credit, Aristotle “always distinguishes between what he
knew and what he had by report.”16 Reid may have had little appreciation
for Aristotle as leader on the high road of philosophy, but he did appreci-
ate him as a “disinterested and indefatigable . . . worshipper of Truth in the
lower walks of science”—a lower walk that included the reasonable han-
dling of testimony.17
Like Arnauld, Reid appreciated but rejected Aristotle’s topics along with
categories and the old format of rhetorical strategies that had been long
taught as dialectic:
He [Aristotle] was the first, as far as I know, who made an

attempt of this kind; and in this he acted up to the magna-
nimity of his own genius, and that of ancient philosophy.
Every subject of human thought had been reduced to ten cat-
egories; everything that can be attributed to any subject, to five
predicables; he attempted to reduce all the forms of reasoning
to fixed rules of figure and mode, and to reduce all the topics
of argumentation under certain heads; and by that means to
collect, as it were, into one store, all that can be said on one
side or the other of every question and to provide a grand
arsenal, from which all future combatants might be furnished
with arms, offensive and defensive, in every cause, so as to
leave no room to future generations to invent anything new.18
Aristotelian topics were a grand system to facilitate forensic combat.

They were supposed to serve public and courtroom debate but never really
worked. They served best as simply a guide to how information relates to
other information. For both Arnauld and Reid there was only one thing
from topics that they wanted to expand upon: testimony and authority.
Neither was interested in encouraging lawyers and forensic combat; rather,
they believed the art of being reasonable was the art of trusting—trusting
God and trusting people. Nicholas Wolterstorff in his recent study of Reid
calls this “epistemological piety,” and gives a ringing summation of the
foundation of Reid’s interest in testimony and authority:
The epistemological piety appropriate to this picture of real-

ity and our place therein will incorporate a blend of humility
and active gratitude, says Reid. Humility because we are
unable to dispel the darkness—and also because though we,
unlike the rocks and hills, do genuinely have active power;
nonetheless our “power in its existence, in its extent, and in
its exertions, is entirely dependent upon God, and upon the
laws of nature which he has established.” This realization
“ought to banish pride and arrogance from the most mighty
of the sons of men.” And active gratitude, because the power
we have is in fact “one of the noblest gifts of God to man.”
For this “bounty of heaven” we should both be grateful, and
stir ourselves to use it properly. For it is in fact “perfectly
suited to the state of man, as a state of improvement and dis-
cipline. It is sufficient to animate us to the noblest exertions.
By the proper exercise of this gift of God, human nature, in
individuals and in societies, may be exalted to a high degree
of dignity and felicity, and the earth become a paradise.”
What Reid happens not to mention in this passage is the

most fundamental component of Reidian epistemological
piety: trust. Not only is the transition that occurs in percep-
tion, from sensation to conception and belief of the external
object, not a transition effected by reason. We can also nei-
ther establish the reliability of this transition without falling
into practical circularity nor can we offer an explanation of it.
In all those ways it is ungrounded: rationally ungrounded.
Yet we are so constituted—or so ruled—that we do in fact
trust its reliability. Ungrounded trust, trust without reasons for
trusting, that’s what is deepest in Reidian piety. Though that’s
not quite right. According to the Reidian, that’s what’s deep
in the piety of all humanity. What’s deepest in Reidian piety,
is acknowledging that fact, and acknowledging the darkness
which that fact implies, and not railing against the mystery
but accepting it humbly and gratefully.19
In his a logic classes at Aberdeen Reid apologized to his students for

spending so much time on testimony, but he was frustrated that so many
logicians “omitted it, or at least said little about it.”20 In those lectures tes-
timony was categorized along with other forms of non-self evident knowl-
edge as a belief, and he was specifically concerned with undermining
Hume’s objections to the evidence of testimony, especially concerning reli-
gion and miracles.
In criticizing Hume, Reid attacked what became Hume’s greatest influ-
ence on the handling of testimony—an influence Hume shared with Kant
that will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. Reid taught his students
that it was a false premise for Hume to say that the evidence of testimony
is built on experience. Testimony was its own kind of evidence, distinct
from experience. By tradition, it served to supply what experience couldn’t.
Hume had linked testimony to experience in such a way that the credibility
of testimony disappeared if it did not conform to a person’s experience. The
importance of this linkage warrants another long quote from Reid:
Now from this consideration it would appear that experience

teaches us to become incredulous instead of impressing
credulity upon us. Supposing now that we would have com-
munication with Beings of another rank than those we are
acquainted with as Angels, tho’ we were sure the Angel we
conversed with for the first time was a good one; on Hume’s
principle we should wait till we were assured by experience,
that he was a Spirit of Veracity before we credit what he told
us: Nay supposing Communication with the Deity, of which
even Hume himself cannot deny, we behoved to wait the like
assurance of experience, before we yield belief to what He
communicated.
Can anything be more Shocking and horrible to human

nature than this [?] Therefore not withstanding the Doubts the
experience may raise in us, with regard to the testimony of
men, there are undoubtedly circumstances in testimony that
require our assent as firmly as if we were certified of them by
demonstration.21
Reid taught his students that both experience and testimony were
equally matters of belief—people believe their senses and their memory and
they also had to believe testimony. Even though experience and testimony
were both beliefs, they should not be linked so that either could diminish
the power of the other as evidence—even in the instance of communication
from a spiritual being or even God. Reid further taught that at times testi-
mony could yield a certainty as high as any other form of knowledge.
Like Arnauld, Reid believed that logic classes should teach a strong role
for testimony in reasonableness and that that role was the foundation of
communication between people and even between people and God.
Students should not be encouraged to seek Plotinus’s high lonesome road
of intellectual autonomy. Philosophy had for too long romanticized the indi-
vidual rather than social realm of knowledge. Hume and his ilk were like
Isidore’s monopeds that lie on their backs in the shade of their large foot.
Scottish Presbyterianism was rooted in a corporate rather than individ-
ualistic way of thinking about church structure. Scottish universities were
highly organized in comparison to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
English and French universities. Authority and social structures were gener-
ally considered good. Maybe one of the deep reasons why David Hume
could not get a job at a Scottish university was that he was too much of the
man of letters to be a true a university committeeman. Presbyterian to the
core, Reid believed in the value of committee meetings. He reported his
college regimen to a friend in 1764: aside from teaching, examinations, and
literary societies, he noted that much time was consumed in business
meetings, “of which we have commonly four or five a week.”22 Reid lived
and taught Presbyterian reasonableness. At the same time he was teaching
in Aberdeen and then Glasgow that we “receive the greatest and most
important part of our knowledge by the information of others,” the logic
classes at St. Andrews were being taught the same principle.23 Student notes
from Robert Watson’s logic class of 1764–65 state that testimony is an inde-
pendent source of evidence and not subject to our experience. Watson also
taught what can be characterized a Presbyterian-Aristotelian foundation for
teaching testimony:
1st . . . there is implanted in our minds a desire to know what

passes in the minds of others. 2nd . . . correspondent to this,
the Author of our Constitution has bestowed on us the faculty
of Speech, and implanted in us a strong Propensity to com-

municate our real Sentiments.24
The most famous Scot logician of the nineteenth century, William

Hamilton, would shake off Reid’s partial antagonism to Aristotle and aca-
demically purify this Presbyterian-Aristotelianism that posits a sovereign
God who made us social creatures with a propensity to believe and tell
truths.
WILLIAM HAMILTON’S MODIFIED LOGIC
Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen, the three medieval centers of Scottish
higher education, were intellectually tied to the University of Paris.
Scholastic Aristotelian scholarship derived from French academics was
strong in Scotland. Alexander Brodie contends that a community of Scottish
logicians in the “circle of John Mair,” all of whom earned higher degrees in
France and returned to teach and publish in Scotland, created a dynamic
environment for the study of scholastic logic in the decades preceding the
Reformation.25 James McCosh began his history of The Scottish Philosophy
(1875) with the intellectual intercourse between Scotland and France,
describing it as “narrow but intense.”26 McCosh presented this narrow
Aristotelian and scholastic focus as the precursor to an Enlightenment reac-
tion begun in the late seventeenth century. However, the notion of a reac-
tion should not be overstated. The Aristotelian tradition of formal logic
remained much appreciated in Scotland.
Throughout the seventeenth century, instead of completely succumb-
ing to the influence of either Ramus or Arnauld, each of Scotland’s univer-
sities produced a long line of logic lectures and textbooks in keeping with
the Aristotelian-Humanist tradition of laying out Porphyry’s Tree, listing the
ten categories with an expanded discussion of quality, offering the
mnemonic devices of high medieval syllogistic, and in sections on topics
delineating the inartificial from artificial. Even at the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century, students were still transcribing such logics: At Marischal
College in Aberdeen, George Peacock’s Cursus Logicus, at St. Salvador’s
College, St. Andrews, Alexander Scrimgeour’s Tractatus Logicus, and at
Edinburgh, Alexander Cuninghame’s class lectures.
A long-influential example of this Scottish tradition is the Institutionis
Logicae (1612) by Mark Duncan. Like Melanchthon and John of St. Thomas,
Duncan used an expanded discussion of habits as a place to teach the psy-
chology and epistemology of faith. Typical of the Scot-French connection,
Duncan was principal at the Protestant academy at Saumur in western
France when he published his textbook. He did not specifically discuss tes-
timony in the context of habits—only faith as an infused habit—but later
laid out the standard case for artificial and inartificial sources of knowledge,
with the inartificial divided into human and divine testimony.27
Of course The Port-Royal Logic, coming from French Augustinians, was
not without influence. James McCosh in his history of Scottish philosophy
noted that some ideas and the structure of The Port-Royal Logic were rec-
ommended to logic classes in the Scottish universities by a Parliamentary
Commission appointed in 1690.28 References to The Port-Royal Logic are
sprinkled throughout the writings and lectures of many Scot logic professors.
Thomas Reid was well acquainted with the works of Arnauld, although
Steven Nadler argues that Reid misinterpreted him on important issues.29
Dugald Stewart specifically refers to The Port-Royal Logic when discussing
analysis and synthesis.30 In the middle of the nineteenth century, William
Hamilton recommended to his students “the celebrated Port Royal Art of
Thinking” in his Lectures on Logic.31 Thomas Baynes, logic professor at Saint
Andrews, Hamilton’s student, and future editor of the Encylopaedia
Britannica produced a new English translation of The Port-Royal Logic and
dedicated it to Hamilton. After noting in the preface to the second and third
Edinburgh editions how fast the editions were selling, Baynes praised the old
Jansenist text as
one of the worst books for cramming, it seems to me one of

the very best for educating the mind. . . . The thought
throughout, too, is fresh and vigorous; and there is a vitality
in all active thinking that is contagious. It produces thought
in turn. And this is indeed the true end of all higher educa-
tion—not so much to fill the mind but to quicken and train
its powers, not so much to impart knowledge as to awaken
thought.32
But as much as Hamilton and Baynes could appreciate the vitality of

The Port-Royal Logic, the nineteenth-century logic professors of the Scottish
tradition were more interested in reviving the productive formal structures
rooted in the former French connection with scholastic logic. James
McCosh, one of the influential Scot logic professors to immigrate to
America, declared the vitality of Aristotelian syllogisms in the preface to his
Laws of Discursive Thought: Being a Text-Book of Formal Logic (1870):
The lingering life maintained by that old Aristotelian and

Scholastic Logic, in spite of the ridicule poured upon it by
nearly all the fresh thinkers of Europe for two or three
centuries after the revival of letters, is an extraordinary fact
in the history of philosophy; I believe it can be accounted for
only by supposing that the syllogism is substantially the cor-
rect analysis of the process which passes through the mind
in reasoning.33
McCosh credited the restoration of Aristotelian and scholastic logic to

Edinburgh’s William Hamilton and Oxford’s Richard Whately.34 Whately will
be dealt with later in this chapter, but Hamilton deserves our attention at
present. He was the most influential Scot logician when Scot logicians were
widely influential in Anglo-American education.
William Hamilton (1788–1856) was well read in the history of the art of
reasoning. In 1803 he began his studies at the University of Glasgow. In
1807 he was sent down to Oxford where, as McCosh reports, he
took his share in the boating and other gymnastic exercises,

but entered with far more eagerness into the study of
Aristotle, the favorite of Oxford at that time. “His manner of
reading was characteristic. He had his table, chairs, and gen-
erally his floor strewed with books; and you might find him
in the midst of this confusion studying with his foot on a
chair, poising one great folio on his knee, with another in
his hand.”35
In 1812 he returned to Edinburgh as a lawyer and, in 1821, was appointed

professor of universal history at the university there. In 1836 he became
professor of logic and metaphysics. In the year of his death, his edition of
Reid’s works was published and posthumously his Lectures on Logic (2nd
edition, 1866).
In the footnotes to his edition of Reid’s Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic
Hamilton consistently undermined the validity of Reid’s criticisms of
Aristotle, and in his own Lectures on Logic he synthesized out of Germanic
and Scottish Aristotelian traditions a viable and widely influential way of
teaching in logic classes what logic was and was not, the relationship
between the science and art of logic, the relationship between what he
called pure logic and modified logic. In doing this he showed appreciation
for both Aristotle and Reid. He was true to Aristotle’s formal structures but
not neglectful of Reid’s call to recognize that we are social creatures and
that the greatest and most important part of our knowledge comes by way
of testimony.
In the historical introduction to his Lectures on Logic, Hamilton baldly
declared that Bacon and Locke had damaged the logic taught in Great
Britain with their misguided and hapless attempts at justifying their preju-
dices. He condescended to say that Watts’s Logick was worth reading as lit-
erature but not as logic. The only seventeenth- and eighteenth-century logic
textbooks worth reading as logic textbooks were those that tried to main-
tain an Aristotelian foundation. Of the old Dutch logicians he recom-
mended Burgersdyk, and, of the British, he allowed the old Oxfordians:
John Wallis and Henry Aldrich. The problem with Arnauld, Locke, Watts,
and the host of others who wanted to teach the art of thinking was that
they confounded logic with metaphysics and further made logic an art of
discovery.
Logic had lost “credit and esteem,” Hamilton taught his students,
because “too much was promised.”36 He insisted that logic is strictly about
the necessary forms of valid inference. According to McCosh, the aim of all
Hamilton’s philosophy was “to point out the limits to human thought and
thereby to teach man the lessons of intellectual humility”37 Hamilton taught
this lesson of humility by hedging formal logic into responsible confines
within the context of broader arts of thinking. He did this by distinguish-
ing pure logic and modified logic. For our purposes this is very important
because although Hamilton is most often praised in the history for purify-
ing logic, he did not neglect the Scottish tradition of teaching the impor-
tance of testimony to his logic classes. The distinction he drew between
pure and modified logic allowed him to wax eloquently on the social
responsibility of trusting external sources in the manner of Thomas Reid
(see figure 5.2).
Testimony along with the other “social operations of the mind” were
included in Hamilton’s lectures under the heading of “The Acquisition of
Knowledge” and “The Communication of Knowledge.” Three lectures were
given over to oral and recorded testimony. Hamilton began with a general
rule:
A matter of Observation or Empirical Knowledge can

only be obtained Mediately, that is, by one individual to
another, through an enouncement declaring it to be true. This
enouncement is called, in the most extensive sense of the
word, a Witnessing or Testimony (testimonium); and the per-
son by whom it is made is, in the same sense, called a
Witness or Testifier (testis). The object of the Testimony is
called the Fact (factum); and its validity constitutes what is
styled Historical Credibility (credibilitas historica). To esti-
mate this credibility, it is requisite to consider—1, The
Subjective Trustworthiness of the Witnesses (fides testium),
and 2, The Objective Probability of the Fact itself. The former
is founded partly on the Sincerity, and partly on the
Competence, of the Witness. The latter depends on the
Absolute and Relative Possibility of the Fact itself. Testimony
is either Immediate or Mediate. Immediate, where the fact
reported is the object of Personal Experience; Mediate, where
the fact reported is the object of Foreign Experience.38
With clarity and force Hamilton taught the Aristotelian tradition of tes-
timony. Important to note here is that Hamilton sets his discussion clearly
at odds with Immanuel Kant—discussed in the next chapter—who col-
lapsed all testimony into the reasoner’s personal experience. Hamilton, in
Figure 5.2. William Hamilton’s divisions of logic.*
General or abstract logic
Pure Modified
Stoicheiology Methodology
Noetic Dianoetic
Clear Distinct Connected

thinking thinking thinking
Truth Impediments Aids or subsidiaries

and error, to thinking to thinking
certainty and with remedies
illusion
These impediments Through
arise from
The mind
The body
The acquisition The communication
External circumstances of knowledge of knowledge
*William Hamilton, Lectures on Logic (London, 1856), I, 68
general, owed much to Kant but in this instance claimed an Aristotelian and
Scottish tradition of interest in communication that opens an individual to
outside sources of information. “Experience,” Hamilton taught,
we carry inside ourselves. But the experience of the individ-

ual is limited, when compared with the experience of the
species; and if men did not possess the means of communi-
cating to each other the results of their several observations—
were they unable to co-operate in accumulating a stock of
knowledge, and in carrying on the progress of discovery—
they would never have risen above the very lowest steps in
the acquisition of science. But to this mutual communication
they are competent; and each individual is thus able to appro-
priate to his own benefit the experience of his fellow-men,
and to confer on them in return the advantages which his
own observations may supply. (II, 176)
Because testimony is for Hamilton so much a matter of communica-

tion between individuals about experiences, he criticizes the use of the
term “evidence” in the place of a witness and the testimony (II, 177).
Evidence is vaguely any information that a reasoner might pick up and use
or a lawyer can support or refute. Evidence is an impersonal term possi-
bly useful for judging the objective probability of a fact, but it is an inap-
propriate term for so interpersonal a matter as judging the subjective
trustworthiness of the testifier. Hamilton follows the traditional teaching
that testimony has to be judged by a numberless calculus that entwines the
fact with the testifier’s character and access to the fact. To treat testimony
as merely evidence is to ignore the fundamental truth that testimony is
actively communicated and is not merely some bit of data inertly available.
Hamilton was at odds with Hume on this issue. The great debate about
miracles that The Port-Royal Logic had helped incite had become a major
issue for Scottish thinkers—partly because the fiery David Hume had
wanted to create a stir and partly because leading academic logicians such
as Reid and Hamilton continued to teach students the reasonableness of a
religion constructed upon the resurrection of Jesus. Hume had declared the
illogic and even the foolishness of believing miracles since they were
impossible in the first place and because testimony had to be judged by
experience, and, according to Hume, no one had ever experienced a mir-
acle. Reid and Hamilton, on the other hand, from their academic posts as
Scotland’s most important arbiters for what constituted logic and the rea-
sonable, refuted Hume. A reasonable person, Hamilton advised, must be
careful not to be too quick to assume a physical or metaphysical impossi-
bility. In the case of the metaphysical, one cannot unconditionally reject an
alleged fact as impossible simply just because “it is not explicable on nat-
ural laws, or even that any natural law stands opposed to it; it is further
requisite to prove that the intervention even of supernatural agency is
incompetent to its production” (II, 180). After offering this warning,
Hamilton proceeded to show the reasonableness of relying on the personal
trustworthiness and competency of an eyewitness while also taking into
account the completeness and consistency of that testimony as it passes
through non-eyewitness accounts. Harkening to the Aristotelian tradition
that Hume disparaged—and even to the Ramist rule of reciprocation—
Hamilton demanded that the character and the circumstances of the testi-
fier were of critical importance when faced with the seemingly incredible.
“On the contrary,” Hamilton declared from his lectern in response to Hume,
where the trustworthiness of a witness or witnesses is unim-

peachable, the very circumstance that the object is one in
itself unusual and marvelous, adds greater weight to the testi-
mony; for this very circumstance would itself induce men of
veracity and intelligence to accord a more attentive scrutiny

to the fact, and secure from them a more accurate report of
their observation [my italics]. (II, 184)
Hamilton affirmed that the requisite conditions of both objective pos-

sibility and subjective credibility had to be met for a testimony to be enti-
tled to credit, but that the latter ultimately held sway over the former. The
standard for objective possibility was very broad for Hamilton and did not
disallow miracles. Therefore, the more narrow and more readily applicable
standard should be the subjective credibility of the testifier. “The validity of
a testimony can only be accurately estimated from a critical knowledge of
the personal character of the witness” (II, 186). When the credibility of the
testimony is mediated through subsequent hearsay reports, the credibility
of the original—immediate—testimony “must be taken on the authority of
mediate witness” (II, 188). Such an emphasis on trusting a person and
communication through chains of testifiers is rooted in the optimism that
Aristotle encouraged. Too much pessimism about liars, forgers, and fools is
unproductive. Of course gullibility must be avoided; however, productive
reasonableness requires a willingness to trust other people and to believe
that truth ultimately prevails. The reasonable person, recognizing that the
greatest and most important information available to him or her comes
through communication with other people, must avoid the mire of cynical
skepticism and instead embrace and slow and steady reasonableness. Like
Quintilian on honest error and Augustine on no-fault submission, Hamilton
affirmed that a reasonable person must, to some extent and even in the
case of alleged miracles, be willing to risk putting their intellect into the
hands of others.
Having dealt with the extreme issue of miracles, Hamilton moved to
more traditional problems. Written testimony, especially documents initially
produced in foreign languages, in a different culture, or the distant past,
present another level of the same problem. Hamilton devoted a separate
chapter to the issue and taught his students a separate rule:
The examination and judgment of Writings professing to

contain the testimony of certain witnesses, and of Writings in
General professing to be the work of certain authors, is of
two parts. For the inquiry regards either, 1, The Authenticity
of the document, that is, whether it be, in whole or in part,
the product of its ostensible author; for ancient writings in
particular are frequently supposititious or interpolated; or, 2,
It regards the Meaning of the words of which it is composed,
for these, especially when in languages now dead, are
frequently obscure. The former of these problems is resolved
by the Art of Criticism (Critica), in the stricter sense of the
term; the latter by the Art of Interpretation (Exegetica or

Hermeneutica). Criticism is of two kinds. If it be occupied
with the criteria of authenticity of a writing in its totality, or
in its principal parts, it is called the Higher, and sometimes
the Internal, Criticism. If, again, it consider only the integrity
of particular words and phrases, it is called the Lower, and
sometimes the External, Criticism. The former of these may
perhaps be best styled the Criticism of Authenticity; the latter,
the Criticism of Integrity.
The Problem which Interpretation has to solve is—To
discover and expound the meaning of a writer, from the
words in which his thoughts are expressed. It departs from
the principle, that however manifold be the possible mean-
ings of the expressions, the sense of the writer is one.
Interpretation, by reference to its sources or subsidia, has
been divided into the Grammatical, the Historical, and the
Philosophical, Exegesis. (II, 191–92)
Certainly the arts of criticism and interpretation complicated the han-

dling of testimony. Questions about who the testifier actually was and
about the role of editors, amenders, translators, and interpreters and, most
importantly, confusions about meaning had to be taken into account.
Hamilton embraced the critical questioning of the German academics he
admired; however, in the same way he warned his students against Hume,
he warned his students not to fall into being overly critical. Reasonableness
was productive and should not undermine the acquisition and communi-
cation of knowledge between people even when mediated though an aged
document. Questioning should not be used to undermine communication;
rather, the questions must be used to help people through time and space
to communicate better. Here is the opening rule for Hamilton’s lecture on
communication:
An important means for the Acquisition and Perfecting of

Knowledge is the Communication of Thought. Considered in
general, the Communication of thought is either One-sided or
Mutual. The former is called Instruction (institutio), the latter
Conference (collocutio); but these, though in theory distinct,
are in practice easily combined. Instruction is again either
Oral or Written; and Conference, as it is interlocutionary and
familiar, or controversial and solemn, may, be divided into
Dialogue (colloquium, dialogues), and Disputation (disputa-
tio, concertatio). The Communcation of thought in all its
forms is a means of intellectual improvement, not only to him
who receives, but to him who bestows, information; in both
relations, therefore, it ought to be considered, and not, as is
usually done, in the latter only. (II, 204–5).
Like Reid, Hamilton thought it important for his logic classes not to
ignore the consequences of the Aristotelian maxim that humans are politi-
cal beings. “By nature a social being,” Hamilton taught his students, “man
has powers which are relative to, and, consequently, find their development
in, the company of his fellows” (II, 207). Communication, whether oral or
written, instruction, dialogue, or disputation can serve in the Socratic fash-
ion as a midwife to one’s own ideas or it can bring outside knowledge in.
The central point Hamilton wanted to teach is that both pure and modified
logic do their best work in communication with others. Loners don’t make
the best philosophers. Hamilton quoted Scaliger on Vives’s advocacy of
silent meditation over dispute, and then inisted “This is not true.” In this
conclusion to his course on pure and modified logic, Hamilton charged his
students to maintain a life of learning and teaching, reading and writing, lis-
tening and disputing. Reasonable humans are social beings. Reasonable
people acquire outside knowledge beyond the limits of their own experi-
ence. Reasonable people should not be so much sunk in the muck of their
own skepticism that they refuse the true communications available to them.
Hamilton identified pure logic as a way to encourage the academic devel-
opment of the powerful tools of formal and closed structures of knowledge.
He then taught his students the broader and social art of reasonableness as
modified logic. Hamilton is recognized as a significant figure in the revival
of Aristotelian pure logic, but it often goes unmentioned that he was also
one of the nineteenth century’s most influential promulgators of an
Aristotelian dialectic for a reasonable society.
SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND THE SUBMERGENCE OF

DIVINE TESTIMONY
James McCosh summed up his sketch of William Hamilton by writing that
Reid labored to restrain the pride of philosophy, and to bring

men back to a common sense in respect of which the peasant
and the philosopher are alike. It was the design of Kant’s great
work to show how little the speculative reason can accom-
plish. And now we have Sir William Hamilton showing within
what narrow limits the thought of man is restrained.39
Hamilton’s influence as a logic professor was rooted in merging Reid and

Kant within a core appreciation of Aristotle. Hamilton also deeply mined the
popular English, Dutch, and German humanistic logic textbooks of the two
centuries that preceded him. Out of this comprehensive scholarship, Hamilton
encouraged a purified formal logic while at the same time teaching his student
logicians the broader art of being reasonable that included human reliance on
and best use of testimony. Like Kant, he taught intellectual humility. But like
Reid, and unlike Kant, he taught that intellectual humility meant that reason-
able people had to trust more than their own personal experience, that rea-
sonable people had to trust communication from other people.
What is surprising—at least for those who have looked at his sources—
is that he did not teach his students to trust communication from God. In
fifty pages devoted to issues surrounding testimony, Hamilton’s Lectures on
Logic nowhere mentions what had long been a staple in sections on testi-
mony: the distinction between human and divine testimony. Eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Scottish logicians, by and large, have been noted
for their Christian piety and belief in divine revelation. McCosh—devout
Presbyterian that he was—wrote of Hamilton that “It is pleasant to think
that Sir William Hamilton ever professed to bow with reverence before the
revelations of the Bible.”40 But most of the Scots abandoned divine testi-
mony in their logic textbooks. The Renaissance formula, rooted in the
Romans, of separating divine from human testimony by ranking the cer-
tainty it yielded as equal to or higher than science appears to have become
too problematic to be taught as a simple rule of elementary reasonableness.
Thomas Reid, quoted earlier, believed that God and all sorts of spiritual
beings can communicate with humans, and Hamilton defended God’s abil-
ity to cause miracles. But both logic professors, when teaching elementary
reasonableness, submerged divine testimony under the surface of human
testimony in general. Hamilton, in a footnote commenting on Reid’s use of
the terms “revelation and inspiration,” backpedaled with:
These expressions are intended metaphorically to character-

ize the incomprehensible manner in which we are made sud-
denly aware of existence; and perhaps, to indicate that our
knowledge rests ultimately on a testimony which ought to be
implicitly believed.41
The subject of divine testimony—as distinct from divine revelation and

inspiration—was an issue that they even further avoided. For both Reid and
Hamilton, God can and does communicate. Logic classes for the last three
hundred years usually associated divine testimony with biblical teaching
and/or church teaching as opposed to individuals reporting a personal rev-
elation or inspiration. Teachers in elementary classes on reasonableness
could use logics from the classical-Augustinian or Thomist tradition to sup-
port their teaching that the Bible or Church had the authority of divine tes-
timony because in a person’s soul God somehow confirmed the divinity of
the divine testimony.
But fear of enthusiasm, unorthodox spiritualism, and the growth of
religious movements following individuals who supposedly directly
communicated with God conspired with the growth of academic biblical

criticism and church history to make divine testimony seem too loose and
too dangerous to be part of the art of being reasonable. Increasingly for
Scottish Protestants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the reason-
able way of viewing the Bible was as a document of human, rather than
divine, testimony of divine revelations and historical events.
It increasingly behooved both elementary logic classes and even pop-
ular Christian apologetics to submerge the issue of divine testimony and
focus on the simpler issue of human testimony. In the case of Evangelical
apologetics, it was cleaner to appeal to human testimony. William Paley’s
Evidences of Christianity (1794) did not claim the certainty of divine testi-
mony for belief in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but rather
emphasized the credibility of the Gospel eyewitnesses and the authoritative
historicity of the New Testament. The widely popular nineteenth-century
Scot apologist Thomas Chalmers, in his On the Miraculous and Internal
Evidences of the Christian Revelation (1852), also relied on the competence
of human testimony in the Bible to establish essential Christian facts. The
dominant trend in evangelical apologetics was to support the credibility of
the Resurrection and biblical miracles by the standards of human testimony
rather than divine. Appeals to authoritative divine testimony seem to have
become a liability. Such was the case in the popular apologetic written by
Simon Greenleaf, a law professor at Harvard from 1833 to 1848 and an
influential authority in American law of evidence:
The foundation of our religion is a basis of fact—the fact,

of the birth, ministry, miracles, death, resurrection, and
ascension of Jesus Christ. . . . Our religion, then, rests on the
credit due these witnesses. Are they worthy of implicit
belief, in the matters which they relate? This is the question,
in all human tribunals, in regard to persons testifying before
them; and we propose to test the veracity of these wit-
nesses by the same rules and means which are there
employed. . . . The proof that God has revealed himself to
man by special and express communications . . . is no part
of these inquiries.42
Even John Henry Newman, when listing the foundations of theism, did
not root knowledge of God in a divine testimony distinct from human tes-
timony:
Is not the being of a God reported to us by testimony, handed

down by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought
home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the
suggestions of our conscience? It is a truth in the natural
order, as well as the supernatural.43
It would be simplistic to describe the end of divine testimony in text-

books on elementary reasoning as a manifestation of the secularization of
the nineteenth-century academy. The Evangelical Christians at their own
schools were removing the subject. Maybe it was a curriculum issue. Divine
testimony was too psychologically and theologically complex for the
increasingly narrow and departmentally specialized elementary courses on
reasoning and reasonableness. Logic classes were being purified to a leaner
emphasis on Aristotle’s formal structures rather than his dialectic. It was
probably better to move the subject of divine testimony into more advanced
classes in psychology and theology. The cumulative effect of the nine-
teenth-century curriculum adjustments was not to deny or even attempt to
undermine divine testimony; rather, divine testimony simply got submerged
in elementary logic classes under the surface of a general discussion of
what Reid called the social operations of the mind. Somewhere between
Watts’s Logick at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the popular
Scottish logics at the end of the century, divine testimony ceased to have a
place in the normal elementary curriculum of a young Anglo-American
Protestant.
To give strength to such a loose generalization, two logic professors
associated with Hamilton can serve as examples of perspectives on teach-
ing divine testimony in elementary logic in the middle to late nineteenth
century. The first is Robert Buchanan (1786–1873), the chair of logic at
Glasgow from 1827 to 1864, during most of the years Hamilton was down
the road at Edinburgh. Buchanan was a thirty-eight year old Presbyterian
minister when he was first hired to assist in the logic classes of the aging
George Jardine. Two years later he succeeded to the chair. He was a pleas-
ant, dedicated, and pious professor of logic. He wrote a university-
produced play called “Wallace,” published a sermon in 1829, and saw some
of his poems in the university magazine, but he never published any philo-
sophical scholarship. Every day he read his lectures in the morning and
orally examined the students in the afternoon. He opened each class with
prayer. These prayers, one of his former students reports, “were far from
being stereotyped and were always appropriate; they were short and sim-
ple and expressed in well-chosen words with a gentle earnestness which
was very touching.”44 He “never bullied or made sarcastic remarks. His large
class—often approaching a couple of hundreds—was in perfect control.”
Behind his back his students called him “Logic Bob.”45
While Hamilton was leading a vigorous Aristotelian purification in
Edinburgh, Buchanan was plodding between the old and the new in
Glasgow. Like Whately and the best of the previous generation, he began
by distinguishing the science of logic from the art—the distinction that
Hamilton called pure and modified. He fully emphasized the science of syl-
logisms along with medieval mnemonic strategies and taught his students
that this science was pure logic. As for the art of logic—the more broad art
of being reasonable—he taught the three generally accepted types of evi-
dence: experience, analogy, and testimony. The last of these was especially
important to a whole lecture, “On the Evidences of Christianity.” In the
spirit of the times, Logic Bob clearly informed his students that testimony
and the faith that results are “not under the province of logic.” However,
just as Hamilton interjected the subject of miracles into his lectures,
Buchanan found it appropriate in his logic class to teach the reasonable-
ness of Christianity.46
But Logic Bob was not content to consider the history presented in the
Bible as merely human testimony. He taught his students that divine testi-
mony had a higher authority than human and that it was highly probable
that the Old and New Testaments were divine testimony. Furthermore,
his class was useful because logic can be useful “in ascertaining the
fact whether any particular doctrine does rest on divine authority.”47 He
recognized that divine testimony becomes human testimony as it is
passed through communities and time, but he believed it his duty to
teach logic students that the “the torch of faith” along with “laws of rea-
son and evidence” would help them distinguish divine from mere human
testimony.48
Buchanan at Glasgow exemplifies the kind of professor who felt called
to teach the reasonableness of Christianity in his logic class. Reid and
Hamilton apparently felt similarly called, but did it in a less direct and more
sophisticated manner. As part of this indirection and sophistication they
were willing to submerge the subject of divine testimony without denying
its possibility. Buchanan and probably others were more direct and more
traditional. They continued to teach the subject of divine testimony in logic
classes and followed the long tradition of expecting grace acting deep in the
soul of the reasoner to distinguish divine from human testimony. On the
other hand, our second example, Alexander Campbell Fraser (1819–1914),
shows the way a highly evangelical logic professor could believe that his
elementary logic classes should not be cluttered with divine testimony.
Fraser exemplifies the rising curricular specialization that divided psychol-
ogy from philosophy.
Like Buchanan, Fraser was plucked from a manse, first to become pro-
fessor of logic and metaphysics at New College, Edinburgh, an experimen-
tal Christian college, from 1846 to 1856, and subsequently to be the
successor to Hamilton at the University of Edinburgh from 1856 to 1891. As
a former student of Hamilton, Fraser was devoted to further encouraging the
Aristotelian logic that Hamilton had revived in Scotland and merging it more
fully into the dominant German logic of his era. His lectures followed
Hamilton in dividing logic into two types according to whether “it does or
does not include the tests of the real truth within its domain.”49 The former
he called pure logic and the latter he called mixed logic.50 Like Hamilton,
when discussing testimony, he made no distinction between human and
divine.
Fraser accepted the fact that logic in the nineteenth century had begun
its “Kantian Period.”51 The Germans, he declared in his 1846 inaugural lec-
ture to the logic and metaphysics class at the evangelical-sponsored New
College, want to have philosophy without religion. “It is an evil omen for
philosophy if she cannot work in harmony with the infallible Book of doc-
trine.”52 However, he consoled his audience of Christian evangelicals, “Let
us not be discouraged because of this German experiment.” Rather, the
Scottish school of philosophy can accept an “infusion of continentalism”
without losing its commitment to the “revealed positive truth of inspired
Scripture.”53
Also important to Fraser was the rise of psychology that he believed
was “inaugurated in Britain” in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding.54 Fraser’s most lasting work of scholarship—completed
along with his other publications after he had retired from daily classroom
teaching—was to annotate a new edition of Locke’s Essay. That edition is
still in print by Dover Publications and Fraser’s extensive footnotes to
Locke’s text show great appreciation for the breadth of Locke’s thought
along with no criticism for Locke’s handling of miracles and divine testi-
mony. But Fraser followed Hamilton in believing that Locke’s Essay was a
bad influence on logic classes. Locke, for Fraser, was interesting for many
reasons, but he had rebelled against the syllogistic logic that the Germans
had shown was too powerful to ignore. Locke had also tried to pack too
much into one logic textbook and did not make proper distinctions
between such things as pure logic and the more general art of reasonable-
ness. Most particularly, Fraser did not think divine testimony should be a
subject discussed in philosophy classes. In his autobiography, Fraser wrote
that the absolute certainty claimed for divine testimony in scriptures or in
church decrees was more a matter for theology and psychology than for
the mixed logic of testimony, which can only give probability.55 He also
explained why he limited his logic classes primarily to pure logic with only
a limited amount of mixed logic: Classes on the practice of reasoning nat-
urally “led onwards from the formulas of syllogism, and methods of induc-
tive trial, to a reflective study of the spiritual constitution of the human
reasoner—in a word, from Logic to Psychology; and through this to
Metaphysics or ultimate philosophy, and analysis of religion.”56
Fraser was committed to a step-by-step curriculum with each course
working within its proper limits. The “final problems” of philosophy and
the general seeking of truth, he wrote, were “hardly appropriate” for young
students who first need “to learn to think.” The young students in his logic
classes
still needed to have the “the mist and veil of words” removed,
their sense of logical consistency made more acute, and
themselves made more awake to the difference between
probability and fancy in estimating evidence. . . .
The duty of the teacher in these circumstances was first
of all to prepare the young philosophers to encounter fallacy
and sophism, by analyzing valid reasoning. Logic formed
accordingly our preamble to psychology and metaphysics.57
Elementary logic, Fraser noted, was a “vestibule” for bigger things. Like
Hamilton, he wanted to “awaken” entering students to issues related to tes-
timonial evidence, but divine testimony and its traditional relationship to
psychology and theology should be handled later in the curriculum.
Fraser exemplifies the submergence of divine testimony in elementary
classes so that the subject can be brought to the surface in the proper
classes at the proper time. In his long career as logic professor he seems to
have maintained an evangelical Christian zeal for education that, in his own
words, connected “the Christian ideas and spirit with the movements of the
thinking world.”58 Both New College and the University of Edinburgh were
expected to support Christianity by supporting “the thinking world.”
Thomas Chalmers, the great Christian apologist of the nineteenth century,
had helped found New College by calling for the “preparation of ministers,
whether for the work of instruction or for the work of defense” by educat-
ing them “in the forms of a science, and receive an academic treatment in
the hands of academic men.”59 Fraser was an academic man appropriate to
Chalmer’s desire. He considered his service to Christian education to be the
offering of elementary classes in pure logic that—in Kantian manner—
offered only a minimum of mixed logic. Divine testimony was to be dis-
cussed in upper-level theology and psychology classes offered by his
colleagues. If a student wanted to raise the issue of divine testimony in
class, Fraser probably quickly explained a Lockean handling of the subject,
then moved on. There was no secularization of the curriculum in this, only
an educational strategy. One result of this strategy of specialization, how-
ever, was that the curriculum no longer had one set place for teaching the
general art of reasonableness.
CREDULITY, BELIEF, AND HUMILITY IN SCOTTISH LOGIC
Reasonable society, Thomas Reid taught his students, was founded on two
deep orientations within humans: a disposition to believe testimony and a
propensity to speak truth.60 The two work hand in hand and are at the foun-
dation of the Aristotelian tradition of emphasizing belief along with assent.
Belief, for Aristotle, was not something deliberated. Belief happens. Beliefs
can be true or false, but are not good or bad in the way the method of
reasoning can be performed well or badly.61 Carneades and Cicero had

emphasized assent instead of belief. Assent was deliberative. Assent was
under the control of the reasoner. Boethius had moved back toward
Aristotelian belief when he taught the authority of spontaneous and willing
belief.
The root issue between belief and assent is the extent of control peo-
ple have over their own knowledge. The classical Ciceronian emphasis on
assent and the classical Augustinian openness to submitting share the per-
spective of the individual will having power over the knowledge with
which to reason. The negatively cautious John Locke added to the tradition
of the reasoner’s power by ending his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding with chapters warning against enthusiasm and dogmatism.
In the eighteenth century it became common to end textbooks with these
models of believing too readily just as in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries reasoning textbooks most often concluded with the fallacies—
especially the so-called fallacy of appealing to an authority. In 1764–65,
Robert Watson, teaching logic at St. Andrews at the same time Reid was at
Aberdeen and moving to Glasgow, followed Locke’s pattern by ending his
course on logic with warnings against enthusiasm, dogmatism, and credulity.
Credulity, he warned his students, “is in some degree natural to all men,”
and “some men are the prey of credulity generally.”62
Thomas Reid inaugurated a new trend for Scottish logic classes, guid-
ing his students back to an appreciation of the powerlessness and imme-
diacy of Aristotelian belief. He used the image of the child. Young children,
Reid wrote in Essays on the Active Powers of Man, “in order to learn, they
must believe their instructors. . . . They believe a thousand things before
they ever spend a thought upon evidence. Nature supplies the want of evi-
dence, and gives them an instinctive kind of faith without evidence.”63
Echoing New Testament praise for the faith of children, Reid did not denigrate
childish credulity; rather, he saw in it a foundation for human reasonable-
ness that adults properly learn to moderate. James Beattie (1735–1802), one
of Reid’s first and most popularly influential followers who also lectured on
logic at Aberdeen, taught that “we have a natural tendency to believe in the
testimony of others” and that there is a scale from the credulity of children
and “persons of little experience” to the mature assent.64 Certainly mature
assent is better, but the credulity of children is the foundation for faith in
human testimony. Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), the most prominent logi-
cian between the careers of Reid and Hamilton, also used the analogy of
children and maturation to describe the “instinctive principle” of belief that
“as with children is originally without bounds, and is afterwards gradually
checked by the example which they occasionally meet with of human
falsehood.”65 Stewart made clear in the following paragraphs that reason-
able people should not deny their childish instinct to believe. It would be
an error to believe that instinct “always leads us astray,” and it is certain

that the instinct helps facilitate “the progress of the mind.”66
Spontaneous and instinctive childish belief in testimony along with the
optimistic faith that people are generally passing around true information
was an Aristotelianism that the Scots wanted to emphasize over against the
worried warnings of Hume and his ilk against childish credulity. The Scot
logicians sought a humility deeper than the humility claimed by the skepti-
cal tradition. The skeptics, in their claim to be assenting to probabilistic
knowledge, still claimed the power to assent or not. Reid, Stewart, and
Hamilton taught the reasonableness of childlike, passive, and instinctual
belief at the foundation of human knowledge. Certainly assent and judg-
ment were important, but they wanted to emphasize human weakness
where extreme skeptics and extreme rationalists demanded human strength.
Reasonableness gave up some of its human power in the Aristotelian and
Scottish tradition by recognizing the role of belief in knowledge.
William Hamilton forcefully developed this humble position and rooted
it in Aristotle. Aristotle, Hamilton taught in his Lectures on Logic, founded
the philosophy of Common Sense with the doctrine that all human knowl-
edge derives from belief. According to Aristotle, writes Hamilton, “all our
knowledge is in its root a blind, a passive, faith, in other words, a feeling.”67
Although Hamilton does not use the image of a child, he affirms (with
Reid) the passiveness, the childlike trust, required for all knowledg and
which calls for special consideration of how testimony works in the social
operation of the mind. Certainly we sometimes deliberately assent to testi-
mony; however, often we simply believe. We blindly, passively, and imme-
diately trust ready-made knowledge gained from other people.
In logic lectures to university teenagers, the Scots taught budding ratio-
nalists to appreciate the Aristotelian doctrine that we humans don’t have all
that much control over our own knowledge. We are, and should be to
some extent, still childlike in the way we think and the way we should trust
other people. The deep epistemology of how a belief was created by a tes-
timony was ultimately circular, but that did not make it false. Nicholas
Wolterstorff, discussing Reid’s epistemology of testimony, noted how
the belief created in the hearer is not just the belief that the
speaker has the belief—though that belief is indeed created
in the hearer. What transpires in accepting testimony is that,
upon believing that the speaker believes what (one believes)
he asserted, one then believes what he believes.68
This description reaches into the depth of Thomas Reid’s willingness to

hinge reasonableness on the social operations of the mind. In his respect
for the interaction of humans sharing and believing each other, Reid was
much concerned for the role of humility in knowledge. Reid hated the
prideful aspects of Aristotle and the way such pride had come to abide in
the traditional way philosophers perceived their work. On the other hand,
he found in some aspects of Aristotle’s work—the ethics, politics, rhetoric,
and dialectic—the groundwork of the social operations of the mind that he
himself found at the core of commonsense thinking and living. In appreci-
ating these aspects of Aristotle, Reid led the Scottish tradition of logic edu-
cation to emphasize testimony.
JAMES MCCOSH AT THE END OF THE SCOTTISH TRADITION
James McCosh (1811–1894), historian of Scottish philosophy, student at

Glasgow and Edinburgh, pastor in the Scottish evangelical movement, logic
professor in Ireland, and modernizing college president in America, exem-
plifies the way the Presbyterian Aristotelianism of the Scots handled testi-
mony a century after Reid, especially as it joined modern education in
America. McCosh, much influenced by Hamilton and Kant, wrote two logic
textbooks, one pure and one applied. In both he implicitly denied Reid’s
designation that testimony is its own category of knowledge separate from
experience, he avoided Reid’s “principle of credulity” that encourages
childlike belief, and he tended to write about testimony in a negative man-
ner. But he did encourage the use of mathematical analogies for testimony
and the apologetic use of testimony to support Christianity.
After sixteen years as professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen’s
College in Belfast, McCosh in 1868 was appointed president of the College
of New Jersey (now Princeton University). In his tenure as president he
pushed the little Presbyterian college to include more science in the cur-
riculum, to modernize old departments, and to compete with Harvard and
Yale for status as a nationally oriented, professionally respectable, and intel-
lectually influential university. In keeping with his ambitions, he published
a logic textbook within two years of arriving in New Jersey. The book was
derived from the logic lectures he had written in Belfast and was published
in order to bring good logic to America. “It is not my office to criticize the
logical treatises of the United States,” he wrote in the preface to his The
Laws of Discursive Thought Being a Textbook in Formal Logic (1870); how-
ever, he could only find two logic books written in America worthy of
praise.69 As for his own logic lectures, he thought them an improvement on
Hamilton’s, which he described as “left in a crude state.”70 Later he pub-
lished a companion logic textbook derived from lectures first presented and
published at Ohio Wesleyan College: The Tests of Various Kinds of Truth:
Being a Treatise of Applied Logic (1889). As a reform-minded college
administrator, McCosh knew that with a good textbook he could extend his
reach all the way into classrooms throughout the country. He designed the
first textbook to bring a Kantian emphasis on pure logic to American stu-

dents. The second was to be a more elementary and broad-based textbook
for colleges and “upper schools” on “what Kant calls applied logic, which
may be quite as useful as primary or formal logic.”71
In both his logic textbooks McCosh was careful to keep his readers dis-
tinguishing pure logic from what Hamilton had called modified logic but
he called applied logic. This was important to his modernizing program for
philosophy departments. Yet at the same time, both kinds of logic retained
the traditional duty of teaching beginning students the messy impurities of
the general reasonableness. McCosh’s pure logic was impure enough to
include a long section on applied matters of general reasoning—including
much on testimony and Christian apologetics. His applied logic further
developed the same issues.
The most important difference between McCosh and his predecessors,
Reid and Hamilton, was his refusal to see testimony as fundamentally sep-
arate from experience and his lack of commitment to the childlike “princi-
ple of credulity” that founded knowledge ultimately in visceral trust.
McCosh was much more influenced by Hume and Kant on these issues. He
lined out his respectful independence from Reid and Hamilton in the first
paragraph of his chapter on testimony in The Tests of Various Kinds of
Truth:
It is not necessary to suppose, with some of the Scottish meta-

physicians in their answers to Hume’s argument against mir-
acles, that there is an original instinct or principle of common
sense leading us to trust in testimony. I believe, indeed, that
there is a social instinct in all of us inclining us to have an
affection for, and trust in, those we meet with, especially in
father and mother, brothers and sisters, and leading us to
believe in what they say. But the belief in testimony is the
result of experience, and is modified by experience.72
On the other hand, McCosh maintained a strong desire to emphasize the

importance of testimony as a means of getting at truths and was still opti-
mistic about how much truth-telling was going on in society:
There is a conscience in every man which disposes him, if he

does not resist it, to speak truly; even selfishness prompts him
not to lose the confidence of his fellow men by deceiving
them. Hence the great body of mankind speak the truth when
they are not led to act otherwise by a desire to excuse them-
selves, or by malignity toward their neighbor, or some other
like motive. We can reach truth by means of testimony. It was
in haste that David said, “All men are liars.”73
As a traditional Scot, McCosh was still much interested in the social

operation of the mind and in human reliance on testimony. However, like
Hume and Kant, he wanted nothing to do with being childlike and feared
religious enthusiasm and mysticism more than Reid and Hamilton. The Tests
of Various Kinds of Truth is heavily concerned with the tests of religious
truth and opens with a call “to try the spirits whether they are of God” and
warnings that mysticism “is very fascinating and at times elevating . . . but.”74
In this religious context, McCosh, in both textbooks, taught students to
root Christian apologetics in human testimony. He also criticized the
Lockean notion that written testimony diminished in authority as it passed
through history. McCosh insisted in traditional fashion that the cumulative
effect of the character and multiplicity of the witnesses and the circum-
stances of the reports handed down testifying to the Resurrection are all so
strong that “healthy minds” will find the evidence overwhelming.75 But also
in this religious context, McCosh tended to warn against over-reliance on
testimony. McCosh, like Locke, was negatively cautious about testimony.
General maxims, traditions, popular notions, and common beliefs should
all be considered weak and not necessarily reliable. McCosh wanted
Christian reasonableness taught in logic classrooms, but it was a wary rea-
sonableness that was less optimistic than Reid’s or Hamilton’s.
McCosh believed in the progress of knowledge and promoted modern
science in his university. He believed in the importance of testimony in the
shared gathering of knowledge. He also believed that good reasoning
would support Christianity. All these notions came together in The Laws of
Discursive Thought, where he promoted the method of mathematicizing
testimony. We have already seen how this method was derived from The
Port-Royal Logic and thrived up through the early nineteenth century.
McCosh’s 1870 textbook is a late example of the hope that quantifying
qualities such as the character of a witness can create helpful numerical
estimates of probability in situations involving testimony. “We can, in a
loose way, numerically estimate” such things as the character, wisdom, and
ability of person.76 Although McCosh conceded that the attempt seldom
results in anything of practical value, he did promote the method as possi-
bly helpful in some situations. He, for example, thought that such quantifi-
cation supported Christian apologetics. When estimating the probability of
the three independent witnesses to the Resurrection speaking falsely, he
recommends 1/10 as the numerical value for each. The formula then is
1/10 ⫻ 1/10 ⫻ 1/10, which yields the possibility of speaking falsely as
1/1000. This, he says, is why a healthy mind will accept Christianity.
McCosh, with his belief that testimony is an aspect of experience rather
than a separate epistemological category, his antagonism to Reid’s princi-
ple of belief, his general negative warnings about relying too much on tes-
timony, and his mathematicizing seem more influenced by Hume that Reid.
Certainly his support for the reasonableness of Christ’s resurrection has no

source in Hume; however, in his modernized Scottish teaching on testi-
mony for use in American colleges and high schools, McCosh seems to
have pushed Reid to the side and raised Hume. It is unclear how influen-
tial his textbooks were at the end of the nineteenth century, but McCosh
was a famous and influential proponent of modernizing education while
still supporting the social and religious values of Presbyterianism. We can
assume that, as the College of New Jersey was fully modernized into
Princeton University under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, McCosh’s
moves from Reid and Hamilton to Hume and Kant were appreciated in the
philosophy department.
RICHARD WHATELY AND THE OXFORD

ARISTOTELIANS
Summing up the history of logic in Britain, James McCosh wrote that
Archbishop Whately and Sir William Hamilton had saved the discipline
because both were “admirers of the Analytic of Aristotle.”77 The textbooks
and lectures of Whately and Hamilton were educational manifestations of
the Greek Revival era in British and Scottish history—an aesthetic revival
that honored the purity of forms in ancient Greece and eschewed the eclec-
ticism of the Romans. Cicero, Whately noted, was not systematic: “he
delighted so much more in the practice than in the theory” of his art.78
Roman practicality, not theory, had been the generative power of humanis-
tic interest in testimony up through the eighteenth century. Now, however,
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, idealization of Roman practice
receded while the vigor of Greek theory came to the fore. The Scots theo-
rized about the social operations of the mind, and Hamilton found a strong
place in his modified (or applied) logic for testimony. At Oxford, mostly at
Oriel College, a group of “noetics” or Greek-honoring intellectuals flour-
ished who advocated all sorts of ecclesiastical, political, and educational
reforms. Richard Whately was at the center of these noetics, and he became
the most important nineteenth-century proponent of a revived Aristotelian
handling of testimony in logic and rhetoric courses. His textbooks on each
subject went through many editions even after his death and were mainstays
of English-speaking education during the era when the sun never set on
Victoria’s empire.
Richard Whately (1787–1863), eventually the Archbishop of Dublin,
was long a fixture at Oxford as tutor, professor, and administrator. Although
he was surrounded at Oxford by some of the brightest lights of England,
Whately’s scholarship seems to have been neither broad nor deep. He was
especially hampered in his philosophical studies by not knowing the
German language. Erkki Patokorpi notes that “nothing in Whately’s writing

indicates that he knew Kant’s works.”79 He was the sort of common-room
scholar who liked to talk more than read. But like many of the most influ-
ential textbook writers and teachers in history, Whately grasped some
essentials and was able to write and speak about them with great clarity
and power. John Henry Newman wrote of Whately:
I owe him a great deal. He was a man of generous and warm

heart. He was particularly loyal to his friends, and to use the
common phrase, “all his geese were swans.” While I was still
awkward and timid in 1822, he took me by the hand, and
acted the part to me of a gentle and encouraging instructor.
He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think
and use my reason.80
Whately taught Newman to appreciate Aristotle and brought Newman

in as a collaborator when writings his logic textbook. Eventually their
strong egos drove them apart. “His mind was too different from mine,”
Newman wrote,
for us to remain long on one line. I recollect how dissatisfied

he was with an Article of mine in the London Review. . . .
When I was diverging from him (which he did not like),
I thought of dedicating my first book to him, in words to the
effect that he had not only taught me to think, but to think
for myself.81
Whatever Whately’s faults and superficialities, he saw in Aristotle the

type of high-thinking yet practical gentleman that he believed the British
empire most needed. McCosh was right to say that Whately grasped the
purity and importance of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic, but Whately also
grasped the Aristotle of dialectics, rhetoric, politics, ethics, poetry, and nat-
ural science. Edward Copleston (1776–1849) taught him this wide appreci-
ation of the whole of Aristotle. Coppleston, first his tutor and later his
colleague, wrote a famous defense of Aristotelian and Classical education
in a series of three essays in the Edinburgh Review between 1809 and 1811.
Aristotle, for Copleston, was the best sort of English gentleman and the
ancient Greeks, in general, were better models for students than the Romans.
Although Whately and Copleston flourished during the Greek Revival
era of English culture, Oxford colleges had long been bent toward Aristotle
more than any other British schools. In the sixteenth century, Oxford had
promoted the eclectic humanist Aristotelianism of Philipp Melanchthon and
John Case. In the seventeenth century, John Wallis, Robert Sanderson, and
Henry Aldrich had carried on the tradition. In the eighteenth century, Aldrich’s
text was regularly reprinted and in the nineteenth century was reborn in
a newly edited version. Around the time of Aldrich, the Oxford-trained
Puritan Charles Morton took eclectic Aristotelianism to Harvard College,
and John Wesley, while teaching at Oxford, wrote an Aristotelian logic text-
book for his students. For three hundred years Oxford had been regularly
criticized by reformers like Bacon and Locke for having too conservative a
grip on Aristotle. Whately’s Elements of Logic and Elements of Rhetoric
(1828) introduced an even tighter grip on Aristotle. For the next fifty years
Whately and Oxford led Anglo-American education toward a greater appre-
ciation of Aristotelianism.
The humanist curriculum at Oxford prior to the nineteenth century had
tended to conflate logic and rhetoric into an eclectic logic course that cov-
ered the whole “art of thinking.” In the spirit of Greek revival, the curric-
ula of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century universities began to
revive the Aristotelian and classic liberal arts distinction between logic and
rhetoric. Whately’s importance in the history of education is that he pro-
duced the two most influential textbooks that in the 1820s so cleanly
espoused the distinction between logic and rhetoric that the new Greek-
revival curricula desired. His textbooks swept the vestiges of Watts’s popu-
lar logic out of English-speaking schools and planted two texts to serve two
courses in its place. From the late 1820s until the early 1870s, Whately’s
logic and rhetoric seemed ubiquitous in the American and British empires.
With these textbooks, not only had Whately purified logic, but he also
helped revive rhetoric. Rhetoric as a recognized and respected college dis-
cipline had long been declining. Erkki Patokorpi writes that “the introduc-
tion of Whately’s treatise as a college and university textbook in America
and Britain bought rhetoric, as a discipline, several more extra years.”82
But testimony was disadvantaged by this return to distinguishing logic
from rhetoric because Aristotle had discussed testimony mostly in his Rhetoric.
Whately had no intention of diminishing the importance of teaching testi-
mony as crucial to the art of being reasonable, but his purification of logic
and reinvigorated rhetoric put testimony at risk. The trouble was that the
noetics, even thought they revered Aristotelian thinking, also remained com-
mitted to the tradition of a classical liberal arts curriculum that had developed
after Aristotle during the Roman Empire. Aristotle had taught formal logic,
dialectic (informal logic), and rhetoric. So Aristotle taught three subjects that
liberal arts advocates had to distribute among two subjects, logic and rheto-
ric. If logic was to be purified and emphasize formal syllogisms, then dialec-
tic had to be put mostly into rhetoric. But as noted above, Whately had
bought traditional rhetoric only a few more years in the fast modernizing cur-
ricula of universities. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, rhetoric’s
hold in the curriculum has not been strong. In its own pursuit of clarifying
its academic role, rhetoric has largely jettisoned the idea of teaching dialectic
and instead emphasized persuasion. In the words of a logic teacher in the

1920s: “Obviously rhetoric must use logic, and yet its center of gravity is else-
where.”83
Whately played an important role in losing dialectic—the teaching of
the art of being reasonable about probabilistic matters such as testimony—
in the academic shuffle of logic and rhetoric in English-speaking colleges
and universities. He did this in conjunction with an attempt to revive top-
ics in rhetoric. Topics, however, would never be able to regain their old
dominant role in the curriculum and rhetoric would lose place to pure
logic, leaving dialectic hanging.
INFORMATION AND SIGNS
Whately, when dedicating his Elements of Logic to Edward Copleston, cred-

ited his tutor and many previous writers as his sources. “I can hardly con-
sider myself as the Author,” he wrote, since so much of the book has been
“borrowed from former publications.”84 Good textbooks are seldom original,
and authorship is usually a matter of reenvisioning how best to organize
standard ideas and information. Whately’s influence on testimony did not
derive from any originality of his material but from the two ways he pack-
aged it in the old discredited topics.
Topics has a long history as a structure that can be schematically
described in which to store or retrieve “arguments.” Arguments were not
verbal jousts, but tools with which one argues. Stated another way, argu-
ments are the premises from which a conclusion is drawn. Whately took
the old idea of a scheme of arguments and expanded it to describe all the
types of places from which a reasoning person can draw. Ideally, topics
had also been often conceived as a strategy whereby a person trying to
prove something would move from topic to topic up and down the scheme,
gathering all the relevant arguments useful to what he or she wanted to
prove. When writing specifically on Christian apologetics, Whately encour-
aged Christians to have such a storehouse of arguments with which to
defend the tenets of Christianity. The finding of arguments as one moves
about the scheme was traditionally called invention from the Latin invenio.
Whately used the more precise translation discovery. This discovery system,
which included testimony, appears in both his Elements of Logic and
Elements of Rhetoric. He did not call it topics. Instead he titled it, in the
Logic, “Discovery of Truth” and in the Rhetoric, “Of Arguments.” In general,
however, he praised the “rhetorical common-places” as “a wonderful spec-
imen of acuteness of thought.”85
Whately offered two ways to reenvision testimony as a common-place
for arguments gained from external sources. In the Logic he described the
role of testimony in communication, giving specific attention to appropriate
views of assent and trust. In the Rhetoric he described more fully the types
of testimony within a scheme of arguments focused on the relationship
between premises and conclusions.
“It is of the utmost importance,” Whately wrote in the Logic concerning
information and instruction, “to distinguish . . . two kinds of discovery of
truth.”86 In the context of traditional topics, the distinction was similar to
Aristotle’s technical (intrinsic) and non-technical (extrinsic). A historian gives
us information, Whately noted, while a mathematician gives instruction.
Information he defined as that which cannot be worked up from within one’s
own reasoning and requires trusting the deliverer. Instruction, however, may
come from a teacher, but a student, in theory, could have worked up the
knowledge without the input. “To all practical purposes,” Whately wrote, the
testimony in either case may be as completely unknown to the math student
as the reader of history; however, as soon as the math students hears his les-
son, “the argument by which it is connected with his previous notions is
made clear to him, he recognizes it as something conformable to, and con-
tained in, his former belief.”87 On the other hand,
If we inform a man that we have a colony in New-South

Wales, or that the earth is at such a distance from the sun; or
that the platina is heavier than gold . . . this kind of knowl-
edge is most usually, and most strictly, called information.
We gain it from observation, and from testimony. No mere
internal workings of our own minds (except when the mind
itself is the very object to be observed,) or mere discussions
in words, will make a fact known to us.88
Information gained by testimony requires “great room for sagacity in

judging what testimony to admit ” and recognition that it is taken by trust.
“To take a geometrical truth upon trust, or to attempt to ascertain it by
observation, would betray a total ignorance of the nature of the science.”89
By reaching back to this bifurcation when describing where we ulti-
mately discover arguments, Whately repackaged the fundamental recognition
that had been at the core of teaching testimony since Aristotle: that the full-
ness of being reasonable requires recognizing the distinctiveness of informa-
tion that we can only gain by trust. Whately describes three places in which
to discover truths—from within, from the senses or experience, and from
other people. Each raises its own distinct issues. Unlike Whately, textbooks
teaching topics had traditionally categorized observation and experience with
knowledge discovered internally rather than externally; however, these three
sources were rooted in the long tradition of teaching reasonableness.
Whately believed it of “utmost importance” to distinguish the three, not for
pure logic, but rather for the fullness of understanding the realm of being
reasonable, of which logic is a key, but limited, part.
Figure 5.3. Richard Whately’s scheme for arguments.*
Arguments are divided

according to
The form in which Their subject The intention of The relation of the subject
they are stated matter the person who matter of the premise to
adduces them that of the conclusion into
á priori; viz. such an argument Arguments whose premises could

that the premises would account not have been used to account
for the conclusion were that for the conclusion.
conclusion granted.
Sign Induction
Infer the necessary Infer the condition

condition
Sign Testimony Concurrent signs Calculation of Argument from

probabilities progressive
approach
Matters of fact Matters of opinion
*Derived from Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 29 and Erkki Patokorpi, Rhetoric, Argumentative
and Divine: Richard Whately and His Discursive project of the1820s, 151
In Elements of Rhetoric, Whately taught testimony as an argument from

a different angle. Rhetoric is the social art of persuasion—ideally persuasion
for the betterment of society performed by good people deserving to be
leaders. Compared with logic, the emphasis in rhetoric is less on structure
and more on use. Whately’s Rhetoric taught the structure of discovering argu-
ments with an eye toward the various ways arguments can be used in con-
vincing people of conclusions. For this purpose, Whately supplied a scheme
of arguments (see figure 5.3).
Testimony has a significant role in this scheme and about twenty pages
(depending on the edition) of Elements of Rhetoric are devoted to the sub-
ject. Working up from the bottom of Whately’s scheme, testimony is a sign
of unnecessary condition that is other than an á priori argument. Working
down the scheme, Whately says the most important question to ask of the
relationship between the subject matter of a premise to that of the conclu-

sion is: “Suppose the proposition in question to be admitted, would this
statement here used as an Argument, serve to account for and explain the
truth or not?” If “yes” then the argument is á priori. If the answer is “no”
then we have a looser relationship between the premise and conclusion—
either a sign or an induction. Signs, on their own scale, can be strong or
loose. If a person is said to have died, Whately offers, that it is a necessary
inference to conclude that the person was alive before dying. This, how-
ever, is a sign and not an á priori argument because “a man’s ‘being alive
one day,’ is a circumstance necessary, as a Condition, to his ‘dying the
next;’ but has no tendency to produce it.”90 His being dead does not
account for his being alive.
Testimony, therefore, is a sign of unnecessary condition. “Argument
from Testimony” Whately described as “the premises being the existence of
the Testimony; the Conclusion, the truth of what is attested; which is con-
sidered a ‘Condition’ of the Testimony having been given: since it is evi-
dent that so far only as this is allowed . . . can this Argument have any
force.”91 Testimony has force but that force is not the ability to directly
account for a conclusion; rather, the force of testimony is in the circum-
stances surrounding the testimony. The circumstances that are most impor-
tant for matters of fact are “the honesty of a witness, his accuracy, and his
means of gaining information”; for matters of opinion there must be added
“his ability to form a judgment.”92
Whately’s list of section headings shows the breadth of his analysis of
the various aspects involved in the force of testimony:
Character of Witnesses
Number of Witnesses
Undesigned Testimony—(unintentional)
Testimony of Adversaries
Negative Testimony
Concurrent Testimony
Character of Things Attested
Things Not Understood, or Not Believed, by Those Who
Attest Them
Superior Force of Negative Probabilities
Testimony on Oath
Testimonies Mutually Confirmatory.
But he did not want to offer a long checklist of rules similar to Isaac
Watts’s list for human and divine testimony. Such lists diminished the discre-
tion of the reasoner. “It might seem superfluous to remark,” he wrote,
that none but very general rules, such as the above, can be
profitably laid down and that to attempt to supercede the
discretion to be exercised on each individual case, by fixing

precisely what degree of weight is to be allowed to the testi-
mony of such and such persons, would be, at least useless,
trifling, and if introduced in practice, a most mischievous hin-
drance of a right decision.93
Whately outlined a place for testimony in the whole context of rea-

sonable persuasive argumentation. His large interest in the subject and con-
cern that testimony be recognized and handled distinctively was rooted in
Aristotle but went much beyond mere classical revival. He appreciated
Aristotle’s topics but reenvisioned and repackaged it in such a way that
logic and rhetoric teachers throughout the English-speaking world every
year sowed the seeds of Whatelyan reasonableness. Because of the popu-
larity of his textbooks, Whately himself became the model of the reason-
able Englishman. But even as his Logic and Rhetoric became bestsellers,
neither book ever outsold an earlier pamphlet he had anonymously pub-
lished on the importance of testimony for simple reasonableness. Whately
staked his claim to being high-priest of English reasonableness in a satiri-
cal pamphlet called Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819).
WHATELY AND THE EXISTENCE OF NAPOLEON
Looking back on Protestant education in eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies, it is hard to underestimate the popularity of the issue of testimony
in the art of being reasonable. Reports of miracles made the issue exciting,
but the root of the popularity was whether school-trained people should
trust the Bible or not for the history of Jesus, especially accounts of his res-
urrection. To keep the present book on track, I have tried to avoid being
swept up by the literature on miracles and to stay with textbooks that were
designed for the purpose of teaching reasonableness. Such textbooks pres-
ent more than the individual thoughts of a polemicist; rather, they manifest,
in general, the doctrines of reasonableness sanctioned by society repre-
sented by governing boards, faculty, and students. In many cases, proba-
bly most, it was expected that students would learn in their elementary art
of reasonableness classes the basic tenets of Christian apologetics. Either
explicitly or implicitly the classes would teach that the history of Jesus as
related in the Gospels has all the qualities of being trustworthy history.
Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte was not a
textbook, but its extraordinary popularity entered the common language of
teaching testimony in English-speaking schools and colleges. When after
six years it was revealed that the anonymous author was from Oxford and
had now produced a logic textbook and subsequently a rhetoric textbook,
the pamphlet and the textbooks became entwined at the center of educating
citizen-Christians in the classrooms of the Victorian era. The message of the

pamphlet was simply that the evidence for Napoleon’s extraordinary life
was not much different in quality from the evidence for Jesus’. The pam-
phlet was not really about miracles. It was designed to make people think
about how they handle reports of the extraordinary every day and that they
should be consistent in what they accept and what they reject. It was also
designed to expose the inconsistent cynicism of scalpel-wielding Bible-
critics who obstinately refuse to trust the Gospels while at the same trusting
newspaper accounts of foreign affairs.
The pamphlet starts with the amazing story of “an obscure Corsican
adventurer—a man, according to some, of extraordinary talents and
courage, according to others, of very moderate abilities, and a rank cow-
ard—” who quickly gained control of one of the greatest countries of the
world, almost conquered the other great countries of Europe, then, when
defeated, was made king of the island of Elba, only to return with six hun-
dred men to regain France, finally to be defeated again and sent to a lonely
windswept island in the middle of the South Atlantic.94
The story is fantastic. It is a story that would be considered over-the-
top if found in an adventure novel. Whately then asks his readers, with
seeming dispassionate reasonableness, why they shouldn’t be skeptical.
The evidence for this story and even the existence of this man is hearsay.
The first question to ask concerns the credibility of the witnesses. Do they
have access to the correct information? Do they have a bias? Do the wit-
nesses agree? The author points out the problems in each case. First of all,
so much of the information involves trusting newspapers, which are noto-
riously biased toward selling themselves. Second, bias infiltrates every fact
one reads or hears. Third, the discrepancies are everywhere: reports differ
on whether Napoleon led a charge or not, what the exact time of day it was,
and so on.
Whately with tongue deep in his cheek picks up all the usual argu-
ments why the Gospel narratives should be dismissed and turns them into
an argument against the existence of Napoleon. Sagely he points out that,
yes, there was a delegation from Plymouth that can give an eyewitness
account of meeting Napoleon, but they could easily have been duped.
“They saw a man in a cocked hat, who, they were told was Bonaparte.”95
With twisted glee Whately moves on to the philosophical reasons not to
trust the history of Napoleon. Is the story conformable to common expe-
rience? Whately answers that the story would remind “the sober-thinking
few” of Arabian Nights.96 Declaiming in the manner of David Hume,
Whately demanded that the “judicious man, not ignorant of history and of
human nature” would keep experience as his “best and only sure guide.”97
By this standard, the judicious man should not commit himself to belief in
the story nor even to the existence of Napoleon.
Satirically, Whately first argues against trusting reports and second against
believing things not conformable to one’s own experience. He then argues
that the story of Napoleon seems to violate the laws of nature. Certainly the
events of his life were not miraculous; however, the probability that he would
be made king of Elba and then rise again is so low that such a story breaks
the moral laws of the universe! Certainly the free-thinking philosopher should
reject the story of Napoleon as fabrication. Whately then concludes: “But if
they are still wedded to the popular belief in this point, let them be consis-
tent enough to admit the same evidence in other cases.”98
Reasonable consistency is the fulcrum on which the essay pivots. If the
reader trusts the story of Napoleon, then the basic structure of this trust
should be extended to the Gospel narratives. If applied without bias, the
traditional rules for handling witnesses—first looking at issues surrounding
the witness, then at the testimony—are reasonable in all situations. To
make the rules work reasonable people must not be absurdly seeking out
barriers to assent; rather, reasonable people should exercise consistent
commonsensical trusting.
Mark Pattison (1813–1884), undergraduate at Oriel College and caustic
fellow at Lincoln, lost no love on Whately or Newman. He wrote in his
Memoirs of an Oxford Don (1885) that
It was only in the then condition of the University, hidebound

in the traditions of narrow clerical prejudice, that the new
Oriel school of the Noetics, as they came to be called, could
be welcomed as a wholesome invasion of a scurfy pond, stag-
nant with sameness and custom. The Noetics knew nothing
of the philosophical movement which was taking place on
the continent; they were imbued neither with Kant nor with
Rousseau. . . . The mental activity prevailing in the German
universities was especially irritating to Dr. Pusey, who com-
plains of their “theories which will pull to pieces what has
been received for a thousand years”. It was the men in whom
this disposition reigned in Oriel that gave the college its
celebrity in the country. The most known names were,
besides Provost Copleston, Whately, Arnold, Hampden, [and]
Baden Powell.99
Pattison’s disdain was Whately’s glory. Copleston and Whately had

stirred up not only Oxford but Anglo-American education by enlivening an
Aristotelian reasonableness that bypassed Kant and the socially destructive
philosophizing increasingly being idealized in Germany. Pattison thought,
like many of the progressive educational leaders of the nineteenth century,
that the fount of true intellectual progress was in Germany. Imagine how
different the fortunes of the Church of England might have been, Pattison
asked his readers, “if Newman had been able to read German.”100
Newman and Whately, in their ignorance of German, did not think

they had missed what was most important. Both recognized that Germans
were at the forefront of advancing the science of logic; yet, each of them
was interested in teaching something broader, deeper, and more tradi-
tional than formal logic. Like many appreciators of Aristotle—such as
Alistair MacIntyre in our era—they found warrant in the great philosopher
for the intellectual authority of communities over individuals, and tradi-
tions over progressive newness. Newman declared Aristotle his master
when teaching his theories of religious reasonableness in Grammar of
Assent. He believed the science of logic was as unnecessary to general rea-
sonableness as is the knowledge of chemistry to cooking. Whately looked
to Aristotle’s topics as the backbone for his curriculum of reasonableness.
Pattison found it intellectually confining to be so parochial and backward-
looking. Whately found the parochial and classical to be both liberating
and reasonable.
The Thomists, Scots, and Oxford Noetics all found in Aristotle a vital-
ity and a structure of thought that they believed applicable in the nine-
teenth century—especially applicable in teaching the reasonableness of
Christianity. The Thomists appreciated the psychological and epistemolog-
ical aspects of habits and the clear distinction between divine testimony
and human reasoning. The Scots did not find much use for teaching a dis-
tinct role for divine testimony but broadly appreciated that humans were
political and must take into account the social aspects of their minds. And
Richard Whately, the popular Noetic, saw in the tradition of topics the
structure to make sense of both broad reasonableness and narrow reason-
ing. All three supported progress in syllogistic logic and encouraged the
narrowing of logic so as to keep it distinct from dialectic; however, all three
desired to teach elementary students the dialectical and epistemological
context of that surrounded that narrower logic. All three rejected Hume’s
and Kant’s insistence that testimony was to be treated the same as individ-
ual experience. Testimony was a special category of knowledge and
deserved special consideration.
Nineteenth-century logicians were the heirs of the Renaissance tradi-
tion that gave philosophy departments the duty to teach reasonableness. As
the Thomists, Scots, and Oxford Noetics helped create the modern univer-
sity curriculum and structure, they each shared the legacy that they were
the teachers not only of logic but also of reasonableness. Bruce Kuklick, in
The Rise of American Philosophy, writes that
philosophy as taught in American schools had a huge signif-

icance in the eyes of its practitioners and their supporters.
The philosopher connected with an institution was the custo-
dian of certain truths necessary to the successful functioning
of civilized society. His job was to convey these truths to the

youth who would one day assume positions of leadership.101
As a conclusion to this chapter, a quick look at the role of testimony in

the rise of the Harvard philosophy department illuminates the institutional
and professional issues that affected the teaching of testimony and author-
ity as it moved into the twentieth century.
THE RISE OF HARVARD’S DEPARTMENT

OF PHILOSOPHY
In the seventeenth century Harvard had no professors and no departments.
Every tutor was assigned a small group of students to whom he taught all
subjects for four years. The college was very small and three or four young
tutors and a president could pretty much handle everything. Beginning in
the late 1680s, Harvard college students were required to study logic for
two years, and were usually exposed to three different forms of humanis-
tic logic. Ramist logic usually served to get students started. Older students
were directed to texts teaching either eclectic Aristotelianism or Cartesian
logic derived from The Port-Royal Logic. In all three types of humanistic
logic the tenets of testimony were taught in the ways I have described in
earlier chapters.
In 1767 the academic program was redesigned so that the tutors no
longer taught every subject, but rather each of the four tutors was assigned
to teach a specified subject—Latin, Greek, Logic, or Natural Philosophy.
The quick succession of tutors assigned to logic tended to rely heavily on
Watts’s Logick. This was true also of Levi Hedge (1766–1844), who in 1795
became the first long-term logic tutor. Fifteen years later in 1810 he was
promoted to a newly created chair of logic and metaphysics. Previously, in
1806, Harvard had created the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and
Oratory and named John Quincy Adams to the chair. In the midst of these
appointments a fight between Trinitarians and Unitarians led to the creation
of Andover Seminary in 1808 (Trinitarian) and Harvard Divinity School
(Unitarian) in 1815. Since testimony was taught in logic, rhetoric, and divin-
ity, it was shuffled about depending on who taught what and to what pur-
pose. This shuffling continued throughout the nineteenth century and the
dust didn’t settle until the turn of the twentieth century.
Initially professors of logic and of rhetoric both taught the rules of tes-
timony. Adams in his published Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810)
and Hedge in his long-lived Elements of Logic: A Summary of the General
Principles and Different Modes of Reasoning (1816) both taught standard
rules for testimony. The future president of the United States told his students
that they need only “select, combine, and apply” the precepts of Aristotle,
Cicero, and Quintilian. He also advised his students to, of course, “substi-
tute the sacred scriptures” for Cicero’s and Quintilian’s pagan list of
authorities: “eminent writers, common proverbs, and oracles.”102 Adams
also believed topics still to be useful. Hedge, on the other hand, followed
Locke in distain for the old classical structures. Although Hedge’s logic
text remained long in print and his primary reputation was as a logician,
in 1827, “owing to the necessity of retrenchment,” Harvard discontinued
the chair in logic. Hedge was renamed the Alford Professor of Natural
Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. Instruction in logic was offi-
cially reassigned to the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric who from 1819 to
1851 was Edward Tyrell Channing. Channing had little interest in logic.
He was primarily interested in teaching students to write and speak well
“with method, elegance, harmony, dignity, and energy.”103 He did, how-
ever, introduce Whately’s logic into the sophomore curriculum in 1833.
Historians of the Boylston Professors note that, during the nineteenth
century, rhetoric at Harvard moved toward belles letters, and English com-
position away from classical dialectic.104
Even though he was no longer assigned to teach logic, Levi Hedge
reported to the administration that along with teaching the standard trea-
tises on the moral philosophy and political economy of the era, he closed
his course in the senior year with his own Elements of Logic. Apparently
Hedge had a high opinion of his textbook and was going to teach it no
matter what his official responsibilities. A student reported that Hedge
demanded that his book be studied assiduously, saying “It took me four-
teen years, with the assistance of the adult members of my family, to write
this book; and I am sure that one cannot do better than to employ the pre-
cise words of the author.”105
Hedge retired in 1832 after thirty-seven years teaching logic at Harvard.
At that time, testimony in general and its role in Christian/Unitarian apolo-
getics was being taught to undergraduates by the professors of rhetoric and
moral philosophy. Four years later, in 1836, Harvard hired young Francis
Bowen (1811–1890) as tutor and instructor in Natural and Intellectual
Philosophy. Long into the 1850s Whately’s logic appears in rhetoric classes,
but Bowen would be praised by James McCosh for introducing the more
sophisticated logic of William Hamilton to America. Bowen wanted a pro-
fessorship in history, but in 1853 he was appointed to the Alford Chair of
Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. A deeply committed
Unitarian, Bowen’s many articles and books were united by a vigorous the-
istic rationality that he believed should be the foundation of civilization. Like
Hedge, Bowen thought his job as Alford professor was to teach the fullness
of being a civilized human. In the course catalogues at Harvard, Bowen can
be seen taking logic back from rhetoric. In 1860, the senior-year logic and
philosophy class listed as texts Bowen’s own ethics and metaphysics,

Butler’s Analogy of Religion, and Hamilton’s lectures on metaphysics and
lectures on logic. In 1864 Bowen produced A Treatise on Logic, or, The Laws
of Pure Thought; comprising both The Aristotelic and Hamiltonian Analyses
of Logical Forms, and some Chapters of Applied Logic (1864).
“We are . . . compelled,” Bowen wrote in the chapters on applied logic,
“in many of the most important concerns of our existence, to depend on the
Testimony, and consequently to confide in the sincerity of others.”106 From
the “moral constitution of human nature, we are warranted in presuming on
the honesty of a witness.”107 Like Hamilton, Bowen criticized Hume’s easy
dismissal of accounts of miracles such as Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead
or calming a storm. Bowen thought assent to such matters depended upon
a combination of intuition and testimony—intuition delivered by God to an
individual. Hume and Kant were wrong, Bowen believed, to appeal to
experience.
Bowen was the center of the beginnings of the Harvard philosophy
department. In 1869 a young chemist-president, Charles Eliot, took control
of Harvard and began to construct a philosophy department around Bowen
that would become probably the most influential philosophy department in
American history. Bruce Kuklick shows in his study of the department from
Bowen’s era to the 1930s that the Bowen was, himself, out of step with
Eliot’s vision of creating a research university by encouraging faculty and
departmental specialization. Bowen continued to teach logic into the 1880s,
but the multifaceted writings of the older man and his belief that the philoso-
pher on campus was charged with the responsibility of unifying the full-
ness of rationality for the benefit of society seemed quaint in the context of
the acceleration of professionalized academic logic and philosophy.
The declining fortunes of testimony in this department are best seen in
three figures: George Herbert Palmer (1842–1933), Josiah Royce (1855–1916),
and Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916).
George Herbert Palmer was the principal architect of the first philos-
ophy department at Harvard. Working closely with President Eliot, Palmer
shared the president’s belief that Harvard had the responsibility to lead
future development of the knowledge industry. Bruce Kuklick sees Palmer
as the transitional figure in undermining the influence of the gentleman-
amateur values of Francis Bowen, which led to the efficient specialization
exemplified by Ralph Barton Perry, who in the early twentieth century
believed his job as Harvard department chair was to “‘narrow the issues’
that philosophers discussed at their professional meetings, in their
learned journals, and in the classrooms.”108 Kuklick sees Palmer in the key
role of narrowing Francis Bowen’s wide-ranging logic/moral philosophy/
religion/metaphysics courses (which included such social issues as how
humans must trust each other for information) by focusing on moral
philosophy courses (which emphasized critical thinking that would result

in self-realization). Kuklick also believes Palmer was the key figure in
keeping the undependable genius, Charles Sanders Peirce, from an aca-
demic post—Peirce being the deepest student of the subject of testimony
at the end of the nineteenth century. Peirce had been a student of Bowen
while his own father was professor of mathematics at Harvard. As noted
in chapter 4, Peirce picked up on Bowen’s interest in mathematical con-
structions of judging testimony to improve upon Hume and criticize
German historians’ use of balancing likelihoods. But Palmer did not think
Peirce the right kind of man for the new knowledge industry. Kuklick
notes that Palmer even kept Peirce from getting a job at the University of
Chicago.
On the road to a more efficient department, Josiah Royce received the
call to Harvard as a temporary replacement for the traveling William James
in 1882. In 1885 he gained a regular appointment and was put in charge of
classes dealing with theories of knowledge and logic. Royce brought
greater mathematical formality to logic and became a leader in idealist epis-
temology. His academic work well satisfied the professional standards of
Palmer and the department. Kuklick points out that Royce’s logic became
intelligible only to a few technically trained in such work. However, Royce
also had many of the tendencies of Francis Bowen. He believed it his duty
as a philosopher to speak to his world. So he wrote books defending
monotheism and Christianity, attacking racism, promoting loyalty, and
arguing for a community consciousness to offset individualism. In all this,
however, Royce was not concerned with teaching or studying testimony
and trust the way Bowen had. In his Principles of Logic, which was devoted
to applied logic, Royce wrote nothing about testimony.109 He tended to
teach religion, loyalty, and community on a high and abstract plane. When
he taught methods, he was especially interested in modern scientific meth-
ods, especially statistics.
So with a department growing while at the same time narrowing under
the guidance of Palmer, where would testimony be taught? One option, if we
remember what Alexander Campbell Fraser was recommending at the same
time in Edinburgh, was that testimony should be taught as part of psychol-
ogy. The willingness to trust and assent, and the analysis of character had
always been closely linked to the handling of testimony. Traditional psy-
chology studied such matters. But modern psychology was being born.110 The
old psychology of faculties and habits of the soul was dying. At Harvard, the
leader in the new academic discipline of scientific psychology was Hugo
Münsterberg who was, in fact, highly interested in testimony, but he was
interested only as a debunker. His popular book, On the Witness Stand
(1908), laughed at lawyers, judges, and juries who rely on their “legal instinct
and common sense” when listening to witnesses.111
Enticed to leave Germany for a post at Harvard in 1892, Münsterberg was

irrepressible as a proponent of experimental psychology. The introduction to
On the Witness Stand begins with an ode to his laboratory in Emerson Hall:
“twenty-seven rooms overspun with electric wires and filled with chrono-
scopes and kymographs and tachistoscopes and ergographs, and a mechanic
busy at his work.”112 In such laboratories, he declared, we can now finally sci-
entifically study, among other things, courtroom reasonableness. The rest of
his book reports a litany of experiments on unintentional mistakes of sound
minds. His statistics, theories, and anecdotes all imply the complete mal-
leability of the mind to the point where it would be foolish to believe infor-
mation from even a witness with good character and no bias. At the end, he
toys with the possibility that hypnotism might actually be able to get at the
truth, but he doesn’t really think so. C. A. J. Coady’s chapter on the discipline
of psychology in Testimony points out the problems with such a one-sided,
laboratory-oriented view of truth. For our purposes it is enough to note that
Münsterberg’s laboratory was the last place testimony was seriously studied
by a member of the Harvard philosophy department. In 1952 McGraw-Hill
published a survey titled The Psychology of Thinking as part of an academic
series for use in the discipline of psychology. Although the author was inter-
ested in the broadest definition of thinking—”the complete pattern of behav-
ior of the total organism”113 —there is no mention of testimony and authority.
Even though subjects discussed include “acquiring concepts” and “social
learning,” society is only the context surrounding the individual thinker. If it
was the hope of Alexander Cambell Fraser that the discipline of psychology
would carry testimony into twentieth-century schools, this book indicates
psychology’s complete lack of interest in the job.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Harvard had Levi Hedge
teaching logic as the art of being reasonable in the manner of Watts and
Locke. All students at Harvard were taught the importance of testimony as
a distinct source of knowledge. By mid-century, the dialectic of testimony
was being taught in the manner of Whately by Channing as rhetoric and by
Bowen as part of his broad duties as the Alford Professor. Bowen’s teach-
ing was much indebted to Hamilton, and so both the Oxford and the Scot
traditions of testimony were being taught at Harvard. By the 1880s, things
were changing fast. Palmer led the department and replaced Bowen.
Palmer was much influenced by Germanic interest in what the self can
know by itself and taught critical thinking along those lines. Bowen had
taught religion, but Palmer dropped it. Since Christian apologetics was a
subject that belonged to the graduate divinity program, the philosophy
department was under no pressure to teach the traditional apologetic role
of testimony. Also by the 1880s, the rhetoricians had lost their interest in
claiming the subject of testimony, so both Whately’s and Hamilton’s logic
had dropped out of the curriculum. Royce would have been the person
most interested in testimony as a social operation of the mind, but the

abstractness of his thought took him in other directions. That left psychol-
ogy to pick it up, and they initially did—but only to criticize the whole prac-
tice of trusting unbiased people of good character for true information.
Eventually psychology went its own way as an academic discipline. The
actual practice of people trusting each other for information remained
pervasive in society; however, Harvard no longer had a place for nor the
interest in teaching its role in the art of being reasonable.
NOTES
1. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (New York:
Image Books, 1955), 10.2.5 (p. 334).
2. Ibid., 10.2 (p. 322).
3. Ibid., 4.3 (p. 90).
4. Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora, trans. G. R. G. Mure, vol. 1 of The Works of
Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 99b.19.
5. G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas “The Dumb Ox” (New York: Image
Books, 1956), 105.
6. Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C.
Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), vol. 1, 13 (Q. 1. art. 8).
7. “Encyclical Letter of Our Holy Father Pope Leo XIII on the Restoration of
Christian Philosophy,” in The “Summa Theologica” of Thomas Aquinas, trans. The
Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne,
1920), I, xx.
8. Ibid., xxiv.
9. Jacques Maritain. “Preface” in The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas,
trans. Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, and G. Donald Hollenhorst (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1955), v, vii–viii.
10. See Pedro da Fonseca, Instituições Dialécticas, ed. Joaquim Ferreira Gomes
(Spain: Universidade de Coimbra, 1964), VII.35 (v. II, p. 574).
11. John of St. Thomas, The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas, VI, ques. 26,
art. 3 (p. 519).
12. Ibid., ques. 26. (p. 504).
13. Aquinas, Basic Works vol. 2, p. 383 (Q. 50. art. 5).
14. Ibid., p. 413 (Q. 55. art. 1).
15. John of St. Thomas, The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas, VI, ques. 26,
art. 3 (p. 522).
16. Thomas Reid, A Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic, with Remarks in The
Works of Thomas Reid, ed. William Hamilton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and
Stewart, 1863, reprint London: Thommes Press, 1994), II, 682–83.
17. This statement by William Hamilton is in the footnote to Reid’s statement
just quoted. Hamilton is frustrated with Reid’s antagonism to Aristotle.
18. Reid, A Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic, II, 706.

19. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ., 2001), 260–61.
20. Thomas Reid, A System of Logic, Taught at Aberdeen 1763 in the manu-
script notebook by John Campbell, Observations on Logic by Several Professors
(p. 77) compiled in 1775 and available in the Special Collections of the University
of Edinburgh.
21. Ibid., 71–72.
22. Thomas Reid to Andrew Skene, 14 November 1764, Correspondence of
Dr. Reid in The Works of Thomas Reid, I, 40.
23. Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind Remarks in The Works of
Thomas Reid, I, 196.
24. Robert Watson, “A System of Logic Taught at St. Andrews 1764–5 by
Mr. Robert Watson,” in Campbell, Observations on Logic by Several Professors.
25. See the bibliography appended to Alexander Brodie, The Circle of John
Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985),
267–69.
26. James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy (New York: Robert Carter and
Brothers, 1875, reprint New York: AMS, 1980), 25.
27. Marci Duncani (Mark Duncan), Institutionis Logicae (Saumur: 1612), 290–91,
300–1.
28. McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, 23.
29. Steven M. Nadler, “Reid, Arnauld and the Objects of Perception,” History
of Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1996): 165–73.
30. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Human Mind in The Works of Dugald
Stewart (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), vol. 2, 261.
31. William Hamilton, Lectures on Logic, H. L. Mansel and John Veitch eds.
(Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1856), vol. 1, 70.
32. The Port Royal Logic, trans by Thomas Spencer Baynes, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh:
1854), vii.
33. James McCosh, The Laws of Discursive Thought: Being a Textbook of Formal
Logic (London: Macmillan & Co., 1870; reprint 1991), iii.
34. Ibid., iv.
35. McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, 423. McCosh is quoting an unnamed
source.
36. Hamilton, Lectures in Logic, I. 37.
38. Hamilton, Lectures on Logic, II, 175–76. Subsequent references by volume
and page numbers in the text.
40. Ibid.
41. William Hamilton, “Dissertations” in the appendix to The Works of Thomas
Reid, II, 761.
42. Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists (Grand Rapids: Kregel,
1995), 12–13.
43. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New York: Longmans, Green,
and Co., 1910), 25.
44. David Murray, Memories of the Old College of Glasgow (Glasgow: Jackson,
Wyle and Co., 1927), 154.
45. Ibid., 154, 153.
46. Various manuscript notes of Robert Buchanan’s lectures are available in
the Special Collections of the University of Glasgow Library. Citations of volume
and page relate to the anonymous eleven-volume set of notes titled Lectures on
Logic that are easy to read and begun in November 1828.
47. Buchanan, Lectures on Logic, VIII, 6.
48. Ibid., 6–8.
49. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Lectures in Logic and Metaphysics, III, 29.
These lectures are in three volumes of manuscript notes taken by Andrew D.
Sloan in 1881–82 and are available in the special collections of the University of
Edinburgh.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., I, 85.
52. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Inaugural Lecture Delivered . . . at the
Opening of the Class of Logic and Metaphysics at the New College, Edinburgh, 10th
Dec. 1846 (Edinburgh: John D. Lowe, 1867), 13.
53. Ibid., 10, 16.
54. Fraser, Lectures in Logic and Metaphyscis, I, 95.
55. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Biographica Philosophica (Edinburgh: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1904), 92–93.
56. Ibid., 200–1.
57. Ibid., 198–99.
58. Fraser, Inaugural Lecture, 16.
59. Hugh Watt, New College Edinburgh: A Centenary History (Edinburgh: Oliver
and Boyd, 1946), 2.
60. Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, VI. Xxiv, in Works of Thomas
Reid, I, 195–96.
61. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1985), 1111b30–1112a15.
62. Watson, A System of Logic Taught at St. Andrews 1764–5, 185.
63. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man in The Works of Thomas
Reid, II, 549.
64. James Beattie’s manuscript Lectures in Philosophy, 460 in Department of
Special Collections and Archives, King’s College, University of Aberdeen.
65. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind in The
Works of Dugald Stewart (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), II, 168.
66. Ibid., 168–70.
67. Hamilton, Lectures on Logic, II, 72. See Aristotle, De Sophisticis Elenchis,
trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, vol. 1 of The Works of Aristotle, 165b.
68. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001), 172.
69. McCosh, The Laws of Discursive Thought, v, footnote.
70. Ibid., v.
71. James McCosh, The Tests of Various Kinds of Truth: Being a Treatise of
Applied Logic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 7.
72. Ibid., 107.

73. Ibid., 107–8. See Psalms 116:11.
74. McCosh, The Tests of Various Kinds of Truth, 24–25. McCosh’s call quotes
1 John 4:1.
75. McCosh, The Laws of Discursive Thought, 165.
76. Ibid., 164.
77. McCosh, {fill in note}
78. Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 7th ed. (London: Parker & Son,
1860), 5.
79. Erkki Patokorpi, Rhetoric, Argumentative and Divine: Richard Whately
and His Discursive Project of the 1820s (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 45.
80. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Garden City, NY: Image
Books, 1956), 133.
81. Ibid.
82. Patokorpi, Rhetoric, Argumentative and Divine, 128.
83. R. W. Sellars, The Essentials of Logic, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1925), 8.
84. Richard Whately, Elements of Logic, 8th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1860), “dedication.”
85. Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 6.
86. Whately, Elements of Logic, 265.
87. Ibid., 263.
88. Ibid., 262.
89. Ibid.
90. Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 34–35.
91. Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 37.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 46.
94. Richard Whately, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, ed.
Ralph S. Pomeroy (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1985), 8.
95. Ibid., 22.
96. Ibid., 24–25.
97. Ibid., 25.
98. Ibid., 42.
99. Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don, ed. Vivian H. H. Green (London:
Cassell, 1988), 51.
100. Ibid., 112.
101. Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts
1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University, 1977), 9.
102. John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, ed. J. Jeffery Auer
and Jerald L. Banning (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), vol. 1, 28–29, 224.
103. Quoted in Richard Dickson, “The Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory
at Nineteenth Century Harvard,” in Ramism and the Rhetorical Tradition (Ph.D. dis-
sertation: Duke University, 1992), 262.
104. Ibid., 225–78; and George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian
and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina, 1999), 286–88.
105. Quoted in Benjamin Rand, “Philosophical Instruction in Harvard University

from 1636 to 1900,” Harvard Graduates Magazine 37 (1928–29): 43.
106. Francis Bowen, A Treatise on Logic, or, The Laws of Pure Thought; com-
prising both The Aristotelic and Hamiltonian Analyses of Logical Forms, and some
Chapters of Applied Logic (Cambridge, MA: Sever & Francis, 1864), 431.
107. Ibid.
108. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, 350.
109. Originally published in German in the Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen
Wissenschaften, ed. Wilhelm Windelband, I refer to an anonymous translation (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1961).
110. Ann Taves in Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University, 1999), describes
the broad range of traditions flowing into the new academic psychology of religion
at Harvard that encouraged ignoring testimony. Taves cites George M. Beard’s
statement from his Psychology of Spiritualism (1879): “The rejection of non-expert
human testimony is, as ever has been, the first step in the development of a science;
it is only by rejecting or ignoring all testimony save that of experts that any science
is possible” (209–10). Taves cites also Beard’s Scientific Basis of Delusions: A New
Theory of Trance and its Bearing on Human Testimony (1877).
111. Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime
(New York: McClure Co., 1908), 11.
112. Ibid., 3.
113. W. Edgar Vinacke, The Psychology of Thinking (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1952), viii.
CHAPTER SIX
TESTIMONY BECOMES EXPERIENCE:

THE RISE OF CRITICAL THINKING
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), an Oxford don, then a Cambridge professor who

wrote popular stories and Christian apologetics in the middle of the twenti-
eth century, had much to say about testimony. In one of his most famous
children stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), one of his
minor characters is a professor disgusted that basic principles of being rea-
sonable had not been taught to the children in his charge. Confronted by the
two oldest of four siblings with a fantastic tale from their younger sister about
a land of Narnia, and a mean-spirited denial from their younger brother, the
professor listens carefully and asks them an unexpected question:
Does your experience lead you to regard your brother or

your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more
truthful?
They answer that their sister is the more truthful, but that in this case, her
story just can’t be true.
“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they

teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities.
Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling
the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious she
is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evi-
dence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”1
Lewis, in the manner of the traditional humanist education that reached

back to Aristotle, believed reasonable people should be taught guidelines
for handling testimony. Among these guidelines was the priority given to
the character and circumstances of the testifier over the material testified.
In other words, given a trustworthy testifier, reasonable people must open
their minds to anything—even things beyond general experience—or else

they risk being caught in their own experience in the way that the King of
Siam refused to believe in the existence of ice. Applying this rule of prior-
ity, a rule the Ramist called “reciprocation,” yielded not an absolute con-
clusion on the matter, but rather a tentative way of proceeding.
What interests me most is the professor’s criticism of English logic edu-
cation in the middle of the twentieth century. The schools were struggling
with how to teach the social aspects of reasonableness. Self-realization,
heroic individualism, and a narrow sense of humility and democracy worked
to encourage an image of the lone-wolf critical thinker. By the end of the
century the only normal discussion of testimony and authority in textbooks
was to warn students against them. In The Teaching of Thinking (1985) three
educational reformers offered the late-century obligatory warnings in a sec-
tion entitled “Reasoning Errors Due to Social Factors.” Nowhere in the book
is there any mention of benefits of reasoning due to social factors.2
It is beyond my power to write definitively on how a traditional mat-
ter of education was lost in a matrix of cultural and intellectual issues.
However, I will describe what I believe to be the most influential shift in
perspective: the adoption of a Kantian principle that called for traditional
doctrines about trusting outside testimony to be collapsed into modern
doctrines of the subjective self.3 To conclude this chapter and the book, I
will comment in the spirit of C. S. Lewis on the need for restoring in schools
what John Locke called “the gentle and fair ways of information.”
KANT AND THE COLLAPSE OF TESTIMONY INTO

EXPERIENCE
Josiah Royce, as discussed at the end of chapter 5, was a philosophical ide-
alist who found much to appreciate in the German philosophical tradition.
However, he was critical of the way Kant and subsequent Germans had
overemphasized the individual self. Kant, Royce noted, was uninterested in
the proper interactions between separate selves:
That they possess a common nature is implied in every step

of Kant’s discussion of the human intellect. How this common
nature is to be further defined, this matter Kant treats with
careful reticence. What indications he gives are paradoxically
baffling. Kant’s ideal moral world of rational agents—the
object of what he defines as our well-warranted faith—is a
realm of ethical autonomy, a kingdom of free selves.4
The twentieth-century success of Kantian thought, along with other

forces such as industrialization and increasing emphasis on democracy,
The Rise of Critical Thinking 229
muddied the water of testimony in education. Western education’s interests

were turned away from social reasonableness. The key figure in philo-
sophically justifying the collapse of testimony into the experience of
autonomous selves was Immanuel Kant. Out of a spirit of humility, Kant
wanted his students to realize the limits of their access to the knowledge
of God and history, but this humility was based on undermining the power
of communication between God and humans and between humans them-
selves. The side effect of Kant’s desire to counteract the hubris of people
who say they know the mind of God or have access to unwarranted cer-
tainty of historical events was to encourage a self-absorbed insistence that
reasonable people trust themselves, not others. Trusting authorities, tenta-
tive listening, and granting benefit of the doubt to credible testifiers about
hard-to-believe information ceased to be a virtue of reasonable people.
Education and scholarship in general came to idealize self-reliance.
We have seen earlier in this book how people within the tradition of phi-
losophy, such as Plotinus, Anselm, and Abelard, had been much interested
a high and lonely road of exploring how much an individual can know
with certainty. In the twentieth century these individualists became the
heroes of all education in reasonableness. Reasonable people should trust
themselves. Abelard was especially idealized over against the churchman
St. Bernard. “Reasonableness” became the equivalent of “critical thinking.”
Emphasis was increasingly placed on the critical individual rather than the
social being who knows his or her mental limits.
KANT’S LOGIC AND THE GERMAN TRADITION
The philosophic watershed that led to the end of teaching testimony and
authority in traditional curricula was the work of Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804). Roger Scruton opens his biographical sketch with this sum-
mary of his life:
The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more
than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable. For
Kant, the virtuous man is so much the master of his passions
as scarcely to be prompted by them, and so far indifferent to
power and reputation as to regard their significance as noth-
ing beside that of duty itself. Having confined his life so that
he could act without strain according to this ideal, Kant
devoted himself to scholarship, entirely governed by congen-
ial routines. The little professor of Königsberg has thus
become the type of the modern philosopher: bounded in a
nutshell, and counting himself king of infinite space.5
Kant never married, loved the town of his birth, enjoyed convivial din-
ners with friends, and was honored by his students. Initially more known as
a mathematician and science teacher, he eventually gained a university post

in logic and metaphysics. Most famous for his great works on pure reason,
ethics, and metaphysics, Kant also taught logic twice a year for over forty
years. Along the way he produced his own textbook titled simply Logic:
A Manual for Lectures (1782). This manual was translated into various lan-
guages, and the growing fame of the author enhanced the fame of his use-
ful little textbook. The textbook was only a brief outline, but it set the form
and content of logic for many other textbook writers. Richard Whately
apparently did not read Kant’s Logic, even the English translation of 1800, but
we have seen how William Hamilton and other Scots along with Francis
Bowen and subsequent Harvard logicians were all impressed by Kant’s logic.
Kant’s Logic appreciated Aristotle’s analytic logic while not appreciating
Aristotle’s categories, topics, or rhetoric. Like the Aristotle of the Posterior
Analytics, Kant was mostly interested in intuition and experience as problems
preliminary to syllogistic demonstrations. As for Aristotle’s non-technical
sources of knowledge, Kant only added a few crucial short comments
about testimony in lecture 9 of the Logic. There he wrote that within the
limits of human reason people subjectively hold things to be true. Of the
three kinds of holding-to-be-true—opinion, belief, and knowledge—Kant
discussed testimony under the subject of knowledge. But first, he offered a
crucial rule that went against two thousand years of tradition. When
describing belief, Kant wrote that “so called historical belief ” should not
really be called belief. The crucial reason for this he offered succinctly:
“The holding-to-be-true on the basis of a testimony differs neither in degree
nor in kind from the holding-to-be-true through one’s own experience.”6
Throughout history many had wrestled with the epistemological fuzzi-
ness between what a reasoner knows on his or her own and the prepack-
aged information that comes to a reasoner by way of an outside source.
Aristotle had begun the dominant tradition that the information gained from
an external source that is brought into the reasoning process deserves to
be treated differently than purely self-developed information. Dialectic had
long taught the distinctive requirements that accompanied the use of out-
side sources of information. A reasonableness had to be taught that was
more embracing than mere reasoning. This reasonableness necessarily led
to discussions of faith, spontaneous belief, probabilistic assent, and appro-
priate submission to an expert. Of course there was a chicken-and-egg
issue that even Cicero’s son noticed: Does not the conscious decision to
bring outside information into the reasoning process show that internal rea-
soning is dominant and the externality of the source of some information
unimportant? Jean Bodin had taught that private judgment ultimately rules
over testimony, implying that the self was always ultimately responsible for
its conclusions. But Cicero’s answer to his son still applied: some informa-
tion comes prepackaged and ready-made to humans, and the truth of this
demands that the art of reasoning teach distinctive rules for the non-art of
testimony. The long tradition of reasonableness had taught that no matter
how much emphasis was placed on the self there remained a need to have
a distinctive method for handling testimony. But Kant declared his opposi-
tion: Testimony differs neither in degree nor in kind from the holding-to-be-
true through one’s own experience.
Kant did not fully explain his position in his brief logic lectures, but he
laid the rule down as a law. In the section on knowledge of lecture 9, Kant
wrote that there was a distinction between the certainty that is original
“from my own experience” and derivative “as far as I become certain of
something through others’ experience.”7 He calls the latter historical cer-
tainty but the law previously decreed still applies. Other people’s experi-
ences were to be treated as a subset of one’s own experience.
Friedrich Ueberweg (1826–1871), Kant’s mid-nineteenth-century succes-
sor as professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg and author of
a widely popular logic textbook, believed that Kant had narrowed logic too
much. But he also encouraged a self-absorbed way of thinking. In a section
on “Science, Faith, Presentment, and Opinion,” Ueberweg wrote that humans
use their “inner existence” to fully recognize that which is external to them.
“He copies in himself,” wrote Ueberweg of a man searching “the content of
the external perception of what appears at the time.” Ueberweg calls this a
“reproductive process.”8 He strongly believed that classes in logic should
wrestle with “doctrine of the laws of the forms of knowledge,” but his own
opening assumption that “the human mind must consciously reproduce what
actually exists” focused his students on their own minds.9 The Aristotelian tra-
dition had long taught that knowledge had two legs: that which a person
knows by reason and that which is known by authority. But in the nineteenth
century, the most popular German textbooks teaching “the laws of the
forms of knowledge” taught that human knowledge stands only on one leg.
It is not in my power to track with accuracy a cultural shift in the edu-
cation systems of Western civilization. However, a key figure whose writ-
ings indicate the dominance in the twentieth century of Kant’s belief that
testimony should be collapsed into personal experience is John Dewey
(1859–1952). Born and educated in Vermont where Scottish common sense
was the dominant philosophy, Dewey wrote in 1883 that his study of Kant’s
writings “certainly introduced a revolution into all my thoughts, and at the
same time gave me a basis for my other reading and thinking.”10 Dewey went
on to become a professor at Michigan, then Chicago, then Columbia, dur-
ing which time his philosophy of education was hugely influential in
America. In 1939, Dewey wrote:
So stated, democracy is belief in the ability of human experi-

ence to generate the aims and methods by which further
experience will grow in ordered richness. Every other form of

moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience
must be subjected at some point or other to some external
control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside the
processes of experience. . . .11
Dewey’s great cause was to promote the importance of personal experi-

ence in education. The beginning of thinking is personal experience. Dewey
criticized the long tradition of those who taught that thinking was bigger than
experience and that there were aspects of thinking that helped overcome
“the inherent limitations of experience.”12 Testimony had always been recog-
nized as supplying information that the self could not get on its own; how-
ever, Dewey had no room in his concept of the thinking human for gathering
information from trusted outside sources. He said of gathering information
from newspapers and histories: “To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this
and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to think.”13 Thinking is
only the “sympathetic identification” with such information.14
The irony is that Dewey’s primary concerns were social. He was one
of the great proponents of communication and the crucial role of educa-
tion in holding society together:
Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by com-

munication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission,
in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between
the words common, community, and communication. Men
live in a community in virtue of the things which they have
in common; and communication is the way in which they
come to possess things in common. What they must have in
common in order to form a community or society are aims,
beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—
like-mindedness as the sociologists say.15
But in this ringing rhetoric Dewey was like Royce. They both saw the
problems of individualism and the importance of education at the founda-
tion of communities, but both thought about community in a new way.
Communities were no longer full of individuals dependent on each other
for corporate reasonableness; rather, communities were gatherings of
autonomous critical thinkers. Education in the twentieth century must be
designed to serve the latter, not the former.
R. G. COLLINGWOOD VS. L. SUSAN STEBBING AND THE

TRANSITION IN BRITAIN
Dewey did not directly engage traditional teaching on testimony. He side-

stepped into his appreciation of communities of self-absorbed individuals.
R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) did not sidestep. More than any other

twentieth-century logician, he attacked directly the tradition of teaching the
handling of testimony as a fundamental aspect of reasonableness. His influ-
ential attack on testimony and authority was presented as a boost for his-
torians. His opponent was another professor and popular textbook writer,
L. Susan Stebbing, who also sought to encourage historians by teaching that
history had its own special method. Stebbing encouraged a Kantian critical
thinking merged with the tradition that historians had to rely on testimony
and authority. Collingwood declared this to be cut-and-paste history. He
attacked the Kantian way of doing history and Stebbing’s traditional views
of testimony and authority. For Collingwood, the true historian must model
the loner detective, preferably the jaded, lone-wolf detective that he, him-
self, so appreciated. British education was in transition on the subject of
testimony and authority at mid century. Stebbing’s books were very popu-
lar in both England and America. But by the 1970s Collingwood had won
the heart of the theorists. Critical thinking became the work of heroic indi-
viduals. The listening and reading skills of reasonable trust were for sheep.
Collingwood had a complex dislike of Kant. Although critical of Kant
on other issues, Collingwood embraced the notion that testimony could not
be thought of as coming from outside the individual and thus requiring
anything like faith or belief. Dewey had criticized the idea of turning one’s
head into a scrapbook and Ueberweg had written that the reasoner “copies
in himself” the content of the external perception, but Collingwood directly
criticized the tradition of reasonableness as “cut-and-paste” thinking and
demanded that historical testimony was “reenacted” in the historian’s mind.
Born into a family of artists, his father not only an artist but a biogra-
pher of Ruskin and an amateur archeologist, Collingwood was educated at
Oxford and eventually gained a position in its philosophy department. On
the side he became an amateur archeologist and an important historian of
Roman Britain. A sharply caustic character, he liked to think of himself as
an outsider at Oxford. His student Stephen Toulmin reports that people
thought him a “lone wolf.”16 Very critical of his colleagues, Collingwood dis-
missed the need to convince them of their many errors writing “my job,
after all, was not with my colleagues but with my pupils.”17 Finding himself
dying in his late forties, he produced an Autobiography (1939) in which he
hoped to quickly lay out some of his thoughts about the philosophy of his-
tory and science. After his death, a former student, T. M. Knox, edited out
of Collingwood’s papers his Idea of History (1946). Knox wrote of him:
Collingwood was endlessly painstaking with his college

pupils, although few of them took much interest in philosophy;
but a great deal of his best work was put into his university
lectures which attracted very large audiences and widened
his influence as a philosophical teacher. Speaking in a thin

but clear voice, he always gave the impression that he had
something important to say; this made it interesting, and the
orderly argument couched in clear-cut and well-chosen
phraseology, made it intelligible to anyone who would
listen. . . . His abilities brought him respect, though his aloof-
ness was apt to inhibit affection; but in the company of those
privileged to enjoy his friendship he was never aloof, and it
is hard for me at least to say which was the greatest, the affec-
tion inspired by Collingwood the man, the stimulus derived
from the tutor, or the admiration evoked by the gifts of the
philosopher and historian from whom I have learnt more
than I can hope to acknowledge.18
The Idea of History begins with the development of philosophies of his-

tory from Greek to modern times. The book ends with long section in which
Collingwood criticizes the way his predecessors and contemporaries at
Oxford handled testimony. Collingwood was antagonistic to the way his col-
leagues taught that the discipline of history deals with information gained
from external sources. For Collingwood, this made history too much like nat-
ural science. He insisted that historians reenact history in their own minds
and thus have a method completely autonomous from natural science.
Collingwood went further than Kant in collapsing testimony into personal
judgment. Kant’s problem, Collingwood wrote, was that he treated history
like nature, viewing both the way a spectator views a parade—as a phe-
nomena. As such, in Kant’s philosophy, “if we could get inside the phenom-
ena, and relive their inner life in our own minds, their natural characteristics
would disappear: we should now be apprehending them as things in them-
selves, and in doing so we should discover their inner reality is mind.”19
Collingwood boldly declared Kant wrong. History was not phenomena:
The events of history do not “pass in review” before the

historian. They have finished happening before he begins
thinking about them. He has to re-create them inside his own
mind, re-enacting for himself so much of the experience of
the men who took part in them as he wishes to understand.
It is because the eighteenth century did not know this, but
falsely regarded history as spectacle, that it reduced history to
nature.20
Collingwood saw himself reversing Kant’s effect on the handling of his-

tory; however, from our perspective we can see that Collingwood retained
the crucial self-absorption of nineteenth-century Germanic philosophy. The
main difference for us between Kant and Collingwood is that the former
wanted testimony treated as internal experience while the latter created
a special type of internal experience called “reenactment.” But both Kant

and Collingwood wanted to deny that there is a social reasonableness
broader than individual reasoning. They both deny the first division in
topics between artificial and inartificial sources of knowledge. All knowledge,
for them, is artificial. There is no need to think about the reasonableness
of assent, trust, submission, belief, faith or any of the other terms we have
seen advocated to help people handle external communications. As a “lone
wolf,” Collingwood directly attacked the discussions of testimony in two
logic textbooks being used by other professors at Oxford: F. H. Bradley’s
The Principles of Logic (1883), and L. Susan Stebbing’s A Modern
Introduction to Logic (1930).
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) was retired and living in Merton
College when Collingwood matriculated at University College in 1908. The
opposite of Collingwood in many ways, Bradley was an elderly, much-
loved, and much-revered member of Oxford’s philosophical community.
He was known best as the leading “Anglo-Hegelian.” Collingwood
approved of the way Bradley tried to avoid falling into the scientific meth-
ods of the biblical criticism associated with the University of Tübingen. He
shared Bradley’s belief that German critics of the Bible were inappropri-
ately trying to imitate scientists and lacked the subtlety required for dealing
with historical testimony. Collingwood wrote disapprovingly of the
Germanic school of critical historians:
The critical historian is one who is no longer content to say

“the authorities say that such and such an event happened,
and therefore I believe that it did”. He says “the authorities
say that it happened, and it is for me to decide whether they
are telling the truth or not”.21
Such a black and white distinction lacked the subtlety of Bradley’s

argument that the historian brings him or herself to the testimony not as a
scientist but as one who lives in and experiences the past and the present.
The historian should not judge testimony by the cold standards of natural
science. The good historian has a historical spirit that “creates itself in the
work of historical inquiry.”22
Collingwood appreciated the way Bradley tried to not fall into the
German trap of dissecting historical reports as if they were dead cats. But
he criticized Bradley for “the fundamental error” of the natural scien-
tists,who conceived “the life of the mind as a mere immediate flow of feel-
ings and sensations, devoid of all reflection and self-knowledge.”23
Collingwood wanted all the attention paid to the historian’s own mind. Too
much talk of experience sounded like natural science. Even Bradley’s
greater historical empathy sounded more objectively scientific than
Collingwood wanted to allow.
“The historian,” Collingwood declared, “is master in his own house; he

owes nothing to the scientist or to anyone else.”24 The master of the house
rules and has no truck with spontaneous belief, tentative assent, or willing
faith. The master certainly is not compelled to trust anyone or submit to any
authority. The lone-wolf detective—jaded, self-reliant, sure that most people
are hiding something, and sadly pursuing the pure truth while normal author-
ities prove to be naive—was Collingwood’s model for the modern thinking
person, and especially the historian. Collingwood’s thinker was as cold as the
German Bible critics but even more autonomous. In Collingwood’s mind,
Bradley was too soft, too willing to empathize. Thinking is a sad and lonely
responsibility in which it is better not to make friends along the way.
Collingwood lived the way he thought, freely dispensing disdain.
L. Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) was an object of such a dispensation. In the
1930s when Collingwood was writing against testimony at Oxford, Stebbing
was a professor of philosophy at Bedford College at the University of
London. A logician and epistemologist, she was one of the first women to
break into professional academic philosophy departments. She published
well and in the 1930s served terms as president of the Aristotelian Society
and the Mind Association. For the 1930–31 academic year she lectured on
symbolic logic at Columbia University in New York. She gained a bit of
fame and was most influential in education. She wrote a popular elemen-
tary textbook on the art of being reasonable that was reprinted into the
1960s and published a set of radio lectures that she performed on BBC
radio: Thinking to Some Purpose: A Manual of First Aid to Clear Thinking,
Showing How to Detect Illogicalities in Other People’s Mental Processes and
How to Avoid Them in Our Own (1939). This popular set of lectures went
through multiple reprints and also remained available deep into the 1960s.
Collingwood disliked Stebbing’s promotion of the traditional notion
that testimony was an outside source of information, that we need it, and
must have a distinct method for handling it. “That we must rely upon tes-
timony is of great importance,” she wrote.
For most of the purposes of our everyday life we need to

think effectively. We want to draw conclusions from true
premises. . . . Constantly we are forced to rely upon the
advice of other people; we have to rely upon others to supply
us with information which we have not the time, or the
opportunity, or the skill, to discover ourselves. In short, the
acceptance of testimony is indispensable for the fulfillment of
our desires. Since we must act, knowledge of the conditions
relevant to our action is essential.25
In her Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), which went through mul-

tiple editions for over three decades on both sides of the Atlantic, she
insisted that history was not like an experimental science. She also dis-
missed the idea that the historian experiences history in any way—espe-
cially reenacting it in the mind. For Stebbing, the discipline of history
deserved a special method of reasoning precisely because it is concerned
with a uniqueness that is outside the self, a unique event that cannot be
experienced or reenacted. “The study of history,” she wrote “is concerned
with determinate occasion as a unique datable occurrence; it is concerned
with this occasion in its uniqueness.”26 She taught straightforwardly that
“any problem into which date enters as an integral element cannot be
solved by methods which depend upon, and are suitable to, repeatable
occurrences.”27 Collingwood believed that history was repeatable—it could
be reenacted in one’s own mind and thus become independent of its orig-
inal sources. He believed in hard study of historical source material, but the
historian’s mind was ultimately autonomous. Stebbing emphasized the
muddy problems of studying history. Collingwood’s detective found
answers in his own mind. Stebbing’s historian was forever mired in proba-
bilities because the sources are distant.
Collingwood dismissed Stebbing’s textbook as “the kind of logic which
professes to be most up to date” when, in reality, it was useless and taught
“the pre-scientific form of history which I call ‘scissors-and-paste history.’ ”28
This was “not really history at all.”29 Scissors-and-paste history was the tra-
ditional way a historian searched out the words and ideas of authorities,
compared various eyewitness and hearsay accounts, and felt obligated in
questionable situations to follow the best authorities and seemingly most
veracious accounts. Such a method—usually taught in terms of duty,
responsibility, risk, and willingness to submit one’s own judgment to best
available information and interpretations—assumed that the historian was
obligated in some deep way to his or her sources. Being obligated appalled
Collingwood. The historian, Collingwood declared,
can never be under any obligation, or have any right, to let

someone else make up his mind for him. If anyone else, no
matter who, even a very learned historian, or an eyewitness,
or a person in the confidence of the man who did the thing
he is inquiring into, or even the man who did it himself,
hands him on a plate a ready-made answer to his question,
all he can do is reject it: not because he thinks his informant
is trying to deceive him, or is himself deceived, but because
if he accepts it he is giving up his autonomy as an historian
and allowing someone else to do for him what, if he is a
scientific thinker, he can only do for himself.30
Note especially Collingwood’s use of the term “ready-made.” As we have

seen, this is the traditional term used to describe the information that
a human cannot work-up from within her or himself and must take in
“ready-made” from an outside source. Collingwood insisted that this whole
tradition is wrongheaded—that the thinking person does, in fact, work up
from within all the information needed for rational judgment. For
Collingwood, the thinking person is fully, completely, and necessarily
autonomous. There is no broader reasonableness.
Stebbing thought otherwise and earned his scorn. Collingwood was
right to recognize in her books an Aristotelian tradition that insisted on rec-
ognizing that reasonable people needed a special method for handling tes-
timony. On the other hand, Stebbing was not really trying to recover a
dying tradition. For the most part she was interested in individual reason-
ing, not a larger reasonableness. She made no arguments for the social
necessity of trusting other people. She did not specifically teach a reason-
ableness broader than reasoning. She was not much interested in traditional
methods of teaching assent, belief, or faith. When it came to handling tes-
timony, she simply recognized that people, especially historians, had to
think practically about the sources of information. She was a transitional
thinker of the 1930s who understood the practical fact that much knowl-
edge comes to us from external sources while at the same time being
intensely interested in teaching students to be independently “critical.”31 She
herself could lean Kant-like toward almost collapsing testimony completely
into experience. She wrote that “testimony was not a logically independent
source of knowledge, since in accepting testimony we are using our senses
and relying on our memories.”32 The accelerating trend in twentieth-century
academics was to teach students to be critical thinkers. Kantian auto-
nomy—whether in the hard-line form of Collingwood or the softer forms
of Bradley and Stebbing—was the goal of education. The traditional art of
thinking had usually tried to lift up both individual autonomy and social
responsibility when teaching the foundations and methods of human
knowledge. As C. S. Lewis’s professor noted, sometime before 1950s the
social foundations and methods of handling testimony had lost their place
in most schools.
THE CRITICAL INDIVIDUAL
Critical Thinking today is an educational movement complete with all the

hoopla that is expected of an educational movement: a foundation, a cen-
ter, an institute, and a national council selling textbooks, study guides, mini-
guides, video sets, and audio tapes at international conferences and official
web sites. A catalogue of items for sale is available. Every good movement
needs enemies, and this one’s enemies are impractical logicians and a
“pseudo critical thinking movement that is springing up everywhere in the
educational marketplace.”33 The guru of the movement is Richard Paul, who

is described as “a passionate reformer who sees educational problems at
the heart of our social and economic ones. . . . He sees that, although the
21st century is upon us, we are still trapped in 19th century thinking and
20th century arrogance and narrow-mindedness.”34 Paul writes that his
movement began in California in the mid-1980s when the state’s education
systems began demanding that teachers teach critical thinking.
In the literature published by Paul’s foundation, center, and institute
there is no mention of testimony or the need for reasonable people to rec-
ognize the social character of most of the information they use. Critical
thinking is all about self-realization. Community, intellectual humility, and
fairness are held up as ideals; however, the movement does not teach the
reasoning methods of assent, trust, submission, or risk that would bolster
community, humility, or fairness. Richard Paul believes even historical
knowledge must be worked up from within oneself:
There is no way around the need for minds to think their way
to knowledge. Thought is the key to knowledge. Knowledge
is discovered by thinking, analyzed by thinking, and, most
importantly, acquired by thinking.35
Essentially, the critical thinking movement that has gained media and
political prominence in last couple of decades is rooted in the Kantian col-
lapse of testimony into experience and an American form of individualistic
pragmatism whose most significant proponents have been William James,
John Dewey, and Stephen Toulmin. Toulmin, in The Uses of Argument
(1958), established his position as a critic of modern rationalism and pro-
ponent of using legal analogies for teaching the art of being reasonable.
A former student of Collingwood, Toulmin has no interest in testimony.
“There is one special virtue in the parallel between logic and jurispru-
dence,” declares Toulmin. It “helps to keep in the center of the picture the
critical function of the reason.”36 Being critical is the work of the judge,
jury, and lawyers, while those on the witness stand are no more significant
for the method of courtroom pursuit of a verdict than the furniture. In later
books such as Cosmopolis (1990) and Return to Reason (2001) Toulmin
continues to argue for a broad dialectic of reasonableness, but his focus
remains on the autonomous individual, not a community of shared infor-
mation. In Return to Reason, Toulmin offers only two individualistic
options: “Thus, pragmatism and skepticism are the beginning of a wisdom
that is better than the dreams of the rationalists.”37
When looking at works by Susan Stebbing and Stephen Toulmin we
enter a larger tradition of twentieth-century critical thinking manuals than
the narrow late-century critical thinking movement. Although we saw in
chapter 5 how professional philosophy departments in universities tended

to lose interest in teaching general education classes on the art of reason-
ableness and emphasized instead the specialty of formal logic, there con-
tinued in the twentieth century a textbook market for books that proposed
to teach broad thinking skills. Many of these textbooks seem to have been
directed toward freshman philosophy classes, introductory classes in
persuasive writing, and “research methods” classes in various humanistic
disciplines.
The center of gravity in these textbooks is usually critical thinking in
the manner taught by John Dewey and Stephen Toulmin. However, as we
saw with Susan Stebbing’s popular books, there is a side-tradition of crit-
ical thinking textbooks that early on recognized the need to teach students
that thinkers were not completely autonomous, that there was an impor-
tant social aspect to thinking. But such books got fewer and farther
between as the twentieth century progressed. A somewhat random sam-
pling of textbooks intended for general education in the art of thinking—
culled from some used bookstores and local (San Diego) university
libraries—offers an indication of the normal treatment of testimony in the
twentieth century.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY TEXTBOOKS INTENDED

FOR GENERAL EDUCATION IN THE ART OF
BEING REASONABLE
(arranged by initial publication date)
1898 An Introductory Logic by James Creighton (4th ed. 1923)

There is no specific treatment of testimony or authority. It does,
however, ask “where are the facts which are to be taken as a
starting point?” and notes that people must study the product
and the results of other men’s thoughts. “Our own conscious-
ness can supply but a very small quantity of material.” (14, 17).
1906 An Introduction to Logic by H. W. B. Joseph (2nd ed. 1916)

No treatment of testimony or authority.
1917 The Essentials of Logic by R. W. Sellars (2nd ed. 1925)

Chapter 16 includes much on testimony as one of the principle
means of gaining facts. “Induction rests upon facts. . . . But
fact can be obtained only by means of observation, direct or
indirect. The investigator must either gather his data himself
or else trust in part to the testimony of others” (192). Science
is cooperative and the “individual thinker must secure many
of his data from the testimony of others” (194). History is non-
repeatable so must have its own technique (196).
Cooperation is needed for facts. Follow experts—“the

astronomer tells us. . . . the chemist tells us. . . .” (195). Law
courts are full of conflicting eyewitness testimonies. Sellars
cites Münsterberg’s On the Witness Stand, discusses the prob-
lems of memory and perception, and notes there is a “double-
danger of error” when relying on the indirect evidence of
testimony (205).
Overall, Sellars recognizes the importance of testimony
and trust. However, the emphasis is on the weakness of eye-
witnesses and responsibility to believe scientist-experts. There
is no discussion of assessing the character and circumstances
of a testifier as a means to help validate testimony.
1924 Beginners’ Logic by R. H. Dotterer

There is no clear discussion of testimony, but the author
circles the subject in chapter 8 on “Hypotheses and Their
Use.” He asks how we know things and offers examples of
eyewitness testimonies. However, he does not recognize tes-
timony as a distinct source of facts. In chapter 9 he distin-
guishes premodern and modern reasoning with the example
that premodern theology was based on scriptures with much
knowledge gained from authority and tradition. “The begin-
ning of the modern period was signalized by a change of
attitude toward authority of tradition” (164). Dotterer does
note that “deduction is the method of using the knowledge
which one has already discovered, or has accepted on the
authority of some other investigator” (165).
1928 Principles and Problems of Right Thinking by Edwin Burtt (2nd ed. 1931)
Testimony is discussed negatively in relation to Christian scrip-
tures and miracles. Emotions, fascinations with the mysteri-
ous, religious texts, and deep loyalties encourage “uncritical
acceptance of the testimony” (469). Burtt supports Hume’s rule
for weighing testimony of miracle by experience. “Legitimate”
uses of testimony are exemplified by learning about “bush-
men” and “Eskimos” (471). Divine authority cannot be attached
to scriptures (474–78). Chapter 25, “Explaining Events with
the Historian” (418–36), has no mention of testimony. Burtt
notes that nonrepeatability demands that historian not use the
same method as experimental sciences. A historian “must
immerse himself in the records of his period and feel his
way sympathetically into the living situation he is seeking to
interpret” (422).
In the 4th edition of 1946, the section on miracles and
scriptures was removed.
1930 Humanistic Logic for The Mind in Action by Oliver L. Reiser

This focuses on self-realization. In a chapter on “Skepticism,
Consistency, and Belief,” the author quotes Bertram Russell
that “other things being equal” it is better to believe less and

to be skeptical (188). He warns against “know-it-alls” who
pose as authorities (192). There is nothing on testimony, even
in a chapter on “Organization and Discovery of Facts.”
1935 A College Logic: An Introduction to the Study of Argument and Proof

by Alburey Castel
Castel gives a short definition of “testimonial evidence” as
“testimony which points to the probability of some hypothesis”
(390).
1940 The Art of Practical Thinking by Richard Weil, Jr.

This is written by a businessman, “a wide reader without being
a bookworm.” The author states that “thinking can operate on
any material which has come within the range of experience,”
including the “second-hand experience” of books and movies.
He goes on to use the example of experiencing history but
does not discuss testimony or authority.
1941 Rational Belief: An Introduction to Logic by Albert Frye and Albert Levi
“There are two sources of knowledge: formal reason and
experience” (v). Matters of facts come from experience and
must “accept the authority of experience” (v). Rational belief
is based on reason and evidence from experience. Irrational
belief includes belief rooted in “authority” and “the tendency
to believe what one is told” (216). The book offers nothing
specific about testimony except demands that a rational
person must have an independent mind.
1945 Reliable Knowledge by Harold A. Larrabee

This book opens with an account of the 1938 “War of the
Worlds” broadcast, when many people failed to use “critical
judgment” to discern that the radio drama was not factually
reporting events. The aim of book: “the art of getting reliable
knowledge” (3). Larrabee notes that most knowledge comes
by way of communication from other people and is even
stored for us in libraries; however, “unless we make such
material our own by incorporating them into the fabric of our
own experience, they will remain heaped-up scraps of infor-
mation” (4). Facts and evidence are “something known to us
directly in experience” (128). Testimony is “indirect proof”
that is “relatively accessible” to us (320). The book discusses
testimonial evidence in courtroom, noting that juries tend to
attach great weight to eyewitness testimony, but modern
science “warns us” to not do so (548). Discussion of testi-
mony of “experts” is also treated negatively. Overall Larrabee
recognizes that testimony plays a large role as a source of
knowledge, but he is only interested in its problems. He does
not discuss belief or assent as appropriate at times, and

assumes testimony has to become experience before it is
knowledge.
1946 Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method

by Max Black
Discussing justified beliefs, Black offers a clear, concise, and
traditional position on testimony and authority. “A man who
should try to depend wholly upon information obtained
directly by himself would have a short life that was, in the
famous phrase, ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ The records of his-
tory, the recipes of our various technologies, the accumulated
ethical insights of our forefathers, must be communicated if
society is to survive; and we must, on the whole, be able to
trust those who give the testimony upon which our culture is
founded” (232). It is “a matter of great practical import to set
up ways of discriminating between reliable and unreliable
testimony” (233). Black does not set up these ways other than
to note that the authority of the testifier is “basic,” and that
we should look for “established credibility” of testifier
(233–34). He points out that dogmatic appeal to an authority
is not justified and gives the example of dogmatic appeal to
the Bible about ancient Jewish history. “Our discussion,” he
summarizes, “has suggested that appeal to testimony and
authority are useful and defensible ways of establishing basic
beliefs” (235, see also 243). The following section deals with
“appeal to experience.”
1947 Logic for the Millions by A. E. Mander

“We are obliged to accept many facts of observation on
the testimony of others (88). However, Mander notes that
“good faith of the witness” is not enough to support belief.
Testimony is more reliable if “thoroughly and skillfully
cross-examined” (90). Mander joins Locke in stating that
evidence weakens as it is passed through multiple testifiers.
He offers examples of gossip, rumor, and the conviction of
“forty million British people, that a large army of Russians
had been landed in Scotland” (94). He gives no positive
examples and closes with a warning that ancient history and
the Bible are constructed out of rumors that pass through a
long succession of copies that separate us from the original
observers.
1950 Practical Logic by Monroe C. Beardsley

Beardsley discusses the fallacy of arguing from “illegitimate
authority” but remarks that a “legitimate authority” is one who
has “access to relevant information, who is capable by train-
ing and ability, of thinking about it, and who was fair and
unbiased in thinking” (134). He notes that the testimony of a

witness depends on the reliability of the witness and can only
countered by ad hominem argument (135). Later he mentions
testimony in a courtroom analogy.
1951 The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolf Flesch

The only mention of testimony is as a fallacy in a chapter titled
“How Not to Be Bamboozled.” In a chapter titled “Thinking
Begins at Home,” Flesch noted that “the basis of clear think-
ing . . . is a realization that we think with our experience” (160).
1953 Introduction to Logic by Irving M. Copi (4th ed. 1972)

There is no discussion of testimony outside of warnings
against the fallacies of appealing to authority, to the general
population, and to the prestige of the informer. Copi includes
in a section on induction a detective example, Sherlock
Holmes. But he does not, like Collingwood, discuss the role
of testimonial evidence in the detective story as a distinctive
source of facts.
1954 The Fundamentals of General Logic by E. M. Adams

No discussion of testimony.
1959 The Logic of the Sciences and Humanities by F. S. C. Northrop

Nothing on testimony.
1963 How to Think Straight by James D. Weinland

There is nothing on testimony, but the authors cites Francis
Bacon and writes that “all the various techniques of observa-
tion are alike in having the same two enemies, authority and
emotion” (22).
1965 The Elements of Logic by Stephen F. Barker

Nothing on testimony or authority.
1975 Thinking Straight by Antony Flew

1978 An Introduction to Reasoning by Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke, and

Allan Janik (2nd ed. 1984)
The authors offer advice for handling assertions of facts but
no counsel beyond being wary and antagonistic. They offer
nothing on the need to sometimes trust or risk belief. The
book discusses witnesses and testimony in a section on legal
reasoning, using the courtroom as a good model for examin-
ing evidence (301–5). A short description of types of testi-
mony in court is followed by this warning: “People are not
very good at perceiving and at reporting in detail what they

have experienced with any great accuracy and consistency.
Studies in communication cast some doubt, furthermore, on
the ability of the legal process to yield accurate reports of past
experience through severe direct examination and cross-
examination (304). The authors do believe, however, that
there is warrant to use testimony in the courtroom when
accompanied by phrases such as “as they see it” and “for the
purposes of the law” (304).
1976 Reasoning by Michael Scriven

This influential text is designed to be a “powerful, as well as
practical, book using practical, everyday examples of the kind
that a citizen, especially a citizen student, runs into all the time”
(x). An introductory note “to the instructor” recommends that
“one has to view with great skepticism the very idea that
formal logic is likely to help improve reasoning skill” (xv).
Authority of experts in the fields of their expertise is discussed
in a chapter titled “Special Types of Argument,” which states:
“One footnote might be useful: It is worth attempting to
distinguish between the concepts of credibility (of an authority,
a witness, and other qualified person), reliability, and consis-
tency” (227). The two-page discussion emphasizes weakness of
any use of witnesses—even experts. Using a courtroom model,
Scriven writes that juries are easily led astray. “The extent to
which the witness appears forthright in manner, meets the eyes
of the interrogators, lacks any predisposing personal interests
in this case, and so on,” he believes, offers “very, very weak
and possibly zero indicators of reliability” (228).
1984 Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking by Merrilee H. Salmon

Opening sentence: “Don’t believe everything you hear!” The
emphasis is on the critical thinker as one who does not trust
others but relies on oneself. There is no discussion of testimony;
however, there is a section on “Arguments from Authority.”
Salmon encourages the appeal to “experts” speaking in the
areas of their expertise, but warns against “unreliable authori-
ties,” especially when authority comes from “glamour or pres-
tige” (71–73).
1985 Creative and Critical Thinking by W. Edgar Moore, Hugh McCann, and
Janet McCann (2nd ed.; no date for 1st ed.)
There is no discussion of testimony but a section on “Evidence
from Authorities” (88–89). It discusses decisions about surgery,
antipollution legislation, and nuclear dumping sites as
depending on evaluating authorities and gives three questions
for proper evaluation: 1) How much does the individual know
about the specific question at issue? 2) Is the individual objec-
tive about the matter in question? 3) What do other authorities
conclude about the matter? The authors emphasize authorities’

giving advice, not as soures of information. The concluding
statement warns the reader to be on guard.
1985 The Teaching of Thinking by Raymond S. Nickerson, David N. Perkins,

and Edward E. Smith.
There is no discussion of testimony although ad hominen
argument is discussed in a section called “Reasoning Errors
Due to Social Factors.”
1986 Reflections on Reasoning by Raymond S. Nickerson

Arising from a grant from the National Institute of Education,
this book is designed as a guide to stimulate teachers to teach
better. It notes that reasoning well demands, among other
things, judgment on the “credibility of information sources”
(2). There is no distinct discussion of testimony or authority;
rather, in two chapters on “beliefs” and “assertions,” the latter
including “statements of fact,” the emphasis is on the individual
reasoner. There is no discussion of communication, society,
trust, or recognition of a testifier to facts.
1988 The Logic of Real Arguments by Alec Fisher

Fisher notes that natural science uses authorities and that logi-
cians tend to neglect that fact because of their emphasis on
the fallacy of appeal to authority (122). The preface notes that
the book neglects the “historical domain” (viii).
1989 Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation by Douglas N.

Walton
2000 With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies by S. Morris

Engel (6th ed.; no date for 1st ed.)
The author begins by praising the trivium of the seven liberal
arts. The book has nothing specific on testimony but does
have a section on the fallacy of the appeal to authority.
Although it is sometimes appropriate, as in an appeal to a
scientific expert, the focus is on the error of relying on others
rather than the self (239–45).
2002 The Voice of Reason: Fundamentals of Critical Thinking by Burton F. Porter

Porter’s chapter on “discourse communities” is about persuasion
and debate, not testimony or authority. His only discussion of
authority is as a fallacy.
This desultory journey through art-of-thinking textbooks in the twentieth

century shows overall that the professor in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe was right to complain that the traditional methods for
handling testimony had largely disappeared from twentieth-century
schools. Lewis was particularly concerned about the rules that emphasized
the character and reliability of the witness over the initial believability of
the testimony. Only one of the textbooks listed above teaches something
close to what Lewis (along with Aristotle, Locke, Reid, and Hamilton) was
concerned with: Max Black’s Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Logic
and Scientific Method (1946). Black (1909–1988) was an important philoso-
pher and mathematician, and the fact that he would state that the author-
ity of the testifier is basic to discriminating between reliable and unreliable
testimony should encourage post-Kantian consideration of the traditional
rule that the Ramists called reciprocation. Lewis’s professor and Black
appear to fundamentally agree on the method of handling hard-to-accept
testimony.
Max Black was born to Jewish parents in Azerbaijan but was educated
in England. In the late 1920s as an undergraduate at Cambridge University
he encountered some of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of
the century. In the early 1930s he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the
University of London when L. Susan Stebbing was active there. Coming to
the United States in 1940, he eventually joined the philosophy department
at Cornell University, where in 1954 he became the Susan Lin-sage Professor
of Philosophy and Humane Letters. After his retirement in 1977 he became
the second American to ever be named president of the International
Institute of Philosophy (1981–1984). His most important books dealt with
the nature of mathematics, logical positivism, and the philosophy of lan-
guage. J. Wilson-Quayle in his sketch of Black in the American National
Biography writes that “As a philosopher, he was known for offering a com-
monsense, pragmatic approach to those theoretical issues that he knew
required clarity.” Certainly Max Black’s discussion of the externality of testi-
mony as integral to critical thinking was not as extensive as that of William
Hamilton or Richard Whately; however, it does carry into the twentieth cen-
tury the commonsense approach that was taught at Edinburgh and Oxford
in the nineteenth century.
Also seen in the above list is an overwhelming return to the high
medieval issue of accepting the authority of experts. Some writers warn
against being too gullible. Some seem to imply that reasonable people are
obligated to accept the testimony of an expert speaking in his or her field
of expertise. In general, the role of the expert testimony—especially scien-
tists in the courtroom—seems to be the only issue that keeps testimony
alive in modern critical thinking textbooks.
Also evident in the above list is the continuing tradition of the “fal-
lacy of appealing to authority.” What used to be taught as part of the bal-
ance between skepticism and gullibility when dealing with authoritative
history, submission to expert testimony, and ecclesiastical or political his-

tory, the “fallacy” has become the sole statement on the subject of han-
dling external sources of information. In many cases the only recognition
of testimony’s existence is to label any appeal to it a fallacy. Very much
a result of the Kantian tradition of collapsing testimony into personal
experience, what was a subtle tension in the art of thinking has become
a black/white fallacy.
One final note on the above list is that I encountered the word “trust”
in only one book, that of R. W. Sellars: “The investigator must either
gather his data himself or else trust in part to the testimony of others”
(The Essentials of Logic, 1917). Words such as trust, faith, belief, assent,
obligation, and submission are the ways textbook authors throughout
history have tended to discuss the relationship between testifier and
thinker. In the twentieth century, very few words indicate a thinker’s per-
sonal investment in a community of knowledge. Roy Wood Sellars
(1880–1973) was a prolific epistemologist and systematic philosopher at
the University of Michigan. He advocated a modern humanism that
should ground religion and American democracy. Like Josiah Royce,
Sellars was much interested in the application of philosophy in the cor-
porate life of society.
The art-of-thinking books by Sellars, Stebbing, and Black show that key
elements of the traditional thinking about testimony and authority did, at
times, carry over into mid-twentieth-century education. Recognition of the
role of expert testimony and the expert as an authority kept the general
subject from dying completely in the textbook tradition. Prominent philoso-
phers did not completely collapse testimony into experience and forget
about a thinker’s need to trust both living and dead people. On the other
hand, the “critical” individual became the ideal of the reasonable person.
Sellars, Stebbing, and Black were odd in the way they recognized a posi-
tive role for testimony in the life of a critical thinker. On the whole, the
critical thinking tradition of textbooks in the twentieth century manifests a
narrow individualism happily oblivious to the long tradition of teaching
testimony and authority in the art of being reasonable.
THE GENTLE AND FAIR WAYS OF INFORMATION
John Locke advised his readers: “We should do well to commiserate our
mutual Ignorance, and endeavour to remove it by all the gentle and fair
ways of information.”38 He wrote in the context of describing degrees of
assent, the error of blindly submitting to authority, and the need for the
community of reasonable people to work together. The fact of our mutual
ignorance weighed heavily on his mind. Humanity needed intellectual
humility—not the humility of skeptics who isolate people as islands of

ignorance, but rather, the humility that recognized that humans are limited
political beings who need each other even for the most simple levels of
knowledge. “The necessity of believing without Knowledge, nay, often
upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of Action and Blindness we
are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform our selves, than
constrain others.”39 Humans must humbly recognize their need to believe
in order to learn from other people.
In this book I have followed the long tradition of teaching the gentle
and fair ways of reasonableness principally understood as the need for
humans to believe, trust, assent, and sometimes submit to testimony and
authority. I grew up in the California of the 1960s and 1970s when
bumper stickers demanded that I “Question Authority,” and, in the name
of freedom of thought, I was told to think for myself and trust myself.
I was taught from grade school through graduate school to be a self-reliant
critical thinker. I was trained as a historian and was assigned by a pro-
fessor to read R. G. Collingwood, the “lone wolf,” who demanded that
thinking people have no obligation to any information gained from other
people. I look back on my education as ideologically harsh and isolat-
ing. The textbook I use even now when teaching Research Methods
declares:
Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities. Historians

don’t trust their sources. . . . They question everything. . . .
The writing of history is a brave business because good
historians are willing to question all the evidence and all
the assumptions, and in the end question themselves rigor-
ously. . . . Nothing is quite so destructive to a historian’s rep-
utation as to present conclusions that prove gullibility. . . .40
“Come to history as a doubter,” the author advises.41 Nowhere in the book

does he deal with the reality that historians have to trust more than doubt
and that a methods course should teach more about the responsibilities
and techniques of reasonable trust than simply romanticizing the jaded
detective.
Luckily I had many good teachers who modeled what they did not
preach. They were gentle and fair with authorities and listened respectfully
to people long dead who gave us good information and opinions. They
modeled the reasonable life that I later found taught by Aristotle,
Quintilian, Augustine, Melanchthon, Arnauld, Locke, Watts, Reid, Whately,
and Hamilton: that a reasonable life has obligations to information from
other people.
Two ideas recur throughout this book: communication and risk.

Educating young people in the art of being reasonable requires teaching
them that they have to open themselves up to communication and think
about its implications. As Aristotle taught: we are political beings. None of
us is an intellectual island. We think best when we are aware that we are
awash in communication. I am told the island of Madagascar exists. I am
told a supposedly extinct fish was caught near Madagascar. Mapmakers tell
me this. I read and have heard about the fish. I have no self-evident knowl-
edge of the island, but I suppose I could go visit it to gain experience of
it. But even then, maybe the tour guide might take me to another island
and only tell me I was on Madagascar. And what of the fish? Is it possible
for me Collingwood-like to reenact the extinct fish in my mind and thereby
know it? The fool in his heart says he can think for himself. “Question
Authority?” Yes, but we must do it with real understanding that there is
nowhere else to turn most of the time. We are political thinkers who need
authorities to know our world. Cicero’s son asked his father why extrinsic
knowledge should be given special designation since it eventually winds
up being part of the normal internal reasoning processes of an individual.
Cicero’s answer was similar to Locke’s. Such information comes ready-
made. It cannot be worked up by self-reliant reasoning. Its existence
demands recognition that it is communicated. It obliges us to deal with
people outside of ourselves. Our need of it shines a light on the limitations
of the individual human reason and the necessity of reasonable people
thinking about the implications of communication. Thomas Reid called this
the social operation of the mind.
The second recurring issue in this book is risk. Being reasonable is
risky. The fullness of being reasonable is more dangerous than compla-
cent trusting of oneself. The image of living dangerously as a self-reliant
thinker is romantic in its Emersonian and Nietzschean form; however,
the dangers we actually face are for the most part deciding who to trust.
Reasonableness is about the risk of properly trusting people, often
unknown people, even more often dead people. Quintilian and Augustine
addressed the fact that being reasonable might actually direct one into
error. Quintilian called it “honest error.” Augustine consoled the reasoner
by saying the error was not his or her “fault.” The recurring words of faith,
trust, assent, belief, and even the notion of “compelled assent” all imply
fundamental risk.
Ironically, self-reliance makes thinking safer, less dangerous, less risky.
Carl Becker, one of the leading lights of the historical profession in the
twentieth century pointed out that the historian can and should make
history safe by making history subject to one’s mind rather than actually
something external to the self. He wrote in the context of Hume’s argument
against testimony of miracles:
[Hume’s] argument does not really prove that miracles never

occurred in history; it proves only that there is no use having
a past through which the intellect cannot freely range with a
certain sense of security. If we cannot be on familiar terms
with our past, it is no good. We must have a past that is the
product of all the present. . . . The modern historian admits
that there were lies, but denies that there were miracles. He
not only rejects the miracle—the explanation of the fact—he
rejects the facts as well; he says that such facts are not proved;
for him, there were no such facts. And he rejects these facts,
not because they are contrary to every possible law of nature,
to every possible experience, but simply because they are
contrary to the comparatively few laws of nature which his
generation is willing to regard as established.42
In the context of Kantian collapse of testimony into personal experience,

Becker preached the power of the historian’s mind to impose personal expe-
rience on all history and thereby make it safe for him or her to wander in.
Becker was right. If we want a history—even a present world—that is safe
then we have to deny any obligation to testimonial evidence. Any time we
open ourselves up to the ready-made information that is communicated to us
we put ourselves at risk.
We began with the King of Siam rejecting reports of the existence of
ice. The King would have had to risk too much trust in another man whom
he did not know too well—the Dutch ambassador—in order to believe that
elephants could walk on cold water. John Locke presented the story to
encourage his readers to think about the responsibilities and risks that sur-
round every reasonable person every day. Most of the information we have
comes to us by communication. Teachers such as Aristotle, Quintilian,
Augustine, Boethius, Philipp Melanchthon, John of St. Thomas, Antoine
Arnauld, Thomas Reid, Isaac Watts, Richard Whately, William Hamilton, and
Max Black all have taught that the art of thinking required a humble recog-
nition of a thinker’s obligations to information gained from other people.
None of them taught that such an obligation was simple. Often they do not
agree with one another about the best way to handle testimony in the art.
Aristotle invented two technical terms and a strategy he called topics.
Arnauld was exuberant about better methods of teaching testimony and
authority. Locke was more tentative. Augustine was magisterial on the sub-
ject. Quintilian distinguished the magisterial aspects of historical testimony
from the rough courtroom responsibilities of examining a witness. Anslem
experimented with not using it, then apologized. Abelard thought it the
method of Jews, not philosophers. Cicero warned about problems of divine
testimony. Watts offered extensive checklists for proper discernment of

divine and human testimony. Reid and Hamilton thought it best to focus on
the practical fact that humans have a social operation in their thinking.
Kirwin got caught up with creating mathematical analogies for calculating
good sense. For over two thousand years testimony and authority were at
the center of lively discussions about teaching the art of thinking.
In the twentieth century the tradition faltered. Our schools should
revive the tradition. Renewing the liveliness of the discussion of testimony
and authority in the art of thinking will be a remedy for our ideologically
harsh and isolating philosophies and the way most teachers teach one thing
but live another. Recognizing the gentle and fair ways of information will
help us be more reasonable and will help us consistently teach our chil-
dren to be more reasonable.
NOTES
1. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1950), 38–39.
2. Raymond S. Nickerson, David N. Perkins, and Edward E. Smith, The
Teaching of Thinking (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1985), 130–35.
3. For a recent critique of the main trend of twentieth-century philosophical
movements that have undermined the role of communication by collapsing it into
the self, and an argument for better understanding and justified use of divine com-
munication, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on
the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995).
4. Josiah Royce, The Concept of the Absolute in The Basic Writings of Josiah
Royce, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969), I. 305.
5. Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University, 1982), 1.
6. Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz
(New York: Dover, 1988), 76.
7. Ibid., 78.
8. Friedrich Ueberweg, System of Logic and History of Logical Doctrines, trans.
Thomas M. Lindsay (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871; reprinted Bristol:
Thoemmes Press, 1993), 93.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Quoted in Seven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and
Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University, 1991), 52.
11. Ibid., 400.
12. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy
of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 180.
13. Ibid., 172.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 5.
16. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, intro. Stephen Toulmin (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1978), x.
17. Ibid., 73.
18. T. M. Knox, “Editor’s Preface,” in R. G. Collingwood, Idea of History
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), xxiv.
19. Collingwood, Idea of History, 96.
20. Ibid., 97.
21. Ibid., 135.
22. Ibid., 140.
23. Ibid., 141.
24. Ibid., 155.
25. L. Susan Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose: A Manual of First Aid to
Clear Thinking, Showing How to Detect Illogicalities in Other People’s Mental
Processes and How to Avoid Them in Our Own (London: Penguin Books, 1939), 218.
26. L. Susan Stebbing, A Modern Introduction to Logic (London: Methune,
1952), 383.
27. Ibid., 384.
28. Collingwood, Idea of History, 143.
29. Ibid., 257.
30. Ibid., 256
31. Stebbing, A Modern Introduction to Logic, 385–86.
32. Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose, 218–19.
33. Richard Paul, Critical Thinking, 3rd ed. (np: Foundation for Critical Thinking,
1993), “About the Author.”
34. Ibid.
35. Paul, Critical Thinking, vii.
36. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University,
1958), 8.
37. Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University,
2001), 190.
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), IV.xvi.4.
39. Ibid.
40. Richard Marius, A Short Guide to Writing About History, 3rd ed. (New York:
Longman, 1999), 48.
41. Ibid., 67
42. Carl Becker, Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of
Carl L. Becker, ed. Phil L. Snyder (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1958), 13–14.
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INDEX
Abelard, Peter, 75–76, 84n99, Topica, 10, 14–18, 21, 38n12–13,

84nn104–7, 87, 105, 229 38n25, 38n25, 75, 84n101, 102,
Adams, E. M., 244 124n56, 176
Adams, John Quincy, 217–18, 225n102 Aristotelian textbook tradition, 1, 3, 68,
Afer, Domitius, 32 77–80, 90, 120, 142, 175–222, 238;
Agricola, Rudolphus, 87–92, 102, 107, decline, 7
121nn4–5 Arnauld, Antoine, 11, 128–30, 141–46,
Alcuin of York, 73–74, 84nn92–94 148, 170n1, 170n3, 171n6,
Aldrich, Henry, 140–41, 142, 171n11, 171nn8–9, 172n30, 172nn45–48,
188, 207 183, 186. See also Port-Royal Logic
Al-Farabi, 78 artificial topics. See topics
Al Ghazzali, 79, 85n115–17 Ashworth, E. J., 123n39
Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 99, 123n37 assent: compelled/forced, 4, 35,
Andover Seminary, 217 142–43; history of, 18–37. See also
Anselm of Canterbury, 6, 57–59, 73, testimony
82n51, 82nn55–56, 229 Athanasius, 4
Antigone, 17 Augustine, 1, 11, 18, 46–57,
apologetics. See Christianity 81nn14–27, 81nn30–31,
Aquinas, Thomas, 58, 63, 82n52, 98, 82nn36–39, 82nn41–47,
123nn33–35, 176–82, 222n6, 82nn49–50; influence of 5, 6,
222n13 46–48, 57, 59, 64–65, 72, 81n13,
Arabs, 77–78. See also Islam 87, 107, 127, 155, 180, 201;
Arcesilaus, 20, 22, 23 Confessions, 46, 56–57, 137; On
Aristotle, 1–2, 9–18, 38n11, 47, 50, Christian Doctrine, 46–48; On the
81n32, 96, 123n27, 171n7, 222n4, Profit of Believing, 46, 52–56, 135;
224n61, testimony/authority, On the Trinity, 46, 48–49, 131;
16–17; divine testimony, 17; The City of God, 46, 49–50, 137
influence, 3, 5, 11, 27, 51–52, Augustinian, textbook tradition, 1, 43,
56, 107, 127, 154, 175–222; 52, 56, 64, 66, 80, 87–121, 169
rediscovered, 23, 39n38; Art of authority, 24, 74, 102, 162; fallacy of,
Rhetoric, 10, 14–18, 21, 24, 38n10, 131–35; as social knowledge,
38n21, 38n26, 38nn28–29, 56–57, 133, 134, 14; submission
39n30–36, 122nn12–13, 176; to, 5, 50–57, 133; supposed crisis
De Sophisticis Elenchis, 38n4; of, 102–8; as a topic, 4, 131.
Nicomachean Ethics, 13, See also testimony
38nn15–16, 38n18–20, 63, 83n69, Averroes, 79
96–98, 123n28, 123n30, 124n55, Ayers, Robert H., 173n59
175; Politics, 12–14, 38n14, 38n17; Azami, Muhammad Mustafa, 85n113
Bacon, Francis, 102, 105, 123nn43–44, Brodie, Alexander, 84n103, 186,

123n48, 154, 169, 182, 208; 223n25
criticized, 188 Brown, Peter, 56
balancing likelihoods, 154, 158–61, Buchan, John, 174n91
164–65 Buchanan, Robert, 197–99,
Barnes, Jonathan, 40n55 224nn46–48
Barker, Stephen F., 244 Buisson, Ferdinand, 119, 126n111
Bayle, Pierre, 167–70, 174nn93–94 Burckhardt, Jacob, 118, 126n110
Baynes, Thomas, 187, 223n32 Burns, R. M., 173n55
Beard, George M., 226n110 Buroker, Jill Vance, 170n1
Beardsley, Monroe C., 243–44 Burridge, Richard A., 80n5
Beattie, James, 201, 224n64 Burton, John, 85n113
Becker, Carl, 250–51, 253n42 Burtt, Edwin, 241
Beckwith, Francis J., 172n55
Bede, 58 Cambridge University, 103, 104, 110,
belief, 185, spontaneous and willing, 112
43, 63–65, 200–202. See also Capella, Martianus, 66, 83n75–80
testimony Carneades, 20–22, 23, 53, 81n12, 118,
Bently, Jerry, 113, 125n89, 174n98 201
Bergersdyk, 188 Case, John, 103, 124nn53–54, 124n69,
Berkeley, George, 166, 173n85 207
Bernoulli family, 155 Cassiodorus Senator, 6, 43, 59, 65–72,
Bernoulli, Jakob, 153, 156–58 75, 83n81–85, 83n87–89, 90, 96,
Bernoulli, Nicholas, 156–58 130; neglect of divine testimony,
Bible. See Christianity 71–72, 101; testimony/authority,
Bird, Otto, 84n103 70–71, 88; An Introduction to
Bitzer, Lloyd F., 7n2 Divine and Human Readings,
Black, Max, 243, 247–48 66, 68
Blomberg, Craig, 80n5 Castel, Alburey, 242
Bodin, Jean, 117–19, 126nn103–9, category of quality. See quality
230 Cato, 25, 26
Boethius, Ancius Severinus. 6, 43, Cato the Younger, 36
57–65, 68–70, 75, 82n57, 83n60, Chadwick, Henry, 63, 80n10, 82n58,
83nn63–68, 83nn70–71, 96, 120, 83n67, 83n70
122n10, 177, 201; dichotomies, 90; Chalmers, Thomas, 196, 200
neglect of divine testimony, Channing, Edward Tyrell, 218
71–72, 101; De Topicis Differentiis, Charlemagne, 73
60–61; In Ciceronis Topica, 60, Chesterton, G. K., 177, 222n5
61. See also belief, spontaneous Christianity: apologetics, 43–57, 58, 76,
and willing; testimony. 91–92, 107, 112, 148, 153, 177,
Bonaventure, 58, 77, 82n54, 85n108 196–97, 198, 205, 209; biblical
Bowen, Francis, 218–19, 225nn106–7, emphasis on testimony, 43–46, 76;
230 church authority, 17, 73–77, 94,
Bowen, James, 41n100 133; German critics, 235;
Boyle, Robert, 105, 116 reasonableness of, 146–53, 196,
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 235–36 198, 216; use of dialectic/logic for
Braun, Herbert, 80n12 support, 46–48, 67–68, 76–77, 80,
Index 271
87, 92–101, 111–12, 140, 141, doubt: as unsteady and unproductive,

191–92, 213–17 181
Chrysippus, 19 Dotterer, R. H., 241
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 11, 14, 18, 19, Duncani, Marci (Mark Duncan), 186,
22–37, 40nn56–57, 40n66, 223n27
40nn72–73, 40n76, 41nn85–86, 45,
48, 52, 56, 116, 119, 121n1, 201, eclectic logics, 107
206, 250; influence, 3, 6, 22, 27, encyclopedia and encyclopedists, 59,
31, 63, 65, 80, 87–121; on 66–68
testimony/authority, 23–31, 49, Engel, S. Morris, 246
230–31; De Inventione, 22, 26–27, Erasmus, 88, 119
40nn63–64, 40n71, 120; De Evans, C. Stephen, 80n5
Partitione Oratoria, 22, 27, 40n54, extrinsic topics. See topics
40n65, 40n67, 40n69; Topica, 22,
23–25, 40n58, 40nn60–62, 40n68, faith. See testimony
40n70, 120 fault. See Augustine; honest error;
Ciceronian textbook tradition, 60, 66, Quintilian; testimony
87–121, 218. See also Boethius Fisher, Alec, 246
Clement of Alexandria, 45–46, 76, 178 Flesch, Rudolf, 244
Coady, C. A. J., 172n55, 173n82, 221 Flew, Antony, 244
Collingwood, R. G., 232–38, 249, Fonseca, Pedro da, 179, 222n10
253nn16–24, 253nn28–30 footnotes. See Grafton, Anthony
commonplace book, 15 Franklin, James, 39n32, 39n52, 79,
Copi, Irving M., 244 85n119
Copleston, Edward, 207, 209, 215 Franklin, Julian H., 117, 125n101
Craige, John, 165–66, 173n83 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 198–200,
credibility. See probability 220, 221, 224nn49–58
critical thinking as education Frede, Michael, 39n44
movement, 1, 3, 7, 114, 232, Freedman, Joseph, 108, 124nn70–71
238–41 Frye, Albert, 242
Creighton, James, 240 Fumagalli, Maria Teresa Beonio-
Cuninghame, Alexander, 186 Brocchieri, 84n102
Daston, Lorraine, 155, 157, Galileo, 105–6, 154

172nn49–51 general education in curriculum,
De Rijk, L. M., 75, 84n100 175–76
Descartes, René, Cartesian, 6, 127, Geography: as a discipline relying on
129–30, 153, 154, 171n4, 171n8 testimony, 3, 4, 136–37, 148–50
Dewey, John, 231–33, 240, Gerhardsson, Birger, 77, 85n109
252nn12–15 Gibbon, Edward, 4, 8n7
dialectic: as discipline teaching Gillispie, Charles, Coulston, 158,
reasonableness 10, 12–14, 18–22, 172nn53–54
46–47, 87; textbook traditions, 3, Grafton, Anthony, 107, 113, 124n67,
9, 65–77, 88 125n91, 168, 174n92; footnotes,
Dickson, Richard, 225nn103–4 168
Diogenes Laertius, 10, 19, 37n1, Grant, Robert M., 81n12
39n39, 39n43, 39nn47–48 Grayeff, Felix, 39n38, 40n55
Greenleaf, Simon, 196, 223n42 Ibn Khaldun, 79

Green-Pedersen, Niels Jørgen, Ibn Rushd, 79
83n61–62, 84n98 Ibn Taymiyya, 78, 85n112
Gregory of Tours, 58, 82n53 inartificial topics. See topics
gullibility, 36–37, 51, 144–45 inevident habits, 176–82. See also
quality; John of St. Thomas
habit. See quality intrinsic topic. See topics
Hacking, Ian, 153, 155, 172n43 Isidore of Seville, 71, 77, 83n86, 185
Hadith, 78 Islam, 7, 51, 77–80, 176. See also
Halley, Edmund, 156 Hadith
Hallie, Philip P., 39n50
Hamilton, William, 6, 11, 186–94, 198,
Janik, Allan, 244
222n16–17, 223n31, 223n36,
Jansenism, 128–29
223n38, 223n41, 224n67, 230;
Jansenist logic, 127. See also Port Royal
criticizing other logics, 188;
Logic
influence on textbooks, 203–6,
Jardine, George, 197
218, 221
Jardine, Lisa, 88, 89, 121nn2–3, 122n7,
Harvard College and University, 6, 99,
124n49, 124n72
108, 112, 217–22
Jerome, 45, 72, 80n8
Harvard Divinity School, 217
Jesuits, 140
Hedge, Levi, 217–18, 221
Jews, Jewish, 7, 43, 51, 75–76, 77–80
Helen of Troy, 21
John of Salisbury, 74, 84n97, 96,
Herodotus, 14, 71, 77
123n25
History: as discipline relying on
John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot), 99,
testimony, 3, 4, 33–34, 48–49, 58,
176–82, 222nn11–12
77, 79, 117–19, 136–40, 143–44,
John Scotus Eriugena, 73–74, 84n96,
149–50, 165–67, 168–70, 233, 249;
105
as discipline that must not rely on
Johnson, Samuel, 171n12
external authority, 233–38;
Joseph, H. W. B., 240
historian as loner detective, 233;
jurisprudence: courtroom, 67; as a
scissors-and-paste history, 237.
discipline relying on testimony,
See also Quintilian
3, 4, 33–34, 73–74, 163, 220–21.
Hoitenga, Dewey J. Jr., 82n40
See also Bodin; Cicero; Quintilian
Homer, 41n99
honest error, 5, 54, 64. See also
Quintilian Kant, Immanuel, 114, 215, 252nn6–7;
Hotson, Howard, 108, 123n37, 124n70 criticized, 189–90, 195, 219;
Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 123n39, influence, 6, 117, 184, 199, 203–6,
171n10 207, 227–52; on testimony, 115,
Huby, Pamela M., 40n59 228–232
humanists, 11, 27, 93 Keckermann, Bartholomäus, 99, 112,
Hume, David, 30, 36, 114–16, 125n96, 123n38
158–61, 164–65, 173n56–57, Kelley, Donald R., 122n19
173n75, 173n78–79, 184–85, Kennedy, George A., 31, 39n42,
214, 219 40n77, 225n104
humility, 200–203, 249 Kenny, Anthony, 11, 38n7
Index 273
Kirwan, Richard, 156, 161–67, Luke, 43, 77, 80n5

173nn64–74, 173nn76–77, Lull, Raymond, 78
174nn86–87
Kneale, William and Martha, 14, 38n3, MacIntyre, Alistair, 216
39n40 MacKendrick, Paul, 40n53
Knoles, Thomas and Lucia, 124n68, Maimonides, Moses, 79, 85n118
125nn74–75, 125n92 Mair, John, 186
Knox, T. M., 233 Malherbe, Michael, 123n45
Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 19, 39n44 Mander, A. E., 243
Kuklick, Bruce, 216–17, 219–20, Marenbon, John, 74, 84n95
225n101, 226n108 Maritain, Jacques, 178, 222n9
Marius, Richard, 253nn40–41
Laelius, 25, 26 Mather, Cotton, 108, 141, 171n13
Lanfranc, 59 Mather, Increase, 108–9, 114
Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de, McCann, Hugh and Janet, 245
157, 166, 172n52, 173n84 McCosh, James, 166–67, 174nn89–90,
Larrabee, Harold A., 242–43 186–89, 194, 203–6, 218, 223n26,
Le Clerc, Jean, 117, 125n102, 167–70, 223n28, 223nn33–35, 223n37,
174nn95–97 223nn39–40, 224nn69–71,
Leibniz, Gottfried Willhelm, 156 225nn72–77
Leo XIII, 178, 222nn7–8 McLachlan, James, 172n34
Lever, Ralph, 104, 124n59 Megarians, 19
Levi, Albert, 242 Melanchthon, Philipp, 6, 15, 92–98,
Levine, Michael P., 172n55 102, 112, 122nn14–16,
Lewis, C. S., 227, 238, 246–47, 252n1 122–23nn21–24, 123n26, 123n29,
liberal arts curriculum, 65–66, 68, 88, 123n32, 147, 179, 181, 207;
101. See also encyclopedia inaugurates tradition of textbooks,
Lilla, Salvadore R. C., 45, 80nn10–11 87, 93; innovations in topics,
“little schools” of Jansenists, 129–30, 94–96; on testimony, 92. See also
133 quality
Locke, John, 1–2, 6, 7n1, 7n3, 148, Menelaus, 21
154, 171nn14–29, 172n31, Merrill, Kenneth R., 173n59
173nn80–81, 201, 208, 228, method, 130, 135–41
248–52, 253nn38–39; criticized, Middle Academy. See Plato’s Academy
188, 199; diminishing authority of miracles (the incredible, fabulous, and
history, 165–67; Essay Concerning hard-to-believe), 2, 6, 29, 71, 90,
Human Understanding, 6, 141–46 95, 107, 114–17, 137–38, 165,
Lockean textbook tradition, 146–53, 191–92, 213–15, 227
199, 217–22 Milton, John, 109–10, 114,
locus, loci. See topics 125nn76–77, 125n93
logic: as given to Moses, 89; formal, Montaigne, 132, 142
175; as loose term, 88 Moore, W. Edgar, 245
logos, 45 Moran, Dermot, 84n96
Long, A. A., 18, 39n37, 39n41 More, Thomas, 119
Love, Harold, 124n68 Morton, Charles, 99–100, 123nn41–42,
Lucian, 117, 126n102 147, 208
Moss, Ann, 14, 121, 126n124 Peter of Spain (Pope John XXI),
Münsterberg, Hugo, 219, 220–21, 74–75, 87, 101, 119
226nn111–12 Peters, F. E., 39n45, 66, 77, 78, 83n74,
Murray, David, 224nn44–45 85n110, 85n114
Muslim. See Islam Philosophy departments, 175, 217–22,
240
Nadler, Steven, 171n5, 187, 223n29 Pius XI, 178
Nash, Richard, 173n83 place-logic. See topics
Neusner, Jacob, 78, 85n111 Plato, 18–19, 38n3, 39n45, 53, 73
Newman, John Henry, 175, 196, 207, Plato’s Academy, 18–22; Middle
215–16, 222nn1–3, 223n43, Academy, 22
225nn80–81; belief, 64 Plotinus, 72–75, 84nn90–91, 105, 185,
Nickerson, Raymond S., 246, 229
252n2 Plutarch, 19, 35–36; 41nn94–95, 77,
Nicole, Pierre, 129, 170n1. See also 115–16, 125n97
Port Royal Logic Poinsot, John. See John of St. Thomas
non-technical topics. See topics Posidonius, 65
Noreña, Carlos G., 126nn111–12 Porphyry, 68, 90, 96, 130, 186
Northrop, F. S. C., 244 Porter, Burton F., 246
Port-Royal Logic, 6, 16, 47, 113, 117,
obstinacy v. right thinking, 133 127–70, 187
Odysseus, 36–37 Potter, David, 30, 40n74
Ong, Walter J., 108, 122n6, 124n73 predicaments. See Porphyry; quality
optimism, epistemological, 10–12, probability and certainty, 20–22, 52–57
47–48, 50–52, 87, 90, 93, 115, Puritans, 106–13
117, 177, 192, 202 Pusey, 215
oracles, 17, 26–31, 67, 90–91 Pyrrho of Elis, 11–12, 64
Oxford University, 6, 102–3, 140, 147,
175–76, 188, 206–9 quality: as Aristotelian category, 96–97,
154; Melanchthonian tradition, 94,
Paley, William, 196 96–101. See also John of
Palmer, George Herbert, 219–20 St. Thomas
Pascal, Blaise, 128, 132, 133, 135, quantification of testimony/authority,
154–55, 171n9 135–36, 153–55, 205–6; Port-Royal
Patokorpi, Erkki, 207–8, 225n79, Logic influence, 153–70
225n82 “Question Authority,” 249
Pattison, Mark, 215–16, 225nn99–100 Quintilian, 1, 10, 12, 18, 19, 22–37,
Paul (St.), 43–44, 50–51, 76, 93 38n6, 38n9, 40n75, 41nn78–84,
Paul, Richard, 239, 253nn33–35 41nn88–93, 41nn96–98, 48,
Peacock, George, 186 82nn34–35, 115, 118, 124n61;
Peirce, Charles S., 160, 173nn59–62, honest error, 34–35, 51, 54, 104,
220 115, 180; influence, 3, 22, 31, 65,
Pelikan, Jaroslav, 64–65, 83n73 80, 218
Pepys, Samuel, 2, 8n5
Perkins, David, N., 246, 252n2 Ramist textbook tradition, 87, 106–17;
Perry, Ralph Barton, 219 dichotomies, 90, 130. See also
pessimism, epistemological, 10–12 reciprocation, testimony
Index 275
Ramsey, I. T., 171n27 Scipio, 25, 26

Ramus, Petrus, 6, 68, 87–92, 96, 101, scribal publication, 107
119, 122nn8–9, 122n11, 182, 186 Scottish logic, 175–76, 182–206;
Rand, Benjamin, 226n105 universities, 185, 186; educational
“rational,” different from reasonable. influence, 194, 203–6
See reasonableness Scrimgeour, Alexander, 186
“reasonableness”: as art of trusting, Scriven, Michael, 245
183; and belief, 64, 180–81; Scruton, Roger, 252n5
criticized, 232–38; as founded Sedgwick, Alexander, 170n2
upon internal and external sources Sedly, D. N., 18, 39n37, 39n41
of information, 1–3, 56–57, 58, 63, Sell, Alan P. F., 172n36
135, as social, 12–14, 48–49, Sellars, R. W., 225n83, 240–41, 248
72–73, 93, 132, 177, 182 Seton, John, 104, 124n62
**“reasoning” for broadest definition. Sextus Empiricus, 10, 37n2, 39n49,
See reasonableness 39n51, 82n33
reciprocation, rule of. See testimony Shapin, Steven, 102, 105, 116, 123n47,
Reedy, Gerhard, 111, 125n84 124n64, 125n98
Reid, Thomas, 11, 12, 182–94, 200, Shapiro Barbara, 113, 125n90, 146,
222nn16–17, 223nn18–23, 224n60, 172n32–33
224n63; and Aristotle, 182, belief, Sharratt, Roger, 122n7
64, 201–3, Presbyterian, 185. See skeptics, skepticism, 5, 11–12, 18–22,
also Scottish logic 36–37, 53–56, 93, 141, 153, 169,
Reike, Richard, 244 180, 202, 248–51
Reiser, Oliver, 241–42 Smith, Edward E., 246, 252n2
republic of letters, 167, 168 Sobel, Dava, 124n66
rhetoric: conflated with dialectic, 88; “social knowledge.” See
decline affects testimony, 208–9; reasonableness; Scottish logic
as discipline to teach testimony/ Socratics, 33
authority not dialectic, 67, 208–9 solitaires, 129, 133
Richardson, Alexander, 110–14, Southern, R. W., 59
125nn80–83, 125nn85–88, Stebbing, L. Susan, 232, 233, 236–38,
125nn94–95, 125nn99–100 248, 253nn25–27, 253nn31–32
risk. See testimony Stewart, Dugald, 119, 201, 223n30,
Rockefeller, Seven C., 252nn10–11 224nn65–66
Royce, Josiah, 219–22, 228, 232, Stoics, Stoicism, 18–22, 26, 33, 153–54,
252n4 180–82
Russell, Bertram, 241 Stout, Jeffrey, 102, 123n46
Ryle, Gilbert, 38n5 Strabo, 23, 40n55
Stump, Eleonore, 62, 63, 83n60,
Salmon, Merrilee H., 245 83n68
Sanderson, Robert, 99, 123nn39–40, submission. See authority; Augustine
207 Sulla, 23
Scaliger, 194
Schmidt, Nathaniel, 85n120 Taves, Ann, 226n110
Schmitt, Charles B., 107, 122n14, Tachard, Guy, 7n4
124n50, 125n69 technical, see topics
Schneider, John R., 122n17 Tertullian, 45, 80n7
testimony: as access to knowledge 61–62, 69–70; “intrinsic” and

outside ourselves, 1–7, 11, 48, “extrinsic,” 3, 4, 24–27, 33, 43, 56,
162, 170, 184–85, 189–99, 210, 68, 70–71, 89, 178; “invention,”
220–21, 236; ancient written 15, 90; Melanchthon’s innovations,
sources, 192–93; assent, 27, 35, 94–96; revival, 209; “technical”
45–46, 49–56, 96, 99, 200–203; and “non–technical,” 3, 4, 10,
belief, 43, 63–65, 135, 180, 14–18, 24–25, 33, 43, 70; textbook
200–203; divine testimony, 17–18, tradition of, 5, 59, 68, 88, 94–96,
29–30, 33–37, 43–44, 48–58, 89, 101, 120, 209
90–91, 94–101, 104–5, 111, 136, Toulmin, Stephen, 160, 166, 173n58,
142, 151–53, 168, 180; in English 174n88, 233, 239–40, 244,
speaking tradition, 141, 148–55, 253nn36–37
228, 233; of experts, 92; faith, Trebatius, 23
24, 35, 45–46, 49–56, 89, 90, trust, as habit of steady assent, 181.
96–99, 108, 135–38; history/ See also testimony
jurisprudence, 32–36, 48, 90,
148–50; moved from rhetoric Ueberweg, Friedrich, 231–32, 233,
to dialectic, 67, 88; neglect or 252nn8–9
submergence of divine testimony,
71–72, 78, 194–200; as no Vanderspoel, John, 83n59
different from experience, 230; Varro, Marcus Tarentius, 66
not requiring faith or belief, 233; Vespasian, Emperor, 31
as part of topics, 4, 14–18, 60–63; Vinacke, W. Edgar, 226n113
as pronunciata, 89; risk, 5, 34–35, Vives, Juan Luis, 119–21, 126nn111–23,
57, 250–51; rule of reciprocation, 182, 194
90, 107, 113–17, 137, 142, 191,
228; submission, 50–56, 78; trust, Wagner, David L., 83n74
1, 5, 46, 49–56, 168, 180–81, 184, Walker, George, 125n78
192; written/oral, 33, 193. See also Wallis, John, 188, 207
authority; quality Walton, Douglas N., 246
textbooks: conservative not original, Walton, Isaac, 2, 8n6
88, 130, 209; influence, 203–4; Watson, Robert, 185, 201, 223n24,
the study of, 4–6, 29, 77–78, 88, 224n62
92, 107, 113, 167, 213 Watt, Hugh, 224n59
Themistius, Themistian, 60–63, Watts, Isaac, 6, 11, 117, 146–53, 156,
68–70. See also topics, 172nn37–42, 197, 212, 217, 221;
“intermediate”/“affected” criticized, 188, 208
thinking. See reasonableness Weil, Richard Jr., 242
Thomists, 176–82 Weinland, James D., 244
Thomson, Samuel, 125n79 Wesley, John, 208
topics, defined, 4, 9–12, 14–15, 46; Whately, Richard, 6, 11, 175–76, 188,
“argument,” 15; “artificial” and 197, 206–17, 221, 225nn78–79,
“inartificial,” 3, 4, 32–33, 43, 48, 225nn84–98, 230; existence of
52, 56, 57–58, 76, 90–91, 108, 111, Napoleon, 213–15
114, 131, 141, 186, 187; criticism will, psychology and role of, 53–56,
of, 4, 16, 47, 130–31, 148, 183; 131–32, 220–21
“intermediate” and “affected,” William of Ockham, 98, 123n36
Index 277
William of Sherwood, 84n98 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 12, 38n10, 183,

Wills, Garry, 56, 82n48 202, 223n19, 224n68, 252n3
Wilson, Thomas, 93, 103–4, 122n18,
124nn51–52, 124n56, 124n60, Yolton, John, 147, 172n35
124n63, 124n65
**witnesses. See testimony Zeno of Citium, 19
Wohl, Louis de, 82n58 Zeno of Elea, 10, 19

A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in The Art of Thinking - Rick Kennedy

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A History of Reasonableness

Rochester Studies in Philosophy

1. The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation

2. Kant’s Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck

3. Plato’s Erotic Thought: The Tree of the Unknown

4. Rationality and Happiness: From the Ancients to

5. A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority

THE UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,

First published 2004

University of Rochester Press

and at Boydell & Brewer, Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kennedy, Rick, 1958–

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the USA.

Susan Elizabeth Kennedy

List of Figures viii

1. The Classical Tradition of Testimony 9

2. Three Medieval Traditions: Augustine, 43

3. Two Renaissance Traditions: 87

4. The Long Influence of The Port-Royal Logic 127

5. Appreciating Aristotle: Thomists, Scots, 175

6. Testimony Becomes Experience: 227

Figure 1.1. Extrinsic in Cicero’s Topica 26

Figure 2.1. Augustine’s Three Levels of Fault and 53

Figure 3.1. Ramus’s Scheme for Testimony 91

Figure 5.1. John of St. Thomas’s Inevident Habits 181

THE KING OF SIAM AND ASSENT TO THE

readers understand that reliance on one’s own experience and reason is

topics as a memory tool and strategy for creating reasonable arguments.

Cassiodorus and Boethius. There was, however, a tendency in higher philo-

from such an influential philosopher tripped up the long Aristotelian tradi-

THE CLASSICAL TRADITION OF

ARISTOTLE AND THE CREATION OF TOPICS

Before describing Aristotle’s topics and the place of nontechnical

subject—for example Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, the Renaissance

of an issue, purposefully balancing every pro with a con, every positive

THE POLIS IN ARISTOTLE’S DIALECTIC

The tendency of the great philosophers is to be triumphantly self-reliant.

elementary reasonableness and persuasion in the political world of shared

Dialectic—especially the dialectic of testimony and authority—is

TOPICS AND NONTECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE

began to create schematic diagrams picturing the structure. The genius of

early nineteenth century. Although it would be Cicero, Quintilian, and

HELLENISTIC ASSENT AND A SCALE

recommended using the knowledge to which they assented. More adamant

the wise man cannot guard himself in argument so as never

CARNEADES’S SCALE OF PROBABILITY

Carneades (c.213–c.128 B.C.), Arcesilaus’s successor at the Academy in

or position, then thresholds of socially acceptable probability mark the

An example of this level (the “probable”) would be viewing something

when we are investigating a small matter we question a sin-

From what we know of these debates, there is little evidence that

of the Hellenistic era encouraged Roman textbook writers to think in terms

CICERO & QUINTILIAN: THE FORENSICS

CICERO’S THREE TEXTBOOK PRESENTATIONS OF

You will remember that when we were together in my

This form of argumentation [extrinsic], that is said not to be

This class also includes those states or conditions from

Figure 1.1. Extrinsic in Cicero’s Topica.

Oracles Works of Gods Dreams

De Inventione is focused on the invention of arguments—“the discov-