The reader however cannot help wishing that
he had taken some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style. If
a lesson were wanted in the importance of sacrificing to the Graces
it might be found in the fact that the early Stoic writers despite
their logical subtlety have all perished and that their remains have
to be sought for so largely in the pages of Cicero. In speaking of
logic as one of the three departments of philosophy we must bear in
mind that the term was one of much wider meaning than it is with us.
It included rhetoric, poetic, and grammar as well as dialectic or
logic proper, to say nothing of disquisitions on the senses and the
intellect which we should now refer to psychology.
Logic as a whole being divided into rhetoric and dialectic: rhetoric
was defined to be the knowledge of how to speak well in expository
discourses and dialectic as the knowledge of how to argue rightly in
matters of question and answer. Both rhetoric and dialectic were
spoken of by the Stoics as virtues for they divided virtue in its
most generic sense in the same way as they divided philosophy into
physical, ethical, and logical.
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