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Milton's Alleged Ramism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Recent scholarship has tended to overstress Milton's adherence to Ramism and to overlook his significant deviations in both theory and practice. The distrust of the human thought processes in theoretical or practical deliberation and the faith in the immediate intuitive perception of logical relations, which is the ultra-spiritual epistemology implied throughout the Ramistic logics, were much more in keeping with the enthusiasm of the radical sects of the seventeenth century than with the rationalism of Milton. Milton was an independent thinker in logical matters as elsewhere and the balance of scholarly evaluation is in need of some readjustment.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 Ramus wrote two works on logic which are easily confused. The Dialectiœ Partitiones sive Institutiones (Paris: James Bogard, 1543) is a lengthy work in 20 books containing a history of logic (Book i), a discussion of the first principles of logic (Book ii), and an evaluation of the principles of the Organon of Aristotle (Books ii-xx) corresponding to the 18 books of the Organon. This work later appears as the Scholce Dialectica in the Scholce in Liberales Artes (Basle: E. Bishop and the Nicolai Brothers, 1578). Herein it will be cited as Dialectica Institutiones. The actual text for the classroom teaching of logic was the Dialectica Libri Duo (Paris: Andrew Wechel, 1556) and this provided the basis for Milton's, as well as all other, adaptations of Ramistic logic. It had first appeared in French as the Dialectique (Paris: Andrew Wechel, 1555) and will be cited herein as simply Dialectic. Wilbur E. Gilman, “Milton's Rhetoric: Studies in his Defense of Liberty,” Univ. of Missouri Studies, 3, xiv (1939), experiences no difficulty in analyzing Milton's arguments in terms of classical rhetoric. He concludes, p. 173: “ … Milton consistently applies the classical principles of rhetoric in urging the support of particular policies which he considers essential for preserving and extending religious and civil liberty.”
2 Franklin Irwin in an unpubl. diss. (Princeton, 1941), “Ramistic Logic in Milton's Prose Works,” has limited himself too strictly to those passages where Milton's Ramism is supposedly made explicit by his use of technical Ramistic terms particularly in refutation.
3 Ramus, Aristotelicœ Animadversiones (Paris: James Bogard, 1543), fol. 18r. Cf. also ibid., fols. 21r, 29r, 77v, and 78r.
4 Cf. E. Garin, La Filosofia (Milan: Vallardi, 1947), i, 245, 247-248.
5 Ramus, Scholœ in Liberales Artes (Basle: E. Bishop and Nicolai Brothers, 1569), p. 830.
6 Ramus explains himself at length in an oration, “Pro Philosophica Parisiensis Academiæ Reformandæ,” delivered in 1550 and included pp. 997-1062 in the Scholœ in Liberales Artes: “At quidquid est in libris legitimis, & per legem nobis imperatis verum, utile pueris instituendis accomodatum, id totum clarissimis nobilissimisque exemplis illustratum non modo verbis, sed pene syllabis & literis singulis persequimur” (p. 1007).
7 Cf. Perry Miller, The New England Mind (New York, 1939), p. 149.
8 A Fuller Institution of the Art of Logic, trans. Allan H. Gilbert, in The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1935), xi, 81-83. Subsequent quotations in my text from this or other works by Milton are cited from the Columbia edition.
9 Ramus, Aristotelicœ Animadversiones, fols. 6v, 7r, and 4v. “In commentariis autem Aristoteles nihil est ad naturae monitionem propositum; nihil (si naturas veritatem spectes) non confusum, non perturbatum, non contaminatum, non foedatum; ars igitur dialectica in commentariis Aristoteles nulla est.”
10 Cf. Miller, New England Mind, p. 125.
11 Ramus, Dialecticœ Institutiones in Scholœ in Liberales Artes, p. 346.
12 Milton, Art of Logic, p. 13: “For as the form and end of logic is not so much the methodical arrangement of logical precepts as it is good debating itself, … so in the genus not merely the arrangement of precepts but the actual teaching of a useful thing is at once the form and the end of an art.”
13 Ibid., p. 19. “Certainly this end [effective argumentation] cannot be attained unless nature is adapted to receiving instruction, and practice establishes what has been received, and unless both instruction and practice make art as it were a second nature” (p. 15).
14 Scholœ in Liberales Artes, pp. 335-336: “Naturalis autem dialectica, id est, ingenium, ratio, mens, imago parentis omnium rerum Dei, lux denique beatas illius, & aeternæ lucis æmula, hominis propria est, cum eo que nascitur.”
15 Dialecticœ Institutiones (Paris: James Bogard, 1543), fols. 5v and 6r: “His sunt tres libri ad omnes disciplinæ fructum, laudemque necessarii: quorum primum æterni characteribus in animis nostris Dei optimis, maximis imprimit.” Cf. also Aristotelicœ Animadversiones, fol. 3v: “Ars enim dialecticas debet ab imitatione & ab observatione naturalis dialectica; proficisci.”
16 Ramus, Dialecticœ Libri Duo (Cambridge: Roger Daniels, 164-), p. 1: “Argumentum est quod ad aliquid arguendum affectum est.”
17 Cited by Miller, New England Mind, p. 124.
18 Ramus, Dialectica, p. 42.
19 De Interpretations, trans. E. M. Edghill, in Works of Aristotle (Oxford, 1928), i, 16a.
20 Topica, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, in Works of Aristotle (Oxford, 1928), i, 100a.
21 Milton, pp. 315-317. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, i, 1; Posterior Analytics, i, 4, and ii, 13.
22 Ramus, Dialectica, pp. 56, 57-58.
23 Miller, New England Mind, pp. 135, 138.
24 Cf. pp. 365-483 of Milton's Art of Logic with any Ramist text.
25 De Doctrina Christiana, xiv, 247 and 265, show Milton employing logical categories to order his material but not as arguments.
26 Prior Analytics, trans. G. R. G. Mure, in Works of Aristotle (Oxford, 1928), i, 46b.
27 Leon Howard, “The Invention of Milton's ‘Great Argument’: A Study of the Logic of ‘God's Ways to Men’, ” Huntington Library Quart., ix (1945), 167.
28 Cf. David Masson, Life of John Milton (London, 1880), vi, 685, and G. C. Moore Smith, “A Note on Milton's Art of Logic,” RES, xiii (1937), 335-340.
29 iii, i, 14. The tract is in the form of a classical oration: exordium, pp. 1-6; narration, pp. 6-14; division, p. 14; confirmation, pp. 14-65; refutation, pp. 65-76; peroration, pp. 76-79.
30 E.g., Wilbur Elwyn Gilman, “Milton's Rhetoric: Studies in his Defense of Liberty,” pp. 12-13.