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Next in order after the foregoing, we must say for how many and
for what purposes the treatise is useful. They are
three-intellectual training, casual encounters, and the
philosophical sciences. That it is useful as a training is obvious
on the face of it. The possession of a plan of inquiry will enable
us more easily to argue about the subject proposed. For purposes of
casual encounters, it is useful because when we have counted up the
opinions held by most people, we shall meet them on the ground not
of other people's convictions but of their own, while we shift the
ground of any argument that they appear to us to state unsoundly.
For the study of the philosophical sciences it is useful, because
the ability to raise searching difficulties on both sides of a subject
will make us detect more easily the truth and error about the
several points that arise. It has a further use in relation to the
ultimate bases of the principles used in the several sciences. For
it is impossible to discuss them at all from the principles proper
to the particular science in hand, seeing that the principles are
the prius of everything else: it is through the opinions generally
held on the particular points that these have to be discussed, and
this task belongs properly, or most appropriately, to dialectic: for
dialectic is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the
principles of all inquiries.
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