Tabulae totius dialectices, aliarum artium instrumenti ...

Aristotle, Book 1, Meteorology, chapter.

See Agricola, Book 11, chapter VII.

The matter of Dialectics.

What a question is.

Divisions of a question.

The genera of questions are four and as many others, which are referred partly to oneself, partly to a third party. See chapter XXXV.

The same instruments for Dialectics and Rhetoric.

enclosed within the earth itself, and excited by the heat of the sun and impelled. No one would say this definition is sought from Dialectics, since it is of Aristotle and the Physicists. That indeed only supplies the genera in some way from its own orders, and teaches the method of constructing a definition: but the learned point out the thing itself, and the matter, and that property which, added to the genus, completes the definition. Let, therefore, the probable question, to be concluded by exposition or argumentation, be the matter of Dialectics, in which it may be engaged.

Understand a question here as a speech posed with interrogation and called into doubt: which consists of two parts, which dialecticians commonly call the subject and the predicate, grammarians and literalists call the suppositum the underlying term and the appositum the attached term or noun and verb: as, Is a comet a star. Here, the subject is "comet," the predicate is "star," which in Latin is called the attribute.

A question is fourfold: Whether it is, What it is, What kind it is, and Why it is or what is the cause of the thing. Every question, moreover, is either of genus, or of definition, or of property, or of accident: because all things, about which one inquires, either pertain to its essence, or are an accident, or a property, or its genus, and the distinction between this and others. Every one is also either of knowledge or of action. Then either infinite or finite: whoever requires an explanation of this, let him repeat it from the Topics and Partitions of Cicero. The same matter is subject to Rhetoric, which it may treat and in which it may be engaged. For both arts use the same instruments for proving, but different, as I just said,