will find that your opponent’s arguments, however excellent they be, are weak and contemptible; and that yours, on the other hand, though they were random conjecture, are correct and to the point; you will have a chorus of loud approval on your side, and your opponent will be driven out of the field with ignominy.  Nay, the bystanders will believe, as a rule, that they have agreed with you out of pure conviction.  For what is not to our interest mostly seems absurd to us; our intellect being no siccum lumen.  This trick might be called “taking the tree by its root”; its usual name is the argumentum ab utili.

XXXVI.

You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast; and the trick is possible, because a man generally supposes that there must be some meaning in words: 

  Gewoehnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hoert,
  Es muesse sich dabei doch auch was denken lassen.

If he is secretly conscious of his own weakness, and accustomed to hear much that he does not understand, and to make as though he did, you can easily impose upon him by some serious fooling that sounds very deep or learned, and deprives him of hearing, sight, and thought; and by giving out that it is the most indisputable proof of what you assert.  It is a well-known fact that in recent times some philosophers have practised this trick on the whole of the public with the most brilliant success.  But since present examples are odious, we may refer to The Vicar of Wakefield for an old one.

XXXVII.

Should your opponent be in the right, but, luckily for your contention, choose a faulty proof, you can easily manage to refute it, and then claim that you have thus refuted his whole position.  This is a trick which ought to be one of the first; it is, at bottom, an expedient by which an argumentum ad hominem is put forward as an argumentum ad rem.  If no accurate proof occurs to him or to the bystanders, you have won the day.  For example, if a man advances the ontological argument by way of proving God’s existence, you can get the best of him, for the ontological argument may easily be refuted.  This is the way in which bad advocates lose a good case, by trying to justify it by an authority which does not fit it, when no fitting one occurs to them.

XXXVIII.

A last trick is to become personal, insulting, rude, as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand, and that you are going to come off worst.  It consists in passing from the subject of dispute, as from a lost game, to the disputant himself, and in some way attacking his person.  It may be called the argumentum ad personam, to distinguish it from the argumentum ad hominem, which passes from the objective discussion of the subject pure and