Institutio Oratoria

Indeed we should have no justification for protracting our studies if we were forbidden to improve upon our original views. Still none of my past teaching was superfluous: for the views which I am now going to produce will be found to be based on the same principles, and consequently no one need be sorry to have attended my lectures, since all that I am now attempting to do is to collect and rearrange my original views so that they may be somewhat more instructive. But I wish to satisfy everybody and not to lay myself open to the accusation that I have allowed a long time to elapse between the formation and publication of my views.

I used to follow the majority of authorities in adhering to three rational bases, the conjectural, qualitative and definitive, and to one legal basis. [*](See III. v. 4.) These were my general bases. The legal basis I divided into five species, dealing with the letter of the law and intention, contradictory laws, the syllogism, ambiguity and competence.

It is now clear to me that the fourth of the general bases may be removed, since the original division which I made into rational and legal bases is sufficient. The fourth therefore will not be a basis, but a kind of question; if it were not, it would form one of the rational bases.

Further I have removed competence from those which I called species. For I often asserted, as all who have attended my lectures will remember, and even those discourses which were published against my will [*](See I. Proem. 7.) included the

I am, however, well aware that the point of competence is raised in many cases, since in practically every case in which a party is said to have been ruled out of court through some error of form, questions such as the following arise: whether it was lawful for this person to bring an action, or to bring it against some particular person, or under a given law, or in such a court, or at such a time, and so on