ARISTOTLE'S PRIOR AND POSTERIOR ANALYTICS

RELATION OF PRIOR TO POSTERIOR ANALYTICS 23to another have not necessarily much weight, since they may belater additions, but where we find an absence of cross-referencesworks which consistently refer back to another work are probablylater than it. There are cross-references between the Analyticsand the Topics, and if our general view be right the references inthe Topics to the Analytics must be later additions; and so is,probably, the one reference in the De Interpretatione to the PriorAnalytics. But it is noticeable that while the Prior Analyticsare cited in the Eudemian Ethics and the Rhetoric, and thePosterior Analytics in the Metaphysics, the Eudemian Ethics, andthe Nicomachean Ethics, there are no references backwards fromeither of the Analytics to any work other than the Topics. Thispoints to a somewhat early date for the two A nalytics, and theymay probably be assigned to the period 350-344, i.e. to Aristotle'slate thirties. This allows for the wide distance Aristotle hastravelled from his early Platonism, while it still gives enoughtime (though not too much, in view of his death in 322) for him towrite his great works on metaphysics, ethics, and rhetoric, and tocarry out the large tasks of historical research which seem to havefiIled much of his later life.IIITHE PURE OR ASSERTORIC SYLLOGISMARISTOTLE was probably prouder of his achievement in logic thanof any other part of his philosophical thinking. In a well-knownpassage I he says: 'In the case of all discoveries the results ofprevious labours that have been handed down from others havebeen advanced gradually by those who have taken them over,whereas the original discoveries generally make an advance thatis stnaIl at first though much more useful than the developmentwhich later springs out of them.' This he iIlustrates by referenceto the art of rhetoric, and then he continues: 'Of this inquiry, onthe other hand, it was not the case that part of the work had beenthoroughly done before, while part had not. Nothing existed atall. ... On the subject of reasoning we had nothing else of anearlier date to speak of at all, but were kept at work for a longtime in experimental researches.'2This passage comes at the end of the Sophistici Elenchi, whichis an appendix to the Topics; and scholars believe that these