Ramism - Ramist Laws and Method

Ramist Laws and Method

In the end the art of memory was diminished in Ramism, displaced by an idea of "method": better mental organisation would be more methodical, and mnemonic techniques drop away. This was a step in the direction of Descartes. The construction of disciplines, for Ramus, was subject to some laws, his methodus. There were three, with clear origins in Aristotle, and his Posterior Analytics.

They comprised the lex veritatis (French du tout, law of truth), lex justitiae (par soi, law of justice), and lex sapientiae (universalité, or law of wisdom). The third was in the terms of Ramus "universel premièrement", or to make the universal the first instance. The "wisdom" is therefore to start with the universal, and set up a ramifying binary tree by subdivision.

As Ramism evolved, these characteristic binary trees, set up rigidly, were treated differently in various fields. In theology, for example, this procedure was turned on its head, since the search for God, the universal, would appear as the goal rather than the starting point.

Émile Bréhier wrote that after Ramus, "order" as a criterion of the methodical had become commonplace; Descartes needed only to supply to method the idea of relation, exemplified by the idea of a mathematical sequence based on a functional relationship of an element to its successor. Therefore, for Cartesians, the Ramist insights were quite easily absorbed.

For the Baconian method, on the other hand, the rigidity of Ramist distinctions was a serious criticism. Francis Bacon, a Cambridge graduate, was early aware of Ramism, but the near-equation of dispositio with method was unsatisfactory, for Baconians, because arrangement of material was seen to be inadequate for research. The Novum Organum implied in its title a further reform of Aristotle, and its aphorism viii of Book I made this exact point.