TOPICS, in rhetoric. By abstracting from a proposition which conveys a truth in the concrete (i. e., respecting certain circumstances expressed in the terms of the proposition) a portion of these cir cumstances denominated accidental, we arrive at the same truth in the abstract, or (in stricter langunge) more widely applicable, and accommodated to many ditTerent sets of accidental circumstances. Thus, for example, in jurisprudence, front an investigation of the troth in various insulated eases in which a too strict application of legal principles has been attended with evil effects. we deduce the general truth that such application is so attended; or, in the proverbial phrase, "suintimin jos summit Among the helps I mployed by the an cients in their favorite study of rhetoric *as the collection and arrangement of a groat variety of such general truths, ac cording to the several sciences or subjects to which they belonged. These they
termed (opoi, or places ; from which the modern term topic is derived. They considered it useful for the student in rhetoric to have at hand, by means of his memory, those compendious expressions of universal sentiment, and the general reasonings or declamations applicable to each of them, in order to employ them for particular use by performing the converse of that operation by which they were arrived at ; viz. clothing them with the particular circumstances of the case. Thus the topes just cited might be useful to the forensic orator ; it affords a sub ject for reasoning and declamation applicable to a great number of in dividual instances. Many of these topics answer to what in modern phrase we should term axioms; and, indeed, some of the axioms of pure mathematics are enumerated by Aristotle among the topics which are proper to every species of oratory.