 Considering Ramus’ desire to make logic responsive to the needs of the humanities, it is reasonable to ask whether the method was applicable to artificial products such as poetry or only to natural things. Ramus was aware of the difficulty of demonstrating his natural method in literature. This was a particular problem for him since he wanted students to learn the method by reading the great authors of antiquity. According to him, the method was also used by poets like Virgil and Horace. He had to admit, however, that the ancients had sometimes intentionally departed from it. Therefore, in earlier editions of the Dialectica he had included another method, a methodus prudentiae, which, as he pointed out, was really no different from the one method. The confusion occasioned by this special method, however, led Ramus to remove it from later editions of the treatise. Instead, he talked about a methodi secunda illustratio, that is, a second representation of the one method (Ramus, Dialectica 1623: 93; see Hotson 2007: 48).