Sentences  and aphorisms, as both compressed and 
authoritative, is that this preference is rapidly altered in the 
sixteenth century. Walter Ong has devoted a great deal of 
attention to this change as it appears in the work and vogue of 
Petrus Ramus. Saving Father Ong’s important work for 
attention a little later, it is only necessary to cite here his 
article on “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind.” (30) Ong 
stresses the change in human sensibility resulting from the rise 
of typography, showing “how the use of printing moved the 
word away from its original association with sound and treated 
it more as a ‘thing’ in space.”

     The implication of this visual approach for the oral 
aphorism, and for the compendia of sentences, adages, and 
maxims which had been the medieval staple of learning, was 
recession. As Ong puts it (p. 160), “. . . Ramus tends to regard