A people that had read truth in the air now had to find it. Essei invented science and philosophy, and within a few generations it invented the Trilectic.

The Trilectic was a tool of reasoning. Where older argument asked whether a statement was true or false, the Trilectic asked how true, and to what degree, and in relation to what. It made possible a calculus of reason: truth measured, not declared.

The earliest Trilectic texts open with the same sentence. It is usually translated, “We will see by other means.”