David Weir quoted Beyond This Limit by Naomi Mitchison
Two stewards brought on to the platform a machine with three legs, a handle, two funnels at the top and a long, flexible nozzle. Phoebe supposed, and rightly, that this was the dialectic.
— Beyond This Limit by Naomi Mitchison (Page 65)
This is from Naomi Mitchison's short story Beyond this Limit, a collaboration with the illustrator Wyndham Lewis.
I love the imagery of the dialectic as a machine, almost like a legendary device akin to the sampo.