1. The name Rhetoric is exceedingly flexible. In any just sense it signifies the theory of certain processes of communication, all of which have language for their instrument.

When, again, ideas expressible by language are thought worthy of being made communicable both widely and permanently, the expression of them is recorded, and constitutes what may rightly be called a literary work. The literary character is stamped on such works, more or less deeply, by the fact of their being recorded; whatever may have been the occasion that gave them birth, and whether it may have been to the eye or to the ear that they were in the first instance addressed. Works so preserved, besides being the only specimens accessible to patient criticism, are reasonably presumed to be the best in their several kinds: from the study of them, accordingly, are deduced systematic expositions of the laws governing the processes which they severally exemplify; and such laws are justly held to be binding on all similar processes, even though they should assert no claim to a place in the literary record.

The processes, therefore, which rhetoric aims at analysing, may correctly be described as being Literary. Ought we, however, to place under that name the whole theory of literature—the theory of each and all of its departments? If we ought not, between what points is the line of extension to be drawn? The name, like every other that has long been in use, suggests to every one certain precise ideas; and to these, for the avoidance of confusion, due difference must be paid in any technical meaning that is to be attached to it.

When Rhetoric is said to be the Theory of Eloquence, a description is offered which will be accepted pretty generally. It leads us promptly to a limitation of the sphere. If rhetoric, theorizing admittedly, processes which are literary, exhausts the theory of literature, poetry must be held to be a species of eloquence. But the word eloquence can hardly by any one be taken in a meaning so wide as to make this inclusion natural, or to save a theory which adopts it from the risk of frequent misapprehension. Popularly, indeed, we limit the name eloquence to an extent which cannot altogether be prevented from embarrassing the expression of rhetorical doctrines: we are apt to confine it exclusively to compositions of an imaginative or passionate cast. Within this narrowed meaning there lies yet another, which restricts the name to spoken oratory; but this is not likely to mislead.

As to the function of rhetoric, accordingly, there have been entertained diverse opinions. The principal of these are four. These, however, as it will immediately appear, are practically brought, by inevitable short-comings in the analysis, within shorter distances from each other than they may at first seem to hold.

In the first place, the name has been applied to the whole theory of literature or literary composition. This view guides the outline of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric; although the treatise, left incomplete, hardly carries the analysis of poetry further than a few hints on style. It has already been said that this widest meaning of the term is inadmissible.

Secondly, the name has been applied to the theory of all kinds of literature that are not poetical. Eloquence being that which is theorized in rhetoric, the whole realm of literature is in this view distributed into two provinces, designable severally as eloquence and poetry.—It is well to say, thus early, that this is a just distribution; but only with the proviso, that the two provinces be distinguished from each other according to a sound principle. Literary works should be disposed, primarily, according to their several purposes; since it is the character of the purpose that determines for a process its paramount laws. Eloquence and poetry, then, are separated by difference of purpose. All literary processes having a certain purpose are correctly comprehended under the name Poetry. To cover all literary processes having any other purpose, no apter name can be found than Eloquence; and the theorizing of all such processes is embraced correspondingly under the name of Rhetoric.—A caution, however, must here be given, and pressed very emphatically. The twofold distribution of the whole range of literature becomes utterly deceptive, and precludes the construction of a true theory for either department, when it is founded, as it has been oftener than not, on a principle which ought to yield only lower steps of classification,—namely, that of form. This is the principle which is adopted when all literary compositions are divided into two kinds, poetry and prose; for the name poetry is thus intended to cover all literary works written in verse, and to exclude all others. The just contrary of prose is not poetry, but verse; the two are merely names for forms into which words may be thrown. Whether a work is poetical or not is a question to be determined by its purpose: it may not be poetical, although its language is metrically modulated; it may be poetical, although its language, not having such modulation, must be called prose. It is the fact, no doubt, that prose is not, and cannot rightly be, adopted as the form of poetry which is designed to be either pure or elevated; and accordingly, the language is metrical in all works which are currently and universally called poetical. So, contrariwise, in all nations and times that yield works calling for criticism, prose is taken as the form of every composition aiming distinctively at any effect not poetical. Therefore the identification of prose with eloquence does, in effect, submit to examination all works which are the fruit of processes justly falling within the description of eloquence. But it takes in likewise certain kinds of works which ought to be excluded; and the mistake which lies at the root must vitiate all the broadest of the inferences to be afterwards drawn. This mistake does, in fact, pervade almost all attempts that have been made, in this country at least, to construct rhetorical systems which should be valid for all works not poetical. The design has been announced as being the laying down of rules for prose composition; and, the execution of the design rising seldom if ever above questions of style, the consequences of the vicious assumption have not been brought into a prominence sufficient to secure their detection.

In each of the two views which are still to be described, rhetoric is treated as being specifically and properly the theory of oratory. The forms and conditions of public speaking are assumed as data; and kinds of eloquence which are addressed exclusively to the eye of the reader, either receive no notice or supply but occasional illustration. Within those limits this question is raised:—whether all oratorical processes should be analysed, or only certain of them? Oratory may aim at no further effect than the generation of belief or explicit knowledge, through assertion or argumentation, or both; and the processes available for this purpose may be said to constitute argumentative eloquence. Again, those processes being presupposed, oratory may aim at the generation of desire and volition, through the representation of emotive images; and the relative processes may be said to constitute persuasive eloquence. Many rhetoricians have treated processes of both kinds: many have restricted their field to the latter of the two.

Thirdly, then, there have been included, under the name of rhetoric, the theories both of argumentative and of persuasive oratory, no immediate cognizance being taken of any other processes. This was the view prevalent, with perhaps no exception, among the Greek and Roman theorists; it was especially adopted both by Aristotle and by Cicero. It is thus that the function of rhetoric is determined by Archbishop Whately.

Fourthly, rhetoric has been considered as being exclusively the theory of persuasive oratory. Argumentative eloquence has been excluded from its sphere, on one or another of several grounds. It has been alleged by some that the process is exhaustively theorized in logic; that there is no difference, practically appreciable, between a process of inference and the communication of that process. By others the communication of inference has been made the object of a special theory, to which, in scholastic times, there was sometimes given the name of Dialectics in one of its several meanings. Yet, again, it has been maintained, and oftenest on the north of the Tweed, that we can derive no practical advantage from subjecting either inference or the communication of it to any systematic or scientific analysis whatever.

2. The questions thus raised, with others not yet hinted at, will be answered in the explanations now to be offered of this of the views which have dictated the plan of the following treatise. with which it embraces and methodizes the problems that ought to be reflected on.

Now, not only does every department of literature insculpture with every other; but, besides this, literature as a whole is no hermit-cell, filling a sequestered nook in the world of thought. Parallel with the processes which it must adopt are certain other processes, aiming at similar ends by the use of different methods. Literature, again, in common with all those kindred developments of human energy, obeys laws which are really the very same laws that govern common life.

Considerations like these suggest some preliminary inquiries, the result of which will lay, or ought to lay, for all doctrines properly rhetorical, the only foundation that is broad and firm enough to bear them.

I. In the first of the two introductory divisions, the design is that of fixing the place of Eloquence as a member in a group of processes, which will be spoken of as Arts of Communication. The only Literary processes of this system are Eloquence and Poetry; to those which are not literary is usually confined the name of Fine Arts. Some correctness of apprehension in regard to the generic character of the group, is indispensable for the formation of a true creed as to the specific character of any one of the members. All of them obey certain laws in common, and therefore are most instructively studied together, down even to a point far beyond that which can here be reached: they illustrate each other not less aptly by the differences imposed on them by differences either in their purposes or in their instruments.

Further, the two literary arts of communication resemble a two-stemmed tree, whose trunks spring from the same root, and whose branches appear, when seen from a distance, to make up but one magnificent mass of foliage. The comparison between them is instructive through innumerable features both of similarity and of difference. The truth is, that the theory of literature is one organic whole, and should be studied as one system. Not only, however, is such treatment here forbidden, alike by the large space that would be required, and by regard to the reasonable meaning of the title prescribed for the present article; but, likewise, the theory of the nobler art of the two has already, in this work, been sketched by a masterly pencil. (See Poetry.) Nevertheless, many of the facts which it is here sought to subject to law, receive elucidations so pertinent from facts developed in the other great province of literature, that our speculations in Rhetoric will be found, especially in their later stages, to make not infrequent incursions into the domain of Poetics.

II. The second of the introductory divisions is a Psychological Outline.

The maxim must again be urged, that rules of art are worse than futile, unless they prompt reflection on their reasons. All the laws of literature, except those (few and obvious) which depend on physical conditions, are, in common with all others that directly govern any department of man's conscious activity, laws of the human mind or corollaries drawn from these. Rhetoric reposes on Psychology.

Now, though we look no deeper than nomenclature, preliminary explanations are seen to be advisable if not necessary. The use of words and phrases descriptive of mental changes is so loose and fluctuating, that exactitude of analysis cannot be reached without exact determination of the meaning in which the leading terms of this kind are to be used. Here, especially, certain processes are to be exhibited as involving the excitement of Imagination, of Emotion, of Desire: there is not one of the three names that has not several significations; which of these is here assigned technically to each? But the best or only adequate explanation of a name is the description or analysis of the thing; and the aptest explanation of a series of related names is that which describes the denoted facts in relation to each other. The call for prefatory statement of psychological doctrines could only be superseded by something which cannot be had; that is, by the power of referring to some one system, familiarly known both to writer and to readers, and accepted at all points by the one party as well as by the other.

There is to be offered, accordingly, a sketch of some psychological doctrines, which afterwards will either be appealed to directly in proof of rhetorical rules, or will modify indirectly the aspect in which the rules are presented; or which, if any of them should not have either of these effects, may suggest speculation on questions lying beyond and above the scope of an elementary treatise. The scheme from which those doctrines are taken has been developed gradually as the basis of instruction to pupils. Well-informed readers will perceive that it borrows freely from many quarters. It has owed very much to the suggestions scattered through the Discussions and Dissertations of Sir William Hamilton, and much also to sources from which that distinguished philosopher has himself drawn. In the final elaboration of the outline, also, such advantage has been taken as the time allowed, of that systematization of psychological doctrines which is supplied by the recent publication of Hamilton's Metaphysical Lectures.

III. The body of the treatise is designed for throwing out hints towards the formation of a rhetorical scheme, which would assume as correct the second of the four opinions as to the province assignable to eloquence. A complete system of rhetoric ought to theorize all literary processes, all departments of literature, whose distinctive purpose is not poetical.

Nevertheless, those narrow methods of treatment, which were described as the third and fourth, are faulty only because narrow, not as being erroneous; and they may be adopted, both safely and conveniently, as the basis of any theory aiming at full comprehensiveness.

A few words may be sufficient for explaining the view thus generally stated.

All possible processes of communication through language are reducible to four, distinguishable by these names,—Exposition, Argumentation, Persuasion, Poetical Representation. The last of the four does not fall within our cognizance, unless incidentally. The other three exhaust all the possibilities of method, for language which is used for the attainment of any purpose not poetical. The complete performance of each of them is exemplified in an oration, or other discourse, which aims at exciting volition through motives which must be aroused by antecedent conviction: in such a discourse, exposition is made the groundwork of argumentation, and that again of persuasion. But all other kinds of literary composition, not poetical, are constituted by those very processes, performed in whole or in part, and combined in diversified degrees of complexity. A complete theory of these three elementary and normal processes would lay down all the laws governing the processes which are complex. If such a theory were reached, it would leave for answer, as to each of the mixed kinds of literary composition, three questions only: firstly, which of the elementary processes enter, and which wholly, which in part, into its constitution; secondly, which one of the constituents is the process leading towards that which is the paramount purpose of the work, and which of them are no more than ministerial; thirdly, what are the relations,—as of comparative efficiency, means of operation, and the like,—between those processes merely subsidiary, and that one into which, as they flow on, they successively deliver their tribute. In a word, the theory of the processes constituting oratory is the true basis of the universal theory of eloquence. Accordingly, our business will be the analysis of the three normal processes, Exposition, Argumentation, and Persuasion. This procedure should yield a skeleton-theory of eloquence. Towards the clothing of the bones with flesh and blood, very little can at present be contributed. The application of the elementary laws to even the principal among the complex departments of literature, would require a fulness of illustration which is inadmissible; and the large additional demand on the patience of readers might not seem to be justified by such results as could be presented, in the execution of a design which (perhaps because thought to be erroneous or barren) does not appear to have been as yet distinctly entertained, and has certainly not yet been systematically prosecuted. It must suffice to have offered this prefatory protest against the completeness of the merely oratorical treatment of Rhetoric; and to throw out, as occasion may arise, a few hints illustrative of the opinion thus set forth as to the genuine structure of a complete theory of eloquence.

The practical issue is, that the treatment of the topic has its outline determined by the third of the opinions as to the function of rhetoric. But even the fourth opinion will in some degree affect the scheme.—The analysis of the first two of the three processes supplies disappointingly few materials towards that systematic application to complex instances, which has been asserted to be essential for completeness in the theory of eloquence. As to exposition, although one aspect of it was taken under the especial patronage of Aristotle, hardly any laws can be assigned that touch it properly as a means of communication: success in it is mainly dependent on considerations not in any way rhetorical. The fact is significant, since this is the process which is paramount in history and biography. As to argumentation, again, the uses of its rhetorical laws are directive rather than critical, a circumstance symptomatic of artificiality; and, further, these uses hardly emerge unless in reference to cases of complicated reasoning in contingent matter, cases occurring frequently in oratory proper, but much less common in works strictly literary.—It is not till we reach the process of persuasion, that it is found possible to elicit laws entitled to claim a commanding place in the code of philosophical criticism. The laws assignable for persuasion justify this claim by their possession of three characteristics: they are resolvable, unequivocally and easily, into principles of man's mental constitution; they possess some efficiency as cautionary guides to performance, and much as suggestive canons of critical judgment; and they govern instances diversified so variously, that there is no department of literature over which they do not exercise some influence. Communication, in short, so long as it seeks to operate exclusively on the rational nature of man, obeys but few universal laws that affect it in its communicative character,—few laws except those which rule the matter communicated, and the thinking which is brought to bear on it. Communication comes under the sway of wide and imperative laws of its own, as soon as it passes onward to the endeavour to generate imagination and emotion. The quarter over which the theory of communication exerts its most active power is the very quarter in which that theory teaches, as the most imperative of its lessons, its own impotence to handle the weapons which native strength of imagination wields with ease,—its own blindness to pierce into the deepest part of those emotive relations, which animate the oratorical picture and idealize the poetic dream.

I. THE ORGANIZATION OF LITERATURE AND ART.

3. The compass of the field which lies before us, in this stage of our inquiries, may be identified when we describe it, in common phrase, as containing Literature and Art, or Literature and the Fine Arts. Our hasty survey is intended for mapping out the ground, in such a way as to indicate the character and boundaries of its several sections.

It is covered by a large system of processes, which will here be spoken of as Arts of Communication.

The name "art" being thus taken to signify processes, not their theories, a group of cognate processes may be called an Art, when they are found to possess two characteristics. First, they must be performable voluntarily, for the attainment of a preformed purpose; secondly, this condition being purified, they will still not come up to the idea of art, until their laws have been more or less thoroughly determined and systematized. If, on this footing, we still wish to retain the use of the current antithesis between the terms art and science, there is only one way of consistently doing so.

The theory of an art, its system of laws, will be called a Science. If, indeed, the name of science is to be bestowed only on systems of knowledge that are in all points both exact and complete, the roll of sciences must always be very short. But imperfection ought not to be a bar; and there may be convenience in sometimes giving the name of sciences to the theories now in question.

If the terms art and science are accepted in the meanings thus explained, the distinction most commonly taken between art and science may, if we will, be recognised as separating science into two sections. The theory of an art is a Practical Science so far as it lays down rules of art, whether directive or critical; the theory of an art is a Speculative Science, so far as it assigns the reasons of the rules. This secondary distinction is narrow and slippery. But it may sometimes be useful as reminding us, that a rule of art which cannot be philosophically justified is merely empirical and therefore unsafe; and that, both in the study and in the practice of the higher arts, like those with which we are now concerned, a rule has no value whatever, unless for those who have apprehended firmly the principle on which it is founded.

Every art, indeed, must draw its principles from without: it must gather its data, not from one but always from more than one, of those systems of knowledge which serve other uses also, and each of which, indeed, has been or ought to have been constructed, in the first instance, with exclusive regard to the speculative point of view.

All arts are processes of change. Every step is the working of a change: the result, also, is a change, the effecting of which was the purpose towards which the steps were adopted as a means. If all the objects on which an art works its changes are corporeal, or if its result, though mental, rises no higher than sensation (physical comfort, for example), the theory of the art will receive all its data from the physical or mathematico-physical sciences. Similarly, if all the changes worked by an art are mental, the art will derive the basis of its theory from the philosophy of mind,—that is, from psychology, the central and original science of that great cycle. If an art works changes on objects of both kinds, it must borrow data both from the philosophy of body and from that of mind. But, in such a case, the character of the result will decisively direct all the leading steps towards the one side or the other: the rules which properly constitute the theory of the art will be developments, either wholly of laws physical, or wholly of laws mental; and the subordinate laws, whose operation is merely a condition of the possibility of the art, may be silently assumed.

In all processes describable as arts of communication, man attempts to work on the mind of man, either individually or collectively. Each of them is constituted by steps, in which, mental states having arisen in one mind, it is attempted to communicate these to some other mind or minds; and the purpose of all is the effecting, in that other mind or minds, of changes of one kind or another. Many processes falling within this description (for example, the process of education) are complex in the extreme: the communicative process has to be repeated indefinitely often; and it has to be engrafted on antecedent processes, requiring to be separately theorized.

As normal specimens of the arts of communication, there may be taken those processes which are embraced under the name of Literature, and those others to which (too narrowly) is usually confined the name of the Fine Arts. All processes of the first class fall within two arts,—Eloquence and Poetry. Among processes of the second class there are only three arts which can be considered as being at once pure and complete,—Music, Painting, Sculpture. If the theories of those five arts can be established, the ground is laid broadly enough for the theorization of all other arts of communication, so far as they are merely communicative.

4. The character of an art is primarily and most widely determined by the character of its purpose. All the arts of communication have this in common; that the effects they aim at producing are mental changes, and changes rising higher than sensation. Consequently the paramount laws of all of them are laws of mind.

The consideration of purpose yields, further, a primary distribution of those arts into two classes. Their primary and paramount differences are founded on differences in the mental states, the modes of mind, which they severally aim at communicating. It is only secondarily, for the formation of genera within each of those two classes, that account can be taken of those differences which arise out of differences in the means or instruments.

Having regard to purpose, then, we have first to set aside, as constituting the first of the two classes, all those of our five arts which have for their distinctive and paramount purpose the excitement of feelings (specifically emotions) having a certain character. These are oftenest called feelings of Beauty. At the cost of a little anticipation, they may be described as feelings of imaginative pleasure, or as pleasing emotions consequent on imagination. All arts entertaining this purpose have a claim equally strong to be called Fine Arts; and all of them will here receive that name. Indeed this phrase is merely an indistinct translation of terms common to all the continental tongues, and more correctly rendered, “the beautiful arts,” or “the arts of beauty.” The fine arts of our roll, then, are four of the five: poetry is a fine art, as properly as music, painting, and sculpture.

The universal theory of the fine arts, the system of laws which is obeyed by all of them, and by the study of which the way ought to be prepared for the study of each of the special theories, has received the name of Aesthetics. The word is but indistinctly descriptive, and has likewise been used philosophically in other meanings. But it suggests significantly the working of all the processes towards feeling; and no substitute that has been proposed is free from faults of other kinds.

Overagainst those arts stands the second class of our arts of communication, into which must be admitted all processes aiming distinctively at the communication of any mental state different from imaginative pleasure. For processes of this class we cannot gain a name, till we have descended to the consideration of the means or instruments. Then, also, the true rank of poetry will appear.

Plain it is, that instruments may be fully available for the end entertained by the fine arts, and yet quite inadequate for the attainment of all the purposes aimed at by the processes constituting the second class. The truth goes even farther: while several instruments are adequate for the first purpose, there is only one instrument fully adequate for any of the others. All these other purposes are, for the uses of theory, reducible to two (the purposes of communication being thus, in all, no more than three). First, the design may be to generate cognition or thought, in the form of Belief, Judgment, Explicit Knowledge; secondly, the design may be to generate Volition (an act of will), through Imagination and consequent Desire or Aversion. It is conceivable (rather than likely) that in communication the modes of mind aimed at shall not be either of the two here named. But if so, they must be modes which are steps towards the one or the other of the two; and a complete theory of the processes leading to the two must have accounted for each of the steps.

For the generation of Belief and Volition through communication, no instrument is fully available except Language, Articulate Speech, spoken or recorded. Belief consists in, volition presupposes, clear thinking of the character and relations of objects; and such thinking cannot be conveyed from mind to mind,—cannot, indeed, take place even in one mind,—through any machinery less powerful and flexible than words.

Accordingly, the only processes of communication admissible into our second class are those which may, in a just sense of the word, be held to be contained in and constitute the Art of Eloquence. To the theory of that art there has been allowed, ever since the Greeks bestowed it, the name of Rhetoric.

Further, processes which communicate through language, and those which communicate otherwise, may conveniently be distinguished as Literary and Non-literary. Eloquence is, among the communicative arts which are not fine arts, the only one that is literary. Among processes of the other class, Poetry is the one fine art which is literary; the others are not discriminated exactly enough till they are described as being Fine Arts Non-literary.

If we were to enter on a particular consideration of the several theories of all those arts, the differences of instrument would come decisively forward, and dictate a distribution guiding our course of study.

On the one hand would stand the Theory of Literature; or, as it has aptly been called, the Philosophy of (literary) Criticism,—a name hinting, significantly and instructively, that the use of theory here is critical rather than directive. This theory is constituted and exhausted by two special theories, or sciences, if that word be allowed: by the theory of Eloquence, which is Rhetoric; by the theory of Poetry, which likewise may retain its old name Poetics or Poetic.

The psychological preconcepts, the instrumental presuppositions, required by the theory of literature, are derived from the science of Grammar; that word being understood in the wide meaning it ought to have, as including both the universal theory of language, and the special theory of the tongue on whose literature the doctrines are designed to bear. The frontier, indeed, which fences off rhetoric on its lowest side from grammar is as loosely drawn as most of those other lines of demarcation forced on us by the necessity of apportioning human labour. All laws of Style might be said to be, in strictness, grammatical, not rhetorical; but by the total exclusion of these the practical uses of rhetorical study would be injuriously cramped. On its higher side, again, rhetoric finds itself to be often brought into direct and useful contact with poetics; and it may learn much, by contrast, from the general doctrines of aesthetics, with something now and then from the special theories of the several fine arts. Poetics, while standing in intimate relations with rhetoric, is necessarily in close alliance both with aesthetics, on which its own uni- verbal laws are founded, and with those special developments of aesthetical laws which rule music and the arts of design.

The physical praecognita of the theory of literature are so narrow, and so patent, as scarcely to require being alluded to. The case stands very differently with the non-literary fine arts. On all of them, though not with equal breadth of application, their nature imposes it, as a condition prerequisite, that those objects of perception which are their instruments shall be on the whole sensuously agreeable. With the harmony of colours, which is thus a condition imposed on painting, and weighing, though lightly, on sculpture, we are not concerned. But we are interested in the harmony of sounds, which penetrates so deeply into the essence of music as to threaten continually an ignoring of the higher capabilities of the art. Poetry, being a fine art, and operating through sounds, has to accept audible harmony, in a certain modification, as one of its precedent conditions; and the melody of language gives a fine and attractive charm to the higher and more imaginative efforts of eloquence.

Among the differences in procedure, necessarily modifying the results likewise, which are imposed on the several arts of communication by the differing character of their instruments, there may here be indicated, in brief, one or two which will soon supply us with instructive points of comparison. On the rhetorical side, these affect exclusively processes in which the excitement of imagination is a step.

The difference which pierces deepest is that which separates the literary arts and the non-literary.—The latter excite imagination directly: the excitatory power is in the work of art itself, constituted by the group of visible forms and colours, or the series of audible sounds. We see the work or we hear it; and, if the perception ceases, our image might supposably be a mere representation of that which we had perceived. Indeed the object actually perceived plays so prominent a part, as to incline towards misleading both theory and practice. The cardinal doctrine, that all the fine arts work their genuine effect only by exciting the imagination of the recipient, is hardly questioned in its application to poetry. But it is not so obvious, nor yet so readily admitted, that the same law rules the arts of design. For here the force and clearness of the perception tend not only to tempt away from the imaginative effort, but also to hamper its freedom when it is instituted; and, beyond all doubt, the mere sight of a picture or a statue imparts a certain kind of pleasure to many minds, whose sluggishness of imagination incapacitates them almost utterly from profiting by the higher suggestiveness of the work. In regard to music there occur similar doubts, traceable, however, to other causes. The organic gratification derivable from harmony of sound is so intense and so fine, that it is apt to monopolize the attention of one who is keenly susceptible to it; and, further, the images directly suggested by music are vague and indistinct, not rising into clearness and precision unless in minds which exercise an independent force of fantasy, closely allied to that which generates the poetic mood.—In imaginative eloquence, exactly as in poetry, the instrument through which the effect is produced, that which is communicated and excitative, is not really the words, but the thoughts which the words signify. Notice will be particularly invited hereafter to some of the interesting consequences flowing from the merely mediative function of language, and from the symbolic and conventional character of the words by which it is constituted.

Another difference, secondary but yet very important, subsists between the arts of design on the one hand, and the other arts of our list on the other. The former represent in space; the latter represent in time. It will be shown that this contrariety, which is oftentimes put to use in the theory of poetry, is also fruitful for eloquence both in restrictions and in licences, both of which are not infrequently ignored.

5. When it has been thought worthwhile to characterise thus systematically the theories of arts, some explanation may be proposed as to the practical bearing which the theory is likely to have on the relative art.

No defence is needed for the dignity and value of speculation as speculation. Equally needless is it to say, that theories, every practical science has speculative relations, which might justify its claim to attention though its practical usefulness should be very small. The theory of every art has a general speculative value, as being (if rightly founded and constructed) an organised system of truths: the theory of all the arts now in question has also a specific speculative value, as being the product of systematic thinking, applied worthily to the monuments of literature and refined art. The thoughts, and images, and feelings which are poured out by the hand of genius, cannot be imbibed by us without the rise of an earnest longing to discover some at least of the laws, in virtue of which it has become possible so to elevate, and inspire, and move us. Inquisition into the laws of literature, and its kindred arts, would be alike inevitable and praiseworthy; although it should be certain, as it never can be in regard to any speculative truth whatever, that the attainment of even a complete system of laws for the kind of processes examined must remain practically barren.

The theory of an art can have but either or both of two practical uses. It is Directive, so far as it is efficient for guidance in the construction of new works: it is Critical, so far as it assists in the just estimation of works already constructed. Of no art whatever can the best possible theory serve either use in any but a most imperfect degree. The higher and wider an art is in the results it aims at, the weaker does its theory become in both aspects; and, when we reach arts having the elevated and far-reaching character of those we have here to do with, the directive use of theoretic laws has nearly vanished, while even the critical use has shrunk within narrow bounds. In the lowest arts that are conceivable, successful performance has individual aptitude as a condition precedent: in arts of high compass this aptitude assumes, more and more as we rise, the character of that which is called genius. Such laws as can be assigned come then to have a direct value that is only negative. They are warnings that disobedience will, though the native power be present, impair or destroy the effect aimed at.—The discovery of the assignable laws rests primarily on the study of works already in existence; the laws cannot confidently be pronounced to be sound, unless the possibility of mistake is excluded by a wide range of antecedent experience. Even such laws are obeyed by genius, rather in accordance with its own imaginative instincts, than in consequence of distinct and generalised thought. Nor do such laws as are assignable serve any higher office than that of being guards about the doorways of the temple: genius sits alone and unapproachable in the sanctuary which is within. But theory has given us something well worth having, if it has only taught us how far law, consciously generalized and intelligibly promulgated, can penetrate into the heart of those mysteries, in the midst of which the poet, the orator, and the artist live and work through feeling rather than thought. It is much if there can be drawn, though it should be but dimly and waveringly, the line beyond and above which rules cease to have so much as critical force.

In a way generally and distantly suggestive, however, rules have a positive efficiency; an efficiency which, even in the arts of communication and in the most ambitious phases of these, may be made to manifest itself vigorously in criticism, and to affect beneficially performance likewise. It is said that in the history of the arts practice precedes theory; and the assertion is correct in a sense which the foregoing hints imply. It is not true, even of the arts of communication, that any of them, or any department of any, is ever practised in the absence of all intelligent apprehension of its governing laws. But it is true that all of these arts are practised, and attain eminent success, before the attempt is deliberately made to discover all the discoverable laws, and to digest these into a theoretical code. A theory, however, being once attained, cannot but exercise and deserve to exercise influence on the subsequent history of its art, so far as it is sound and limited to its legitimate duties. Such influence belongs rightfully to those wide theorems, in which it is possible to exhibit the character of literature and art as an organic system, and the characteristics, generic and specific, of each of the members by which the system is formed; and it belongs with equal right to many particular laws, or cautions, or hints, which are validly deduced from the ruling principles of communicative art as a whole, and of each of its constituent sections. Violation of the particular laws will involve error proportional to the width of the law disobeyed; error which, though no exposure of it should be made by reference to reasons, will be discovered to be error by the native instincts of those to whom the work is addressed. Violation of the wider laws will work still more hurtfully; and this, like the other, will be punished and betrayed by failure in result; by failure which, sooner or later, is certain to be suffered, and which will be speedy or immediate if public taste and judgment be refined and correct.

Not to be overlooked is a class of facts, which is interesting in itself, while it often embarrasses attempts at applying the laws of art to individual works, especially in literature. The theory of an art must be founded on an exact determination of its purpose and procedure, as these are exhibited in the purest instances that are possible. Now, in the actual uses of the non-literary arts there is some scope, in communication through language there is large scope and almost continual occasion, for combination of purposes and consequent complication of processes.

In respect of literature, it has already been asserted, that those genuine departments of it which are not poetical in aim, are really combinations of three normal processes, or of certain of their steps; and, if our business had led us to close scrutiny of poetry, we should have found reason for believing that its genuine kinds likewise are to be regarded as similarly products of a very few elementary forms. The difficulties which are thus raised, even when eloquence and poetry remain faithful, each to its own distinctive vocation, must make literature chaotic and criticism feeble and incoherent, unless the paramount principles of communication, and at least some of their nearest corollaries, be steadily kept in sight. Powerful effect cannot be worked by any literary work without unity of purpose; and the character of the purpose will determine that of the processes,—both of the process which leads to the main result, and of those which are grouped round it as leading to the attainment of aims that are subsidiary.

There may be combined in one work, however, processes which ought not to have been so, because leading towards or up to purposes which are irreconcilable and mutually destructive. Therefore, in all those complications which are so common, the question of legitimacy or illegitimacy must be firmly dealt with. Every art of communication is tempted to struggle for the enlargement of its sphere; mutual borrowings take place between processes the most hard to be harmonized; and, while this dangerous ambition often paralyzes instantly the work in which it is indulged, it imparts still oftener nothing better than the momentary vigour of a feverish paroxysm succeeded by utter exhaustion.

In one sort of cases, the purpose of the art is neither lost sight of nor mixed up with the purpose of others; but the means appropriate to it are enlarged by the addition of means which are foreign. There arises no risk of throwing the process out of the class it should belong to; and, the laws thus retaining firm hold, the error, when gross, is easily discoverable, and almost always exposed. In this way the arts of design borrow from each other; and each of them sometimes, but most unwisely, borrows objects or aspects from poetry. It is a fact coming closer to our inquiries, that poetry often seeks to represent objects and aspects of objects, not representable unless through the means available to painting and sculpture. Eloquence imitates the error; and it will be dealt with hereafter.

Cases of another sort are much more dangerous and troublesome. They consist in complications, interferences, or uncertainties of purpose. Out of these spring works of art, which, when their divergence carries them so far that they do not acknowledge as paramount the laws of any one art, really constitute composite classes, in which theory is set fairly at defiance. Literature is especially open to formations of this cast, on account of the precision of language and its indomitable elasticity; and accordingly few generations have wanted occasion for paying just admiration to the fine thinking, or imagination, or feeling exhibited in works which, still veering doubtfully, like a ship under shifting breezes, between the aim of poetry and aims not poetical, are only dazzling effusions of genius, not thoughtful and enduring monuments of literary art. In the early and spontaneous development of literature and the arts of design, an approach is made to this treacherous ground; but the simple old poets and artists are protected against its dangers by their own strong simplicity as well as by the comparative poverty of their means. It is not till the literature of a nation has passed through its summer-glories, and is descending into the coolness of its autumn, that the boundaries separating the provinces are wilfully overstepped: they are so by men of high literary powers, ambitious of gaining originality of effect through forms unlike the old, and through aims in which the old ones are perplexingly intermingled. An instance, for which no good defence can be offered, is the didactic poem: in the prose novel and romance there is an instance which might be defended by a thousand plausible reasons, and by a few that are strong enough to vindicate for it its place as a somewhat rebellious dependence of the poetical empire.

II. THE DATA FOR THEORIES OF LITERATURE AND ART.

The principles of psychological method.

6. All the actual phenomena of mind are complex. This ought to be the first and fundamental article in every psychological creed. We must not take it for granted, that factors or elements which we can think of separately are always possible in isolation. But it is through different combinations and modifications of a very few elementary factors, that actual phenomena of mind gain their indefinite diversity of character; and therefore the abstractive and ideal separation must be carried up to the very highest point which analytic thinking will allow.

The arrangement of mental facts in named classes is equivalent to an assertion, that each class obeys laws, for which the name is an abridged expression; and the compass and mutual bearing of those laws is indicable through the ordination of the classes, as exclusive of each other, or as descending in regular order of specification.

Every mental fact is doubly related. It is related primarily to the mind, which is its subject; and out of this subjective relation arise its widest and overruling laws,—the characteristics which appear to belong to it when it is con- Data for sidered as a function of mind,—those which would suffer no change through any change of object. It is related, secondarily, to the object or objects with which it brings the mind into communication; and out of this objective relation arise subordinate and modifying laws—laws in virtue of which every subjective law puts on different characters according to the different objects with which, in a given case, it connects the mind. When this principle is applied to the framing of a synthetic psychological scheme, it yields a distribution of all mental laws into orders, which become narrower and narrower. In the study of those orders, we take our departure from subjective laws which are universal, as governing all mental facts: we pass thence to subjective laws which are particular, each governing only certain kinds of facts; and thence we travel downwards still, in several degrees, through narrower and narrower groups of objective laws, which are closer and closer particularizations of the subjective laws that are particular.

7. All mental laws which are both subjective and universal, are virtually covered by this assertion: that all mental facts are facts either of Consciousness or of Retention.

(1.) Consciousness is the mind's knowledge of its own phenomena; a knowledge necessarily including a knowledge of the objects. All mental phenomena, that is, all mental facts of which we have direct cognisance, are facts of consciousness. All the kinds of mental phenomena, all forms of mental manifestation, are modes or varieties of consciousness. Thus also, in the last analysis, all modes of consciousness are facts of knowledge or cognition.

Consciousness, considered more closely, is the mind's knowledge of all that is Present to it in time and in space. But we can and do and must think of objects, which are not present in either of those relations. Especially it is true, that we do and must think of the Past; and it is through the past that we think of the Distant. We remember what we seemed to have forgotten; that which has once been known does not lose its relation to the mind through our ceasing to think of it. Through the past and the distant also, we are able to think of the Possible.

(2.) Facts of Consciousness are Retained by the mind; but the retention occurs unconsciously, out of consciousness. That a fact of consciousness which a mind has once had, continues, when it is past, to stand related to that mind,—to be an attribute of it, a step in its history by which subsequent steps may be consciously influenced,—is a truth which we cannot prove directly, since we have no immediate knowledge of such a relation; but it is a truth demonstrable ex impossibiliti, through that conscious revival of the old fact, which could not take place but for the unconscious retention of it.

Thus there is one class of cases, indisputably real and immensely wide, in which mental facts are not phenomena, that is, facts directly observable; cases in which they are facts latent, detectible only through their consequences. Therefore it requires only another step (but that a wide one) to carry us into Leibnitz's hypothesis of modifications of mind, which, instead of merely becoming latent, are latent from the beginning.—It happens very frequently that a thought now in the mind cannot be accounted for, unless we suppose it to be the result of an antecedent mental process, of none of whose steps are we now conscious. It is commonly maintained that those steps must have taken place in consciousness, but have been forgotten through a want of attention. It has been alleged, however, as a less strained supposition, that the missing steps, though actually occurring, have never been in consciousness at all. The hypothesis might yield a plausible solution of some difficult cases in which the rhetorical student is interested.

(3.) The Past, then, having been retained unconsciously, comes again into consciousness, indirectly, in a kind of fact which, regarded from different points of view, may be called either Reproduction or Representation. The object of this new fact is a thought constituted, in whole or in part, by factors or elements similar to those which constituted either a past fact of consciousness, or more than one such fact. The new fact may thus be said to reproduce the old, or to represent it,—in respect that the former makes present to us, and thus brings within the sphere of consciousness, something which we can think of as equivalent to the latter.

In this way consciousness yields us two kinds of knowledge. We have an Immediate or Presentative Knowledge of that which is present, but of that only; and, through and in such knowledge, we have a Mediate or Representative Knowledge of that which is not present, but once was so. The distinction affects all modes of consciousness to this effect; that past phenomena belonging to all of them may be reproduced, and thus known mediately. But so much as we require here to learn, in regard to the specific laws of both kinds of knowledge, will be considered more aptly at a later stage.

8. All possible modes of consciousness are primarily distributable into Two great Classes, distinguished by a difference very deeply marked, and related by a law which is for elementary purpose extremely valuable. But the characteristics modes of those two classes will become clearer when, by taking a consciousness second step of specification, we have got possession of names to which precise ideas are attachable.

Examined more closely, but still with a reference as purely subjective as the nature of mind will allow, the two classes are found to be constituted by Four several and distinguishable Modes of Consciousness, which may be described as Elementary. These, in some or other of their objectively determined varieties, are the factors of all complex mental phenomena.

All mental phenomena, then, must be facts either of Feeling, of Knowing, of Wishing, or of Willing.—Under the name of Feeling come all facts which, by a further reduction still subjective, are describable as being facts either of Pleasure or of Pain. It is convenient, also, to lay down at once the broadest of the objective distinctions separating the kinds of feeling. A Sensation is a feeling whose excitant is a phenomenon of the body of the subject; an Emotion (the "sentiment" of Hamilton and others) is a feeling whose excitant is a phenomenon of the consciousness of the subject.—Under the name of Knowing or Cognition come all facts which could rightly be said, in the current terminology, to be operations of intellectual powers or of powers or faculties of the understanding.—The term Wishing is here used to denote operations referable to the "active powers" or "active principles" of Reid and Stewart; being extended, however, so as to embrace both of their alternative forms. A positive wish is a Desire; a negative wish is an Aversion.—The term Willing or Volition is used in its universally-received sense, and is equivalent to such words as Resolution or Determination.

Let us now fall back on the primary distinction of all those modes into Two Classes. The first class contains Feeling alone; the other three modes constitute the second class.

The classification arises out of the antithetical correlation between subject and object. The relation of the phenomenon to the mind of which it is an attribute is constant and unalterable; the relation of the phenomenon to that with which it connects the mind is occasional and variable. The differences between all modes of consciousness, down to their narrowest objective varieties, consist simply in varieties of the objective relation, modifying by reaction the relation which is subjective. Feeling stands alone, as being, through its objective relations, the one mode in which consciousness is imperfect, merely rudimental, and yields a knowledge that is confused. The other three modes stand together, in respect that in them, through their objective relations, consciousness is perfect, fully developed, and yields a knowledge that is clear.

Alike in Knowing, in Wishing, and in Willing, the mind has consciousness of an object, which either is actually, or is thinkable as being, different from the mind itself. In Cognition pure, the mind has such consciousness, but it has nothing more; it rests in contemplation of the object; the balance of the two counter-relations is in equilibrium. In neither of the other two perfect modes is that consciousness lost or even obscured; they differ from cognition, and rise above it, because in each of them a new element is added. But the addition made in Wishing throws the fact towards the subjective side; the further addition made in Willing throws it towards the objective. In Desire or Aversion, the mind is bent backward or downward towards the thought of itself. The object is thought of as standing towards the mind in a relation which is imperfect and unsatisfactory; the idea of change has come up; and the mental state is one of transition. In Willing there are all the elements of Wishing; but there is also something which is new and higher. On the idea of change there is engrained the idea of power to effect change; the mind, through the exercise of its own energies, thinks itself into the closest possible relation to its object: the equipoise of relations, disturbed by wishing, is restored; but while in cognition the equipoise was determined for the mind, it is now determined by it. Thus, wishing is indeed more than pure cognition, and willing is more than wishing; but in neither does there disappear that thinking of an object, which is the characteristic mark of cognition proper.

The want of this characteristic mark is the distinctive feature of Feeling; and the want sets this mode in contradictory opposition to the other three. In feeling pure and proper, in being conscious of pleasure or of pain, the mind knows merely a state or modification of its own; it cannot know anything else, without rising into a higher mode. Some object or other must have been the excitant; but, so long as the mind merely feels, that object is hidden from it. Pure feeling has no object beyond itself, no object either actual or even thinkable. The objective relation is the slightest that allows consciousness to be possible. If we are to suppose that any one mode of consciousness can, at a given time, possess the mind to the entire exclusion of all others, we must admit that the mind, in being conscious merely of pleasure or of pain, is conscious only in the very lowest degree.

Here, if anywhere, is to be found the root of that plurality of conflicting elements, out of which the mind strives incessantly to rise into the unity of clear consciousness. The germ cannot be detected through any working out of the concrete and complex antithesis between understanding and will, knowledge and endeavour. It is to be sought in the recognition of consciousness as being itself knowledge; and in the subsequent acknowledgment of the distinction between that one phase, in which the mind falls back on the mere knowledge of its own states, and those higher and successively ascending phases, in which it knows and desires and strives after an object real or thinkable. There is a plain contrariety of character between the one imperfect mode of consciousness on the one side, and the three perfect modes on the other.

But there is likewise between the two kinds a close and indissoluble connection; and it is for the sake of this connection that the relations of feeling to other mental modes are here important.

9. The doctrine to be maintained is this.—In the first place, whatever other complexities may be discoverable, every actual phenomenon of consciousness is at least complex to this extent, that it contains two simultaneous factors: the one referable to one of the perfect modes, a cognition, a wish, or a volition; the other belonging to the imperfect mode, that is, a feeling. Secondly, the phenomenon derives its unity from the necessary predominance of the one factor over the other. The subjective factor (feeling), and the objective-subjective factor (cognition, wish or will), co-exist in an inverse ratio; and the factor which is feeling to the more intense obscures the other, or may by possibility the higher conceal it. The complex phenomenon is named and thought modes of by us, and may often be treated safely even for philosophical ends, by reference to the factor which is predominant mess over the other.—Thirdly, in any continuous mental process or series of successive steps, those steps in which the perfect factors are predominant are the most obviously important, and therefore attract notice most readily. Thus we might be tempted to describe the necessary antecedents of action proper as being three only,—cognition, wish, volition. But the feelings which those overruling elements have kept under while themselves present, tend continually to rise into prominence in their turn; so that a mental state which we should describe as being distinctively an emotion, may consciously occur between any two of the three leading steps.—Fourthly, these intervening emotions, so called, which are properly complex states having emotion as the ruling factor, must be of very short duration: the mind spontaneously tends to rise into some of the higher modes, or into a state in which one of the higher modes is predominant. Yet in every energetic process of mind, such flashes of emotion, such sinkings back from intellective or the modes still higher into intervals in which the predominating consciousness is only of pleasure or pain, are incessant and unmistakeable. It may even be alleged, that the vigour of a mental process is proportional to the degree in which feeling thus wells upwards: indeed it is only so that we obtain the full consciousness of that pleasure or pain, of that effect worked or workable on our own being by the objects we contemplate, out of which springs the very life equally of thought and desire and will. Thus, for instance, a vivid image obscures for a moment the concomitant pleasure; but immediately the emotion recurs with an intensity proportional to that of the image which had at first overpowered it.

That feeling is, very frequently indeed, consciously co-existent in time with the higher modes of consciousness, is an assertion which is not contradicted either by ordinary thinking or by any sound philosophical doctrine. Most men would admit that a thought or desire or act of will is, usually at least, either pleasant or painful in one degree or another. Hints or direct assertions to the same effect are common in psychological systems, though left unworked by reason of the little attention that has been given to feeling; and doubts as to the simultaneity would hardly be prompted, unless by misunderstanding of the doctrine (true in one sense, and false in many others), that the mind cannot be in more than one state at the same time. The one real difficulty is, the accounting for cases of seeming exception; and this difficulty is removed by the law of the inverse ratio. Without seeking for any solution more abstruse, such as that of latent modifications, we can easily conceive how either element of the complex fact, being known but obscurely at the time of its occurrence, and being therefore unattended to, may gain no hold of consciousness strong enough to make it be retained and reproduced.

The law of the inverse ratio, propounded by Hamilton, and by him elaborately illustrated in its specific application to the counter-relations between Sensation and Perception, is by him also extended to the relations between Feeling of all kinds and Cognition of all kinds. If the law be admitted at all, it is not easy to see how it can be arrested at this point of development. Wishing and willing, having Data for cognitions as their necessary antecedents, and being themselves not less than cognitions, but more, must carry through with them all the conditions of cognition. And the extension of the doctrine over the whole sphere of consciousness, to the completion of the antithesis between feeling and the perfect modes, seems to be imperatively required, for placing in full light the wide function of feeling, exercised so incessantly, yet so apt to be overlooked.

The doctrine has thus been pressed to its complete development, in order that the processes afterwards to be explained may be open to receive the deepest grounding of which they are capable. But the use which necessarily be made of the doctrine in the present inquiry is limited in two directions.

These psychological data are chiefly required for our analysis of the mental process which issues in action. In that process, let it take the very simplest form of which it is susceptible, there are three governing and predominatingly objective steps, distinct and successive. There is, first, a fact of Cognition, and specifically of Imagination, a fact in which an object is imagined; there is, secondly, a fact of Wishing, in which (the positive form being at present adequate as an example) the object is Desired; there is, thirdly, a fact of Volition, in which there is resolved on an action, judged likely to produce the attainment of the object. Now, the character of this process is most insufficiently understood, unless due account is taken also of the repeated emergence of Emotion, the subjective concomitant or condition of those objective changes. The character of the emotion, the manner in which it is modified by the character of the excitant, cannot be thoroughly accounted for, unless on the supposition of the original simultaneity. But, as it has already been asserted, if the objective step has been energetic,—if the cognition has been distinct, the desire intense, the volition vigorous,—the concomitant emotion, subdued at the time, will come back with a rebound, and present itself as the determining feature in a succeeding mental fact. In this way emotion may intervene consciously and energetically between any two of the objective steps, and cannot fail to do so if consciousness is in due activity. The rise of the mind from the image to the desire, and thence to the volition, will take place, not with the uninterrupted swell of an inundation, but with an alternation like that of the flowing tide of the sea. Ascending waves of thought carry us steadily upward; yet, after each of these, there is a reflux into emotion: we fall back for a moment on self-contemplation, with no loss of ground, and with a resulting increase in the power of the impulse. Feeling exercises, as if by a repetition of quick electric shocks, its characteristic function, of mediating between mind and its objects, of keeping awake and heightening the mind's interest in the persons and things with which it deals, by incessantly recalling to it their effects on its own internal state.

Now, in the first place, the appeal to the primary doctrine being kept open, in order that difficulties may be explainable and rules philosophically justifiable, it will usually be alike safe and convenient, that we accommodate both our treatment and our names to such cases as those which were last described; to cases in which, the objective steps taking place vigorously, the concomitant emotions recur as intermediate steps. It must be asserted emphatically, that the mental process which Persuasion aims at exciting is not rightly excited unless it has this character; unless, through the energy of each cognitive or higher step, the emotion does recur as the prominent and distinctive factor of a step succeeding. Thus, the first step, in which the emotion is decisively in the back-ground, may be described as consisting essentially in the formation of the Image: a second step, which should intervene between the image and the desire, may correspondingly be described as an Emotion.

Secondly, though we are interested in the whole process down to its consummation in action, all rhetorical rules that can confidently be prescribed bear only on the two steps last noted, the first two in the series: the originating objective step,—that is, the fact of Imagination; the subjective step which next interrupts the objective series,—that is, the fact of Emotion.

Explanations are now called for as to each of the four elementary modes of consciousness separately.

10. The doctrine of Feeling has necessarily been in great part anticipated.

It has been asserted that, primarily and subjectively, Feeling must be either Pleasure or Pain. Every state receiving either of those names is distinctively a feeling; and the actuality and importance of such states ought to secure for feeling, in every psychological scheme, a place very unlike the obscure corner which, in our country at least, has usually been allotted to it. Contrariwise, a feeling which is neither pleasant nor painful is a thing inconceivable. But pleasure or pain absolute should be distinguished from pleasure or pain relative, which is consequent on the diminished intensity of a feeling of the opposite kind. So, further, there are certainly mixed states of feeling in which, however, either pleasure or pain must predominate. Moderate degrees of pleasure or of pain are designable by such names as the Agreeable or Disagreeable; and in the complex ideas signified by such names as Happiness or Misery, continuity of pain or of pleasure seems to be the element indicated most prominently.

There has been stated, also, the objective distribution of feelings into Sensations and Emotions, distinguishable by the character of their antecedents or excitants, these being respectively phenomena of the bodily organism of the subject or of his consciousness. This principle of distinction is quite reconcilable with the doctrine of the simultaneity of feeling with the higher modes of mind.

Of the many specific distributions both of Sensations and of Emotions, which emerge through relations to the diversified kinds of excitants, there are but few which here concern us.

It is of some interest to us, and would be of much if we aimed at a universal theory of the fine arts, to note the difference between two varieties of Sensation, both of which place the subject (all sensations do not) in relation to bodies external to his own.—The first contains those sensations which are the subjective concomitants of ordinary perception.—The second is peculiar to two of the senses, those which are most decidedly objective it contains those peculiar sensations of sight and hearing, which are excited by colours and sounds related harmonically. Sensations of this group have great aesthetic value, as being preliminary conditions of the operation of the non-literary fine arts; while a modified pleasure from melody of sounds has a corresponding though less prominent place in literature likewise, operating more widely in poetry, less widely in eloquence.

Of the indefinitely numerous classifications of emotion which emerge when it is regarded from different points of view, there are two which claim our notice.—We are interested, though but indirectly, in the distinction which separates emotions excited by cognition of objects placed in moral relations to us, from those excited by objects contemplated as in relations of any other kind. Emotions of the former group are the moving power in mental processes ruled by conscience, the moral faculty.—The other objective distinction tells more closely on our inquiries. Emotions, whether pleasant or painful, excited by our cognition of objects placed in certain relations to us, tend to rise directly into wishes,—into desire in certain cases, into aversion in others. Emotions excited by our cognition of objects... placed in certain other relations to us have not that tendency, but tend to fall back into cognition; and such emotions are always pleasant, or have pleasure as their overruling characteristic. This Emotive Pleasure, not excitative of desire or aversion, but purely Contemplative, is, as we shall soon have occasion to observe more exactly, concomitant in the first instance, and consequent in its recurrence, on a cognition specifically describable as a fact of Imagination.

If, looking back to the view we have already obtained of the process issuing in action, we re-consider the first two steps, the image and the emotion, we shall understand the circumstances in which this contemplative pleasure arises, by supposing that process to be arrested at the second step: the emotion, instead of passing on to desire, reverts into imagination or some other phase of intellectuation. A state of pleasing emotion, having such an origin and such an effect, is the mental state towards the generation of which poetry and the other fine arts characteristically strive: poetry is, then and then only, purely and exclusively poetical, when the pleasure which it excites fulfils those conditions; and the broadest distinction between persuasive eloquence and poetry is before us, when we regard the former as generative of the complete process which is consummated in action, the latter as generating the earlier steps of that process, but these only. The name of Beauty, originally and strictly applicable to visible objects, in reference to certain of the feelings which the cognition of them awakens, has been currently extended in our philosophical and critical literature, so as to embrace all varieties of this contemplative pleasure immediately consequent on an act of imagination.

If we were to attempt accounting fully for the rise of such imaginative pleasures, we should be thrown back gradually on the question as to the origin of pleasure generally; and this inquiry would issue in the theory, which determines all pleasure to arise out of the consciousness of mental activity, exerted on objects which neither confine nor overstrain it. Among the many specific modifications, however, which this law receives, and which must be brought to light before the theory can be applied to any given case, there is one which, as being operative widely and incessantly both in persuasion and in poetical representation, has for us great value.

The modification alluded to is yielded by the great Law of Sympathy, expressible, with small alteration, in the words of Adam Smith: The mind has a tendency to experience feelings which it perceives to be manifested by others. It is not here needed to propose the problem, whether this strong and beneficent tendency be an ultimate law of mind, or whether it may be resolved into laws still simpler and deeper. The law must be accepted in the shape in which we know it to be operative; and in the later stages of our inquiry it will seldom be far out of our view.

11. The theory of Cognition, supplying the data for inferences in ontology or metaphysics proper, is the favourite battle-field of philosophical controversy. With the more profound of the analytic problems raised in it we are not here directly concerned. The theory of comparative judgment, again, though we require to use it in some degree, is supplied by any reasonably correct system of logic. What we cannot command so readily, while we need it especially, is a clear and consistent theory of Imagination; and even of the kind of cognitive facts so named, the character cannot be fully elucidated without some consideration of its relations to other phases of intellectuation.

The widest of all distinctions within the sphere of cognition, is that which the logicians mark by the two names, Apprehension and Judgment. Every fact of knowledge must have the one or the other of the forms so called; no such fact can have both, or neither. Judgment, that is, cognition expressible by a proposition, is knowledge explicit, evolved, complete: in the proposition something is affirmed or denied of something. Apprehension, that is, cognition expressible by a term, is knowledge implied, unevolved, incomplete: in the term there is neither affirmation nor denial. Yet the idea denoted by the term implies or involves judgment antecedent, while it may also be a step towards judgment consequent. When the names Apprehension and Judgment are used in these logical meanings, it might seem at first sight as if the difference between the mental facts which they denote were purely subjective: we might believe that our knowledge of any object whatever may take indifferently either the one form or the other. Closer scrutiny removes this impression. Mental affirmations, guarded by the relative denials, lie at the root of all cognition; and this is saying, in other words, that all knowledge takes its rise in the form of Judgment.

Accordingly, this formal distinction affects the next widest of the distinctions between modes of cognition, that which separates Knowledge Immediate from Knowledge Mediate. The former is the root of all our knowledge; the latter grows out of it. In the former, the only object known is something which is present, and which is the immediate object of our consciousness; in the latter, this immediate object represents another object, which is remote, not present, but which is known through the medium of the first. Between these two kinds of knowledge there is a formal difference. Every fact of Knowledge Immediate—every fact in which consciousness gives us knowledge of a present object, and does not rest in that confused state which is really no more than feeling,—must have the form of Judgment; neither the complex fact as a whole, nor any of its constitutive elements, can be thought otherwise than as a mental affirmation or denial. Knowledge Mediate, on the contrary, may have either form; the alternative, however, being determined by the circumstances. Judgment, as being knowledge complete and explicit, is the form which mediate knowledge takes when it is contemplated as being a result, as that for the sake of which antecedent processes were instituted; while Apprehension, as being knowledge implied, and therefore more quickly thinkable, is the natural form of knowledge which is contemplated as only a step towards something beyond it, whether that be a further cognition or a fact belonging to some other mode. These considerations dictate, as convenient if not perfectly exact, a distribution of cognitions; in which knowledge immediate may be considered exclusively under the form of judgment, while knowledge mediate must be considered under both forms.

I. Our Immediate Cognitions, those intuitive beliefs on which the whole structure of human knowledge is built up, are of Individual objects only. This cardinal doctrine being premised, all those deeper questions that lie under it are for us unimportant. Nevertheless some of them must be answered in outline, if it were only that we may be put in possession of names for mental laws which must afterwards be referred to.

Our immediate knowledge, then, is constituted, in every possible instance, by elements of two kinds. We know objects, not absolutely, but under conditions or relations. We have knowledge \textit{a posteriori},—that is, gained through experience, a knowledge vast and always becoming wider; but this knowledge is limited by a few fixed conceptions \textit{a priori}, necessary, as being independent of experience, and constituting the laws or conditions of all \textit{a posteriori} knowledge, whether immediate or mediate. The individual objects of our immediate knowledge must be either corporeal objects, or internal phenomena of the subject-mind; but our knowledge of objects of either kind is not possible without the concurrence of cognitive elements be- Data for longing to both classes, *a priori* and *a posteriori*. The theories of individual object is given to us by experience; that is, in a literature cognition *a posteriori*: the laws under which only we can know it are indeed incapable of operating unless in relation to an object so given; but they are native, mental, *a priori* laws. The frequent necessity for considering separately the two several kinds of elements, gives rise to a division of names. Accordingly, our immediate *a posteriori* knowledge of corporeal objects has been called Perception, External Perception, or Perceptive Consciousness; our immediate *a posteriori* knowledge of internal objects, phenomena purely subjective to the ego, has been called Internal Perception, or Self-Consciousness: and Hamilton has generalized the two kinds by referring both to his Representative Faculty. Our latent but inevitably evoluble cognition of the *a priori* conditions of consciousness, whether internal or perceptive, has been denoted by being referred to an original power receiving different names; as Reason from Kant and most others; Common Sense (awkwardly) from Reid; the Regulative Faculty from Hamilton.—But this abstractive separation of the two correlative elements must not blind us to the essential indivisibility of the fact. Every individual fact, which we could cite as an instance either of Perception or Self-Consciousness, is really a fact of perception or of self-consciousness conditioned by the regulative laws of reason.

II. All the limitations of both kinds, which are imposed on our immediate knowledge, necessarily continue to them in that knowledge, when, by becoming Mediate, it is developed and made practically useful.

Its capability of becoming mediate is founded on two mental laws.—First, The mind has that power of Retention or Conservation, which was noticed as standing in relation to consciousness at large. It can retain, out of consciousness, all mental phenomena which it has experienced, to whatever mental mode these may belong; it can retain alike a feeling, a cognition, a wish, a volition. Secondly, The mind has, within certain limits, the power of Reproduction. Past facts of consciousness, retained out of consciousness, may come into consciousness again; and, on being thus reproduced or represented, the past facts become objects of new facts of consciousness. These new facts must be specifically facts of cognition; wherefore their specific laws are here most aptly in place.

(I.) A new cognition, if it is thought of as the result of a process of mediate knowledge, must take the form of Judgment,—of knowledge explicit, mental affirmation or denial. The process is one of comparison; the judgments may be distinguished from judgments intuitive, by being called Comparative; and the theory of them, while for most of our practical uses it is grounded firmly enough on common sense, is systematically evolved in the science of Logic. The formation of comparative judgments is the result which we shall have to consider as aimed at in the processes to be theoretically described as Exposition and Persuasion.

In regard to the objective varieties of comparative judgments, we are interested only in marking the progress by which, beginning with application to individual objects, they rise to embrace classes of objects—All the compared objects may be Individuals, each of which was formerly known by us in a fact of immediate consciousness, and is now represented. This is the only case in which the resulting judgment can be the first comparative judgment which the process contains. All other cases presuppose other comparative judgments, and therefore require a more severe exertion of mind. The presuppositions become more numerous, and the mental strain grows more intense, with every new introduction of a compared object which is not an individual but a Class. For a common term, which is the name of a class, and is necessary for our compendious thinking of that class, is merely an abbreviated definition of the class, which is itself a proposition, the expression of a judgment. Such a judgment has been gained through the process called Generalization; that is, a judgment, or series of judgments, in which given individual objects are compared, and formed into a class in respect of similar attributes; or in which, after the same manner, given classes are combined into classes more extensive. In the process of Specification this procedure is exactly reversed.

(II.) The last assertions in this cursory review of comparative judgments have already led us into one section of the doctrine previously propounded, that Apprecension is the natural form of mediate cognitions, which are only steps in processes leading to something beyond.

A term, which is the expression of a fact of Apprecension, must belong to the one or the other of two kinds. It may be a Singular Term, the name of an Individual; the name of an object, which may or may not be actually divisible into several component objects, but which is thought of from a point of view in which it is one object only. A term, again, may be a Common Term, the name of a Class; and, as above hinted, this class may be constituted either by individual objects, or by narrower classes. Now, the name Apprecension being conveniently confined to knowledge that is mediate, as being of objects not present, the distribution of appreciation into kinds runs parallel to the distinction between terms singular and terms common. The name Imagination belongs rightfully to all apprehension of objects individual; the name Conception is fitly restricted to the apprehension of universals; that is, of the ideas denoted by common terms. The words Image and Concept signify severally the two kinds of facts as regarded from the objective side.

1. Imagination is always Reproduction. It gives, as objects of immediate cognition, mental states identical in constitution with, and therefore accepted as representing, facts of past consciousness, or factors or elements of such facts. But it has two phases, differing directly in respect of their antecedents, and hence deriving a difference in respect of the remote objects which they represent. In the first of these the remote object may be said to be the Past; in the second, it may be said to be the Possible.

(I.) In the first case, the mind represents only one individual fact of past consciousness; and, it may be noted, the representation is probably never complete. Here Imagination is Simply Reproductive.

This phase of imagination is governed, and the second through it, by the great mental law usually called the Law of Suggestion, or the Association of Ideas. The most authoritative systematization of this law is Hamilton's. All phenomena of the same subject-mind are capable of suggesting each other; a mental fact given in present consciousness may suggest any other, which was formerly in consciousness and has been retained. The suggestive power is primarily given to mental facts either by their identity of constitution, or by their original coexistence or coadjacency in time. On the one hand, a present mental fact may suggest any past fact constituted wholly or partly by the same factors; on the other hand, a present mental fact may suggest any fact which was formerly present with it in consciousness at the same time, or as a step in the same mental process. The suggestive power is modified, or secondarily determined, by this law: that mental facts are suggestible in proportion to their "interest" for the subject-mind; that is, in proportion to their tendency to excite emotion. Out of these widest laws, primary and secondary, arise others more specific and complex: and all of these might, for use, be combined into the one doctrine; that the phenomena of the same mind suggest each other through Resemblance, Contrariety (which implies resemblance) or Contiguity. Again, reproduction may be influenced by Will, though not directly yet powerfully. A complex thought or a group of thoughts being present, we can will to concentrate consciousness on some one factor or member of it. The case exemplifies the process called Attention (or Abstractive Attention), which will be examined immediately; and the thought thus attended to may and will suggest others, which, though related to it either by constitution or in time, had been overlooked when it was contemplated only with others.

Lastly, a past thought or other fact may be reproduced, without our knowing that we had it before. We may even believe that it is a new combination, produced by a process issuing in imagination of the second and higher phase. But this step may be followed by another, in which we recognise the past fact, that is, know that the new fact represents a certain past fact. There is thus performed a process which, beginning with Retention out of consciousness, proceeds in consciousness to the successive steps of Reproduction and Recognition. When the process has thus been completed, we say, not that we have imagined the past fact, but that we have remembered it; and it would be convenient if the name Memory could be applied, for technical uses, to such a process as a whole. It is, however, very frequently used to designate only one or another of the constitutive steps. It is particularly to be observed, that the reproduced thought is truly and essentially an Image; that, indeed, this reproduction of some one past fact, in whole or in part, is the normal and radical instance of Imagination. But till recognition has taken place, the reproduction is virtually for us equivalent to imagination not of the past, but of the possible. Therefore, and because it is on our thinking of the possible that the laws of imagination have the closest practical hold, the name imagination comes to be seldom applied to simple reproduction.

(2.) In short, the name is very usually, and with little of immediate harm, limited to that higher phase of imagination, whose remote object is something which we can think as possible, something whose individual existence we can suppose without violation of any law of thought. Imagination of this character has been called Productive, and (less safely) Creative. The antecedent process to which its peculiarities are owing, would be indicated if we were to call it Synthetic. It does not represent merely one past fact or part of such; it represents two or more past facts, or factors of such, combined under some relation which gives to the combination an individual totality or unity. Consequently it is the result of an antecedent process, which never can have been very simple, and may have been overwhelmingly complex. It must have embraced, besides modifying and colouring flashes of emotion, two or more distinguishable stages of cognition. First, more images than one must have arisen in the mind, through acts, more than one, of simple reproduction. Secondly, there must have taken place judgments, in which there are compared together, in respect of their mutual relations, either those images as wholes, or factors or features of each, or the wholes of some and parts of others. On these antecedents follows the synthetic formation of the new image, an image of something which as a whole had not been known or thought of before. In short, imagination simply reproductive gains its image from one retained fact of past consciousness; imagination productive or synthetic,—imagination in the common meaning,—sometimes and aptly called Fantasy,—gains its image from two or more facts of simple reproduction followed by a series of comparisons.

The function of synthetic imagination cannot be examined too closely by the student either of eloquence or of poetry.

2. The remote object of Conception may be said to be the Universal. A concept, the idea of a class, denotable by a common term, is really, as already asserted, an abbreviated and implied judgment, which would have been explicitly denoted by a definition of the class. Further, this implication, so necessary for rapid and easy thinking, cannot be reached otherwise than indirectly; the concept can be thought only symbolically, as through words, arbitrary symbols. These are adequate reasons, both for the greater mental exertion required in the fact of conception, and for the difficulty of harmonising conception with imagination. A common term does not directly suggest an image. It does, indeed, tend to fall back into the image, through the desire of the mind, in thinking of classes, to make its intellect clearer through thought of the constituent individuals. But the thought which it directly suggests is the implied judgment; it raises the question of truth or falsehood, which the thought suggested by an image does not. The mood of mind excited by concepts,—that is, specially, the tone of feeling,—tends to weaken or destroy the mood excited by images; and both this tendency, and the comparative inefficacy of concepts to excite images even indirectly, increase with the distance of the concept from immediate cognition; or, in other words, with the increasing width of the classes which the concepts represent. All these considerations are rhetorically very important.

12. The reason for adopting the term Wishing, to denote the "Active Principles" or "Powers" of Stewart and other wishing-standard writers, was virtually assigned in the hint, that wishes are of two kinds, Desire and Aversion. The received theories confine attention to the former, the positive form, neglecting the latter, the negative. Each implies the other; and, though it is desire that is by far most frequently the direct prompter of volition and consequent action, yet it is a question of circumstances whether it may not be by aversion that this function shall be discharged. The theory is not complete unless both forms be taken account of.

All wishes, as developed in the positive form, are referable to one or another of the three kinds described by Stewart as Appetites, Desires (in a narrow sense of that word), and Affections. It is only with the latter two of those classes that rhetorical inquiries are concerned; and, for these or all the three, Stewart's doctrine might serve our present uses reasonably well, if there were worked into it the few points that bear directly on aversions. But, even for studies such as ours, increased clearness of apprehension may perhaps be won through an analysis somewhat closer.

In the first place, all wishes are distinguishable objectively into Two Orders. The first order contains Stewart's Appetites and Desires, with the relative Aversions. These may be described as Wishes Simple or Direct; and there lies on the surface a reason for calling them Self-Regarding. The second and higher order contains Stewart's Affections. These may similarly be called Wishes Complex or Indirect; and they may be spoken of also as Not-Self-Regarding or as Sympathetic.

The analysis of wishes belonging to the first order will open the way for the analysis of those belonging to the second. But there may be prefixed a notice, that exception is to be taken to the answer most commonly given to the question, what is the object of a wish? According to Stewart, the objects of appetites and desires are things, and things of different kinds; the objects (proper) of his affections are persons. More exact inspection, it is thought, entitles us to say, that all the objects of wishing are primarily of one and the same kind, the differences between them going no further than modification.

I. The true object of a wish must be something, by the existence of which the wish would be exhausted.—First, then, the object of a Simple or Direct wish is in every conceivable case a state of the subject-mind, the mind that Data for wishes. Secondly, that state is a feeling, either emotion or complex or continuous, feeling is thought of as the predominating element. The object of a desire is a state of pleasure; the object of an aversion is a state of pain.

Thirdly, this state is thought of as future; futurity is implied even in the desire of, or aversion to, the continuance of a mental state which has already come into existence. Fourthly, this future state of pleasure or pain of the subject-mind must have been represented by the subject in an antecedent fact of imagination; and, by reason of the nature of the object, this fact must have been specifically one of Imagination Synthetic.—Through these features of the object, this order of wishes is distributable into two classes. The Appetites, and the relative aversions or loathings, are Sensuous Wishes; the feeling imagined is a state of sensation. The Desires of Stewart (Propensities of other authors) and their contraries, are wishes Non-Sensuous; the feeling imagined is a state of emotion.

The elements which have been described are all the elements which are absolutely essential to the object of a direct or simple wish. But there is yet another element which, though inessential, is seldom if ever absent, and which in our everyday thinking receives more attention than the others. We think of the object, our own future state of feeling, in relation to something which has a tendency to bring it into existence; something which is a cause or constituent of a cause, of which the mental state we desire or are averse from is imagined as the effect. In unanalytic consciousness the idea of this cause or con-cause usually obtrudes itself so as to obscure,—and may often come up so strongly as almost quite to conceal,—all the other constitutive ideas. It has this prominence for two sufficient reasons. In the first place, it is only when the idea of a cause is incorporated into the idea of the object that a wish becomes definite, precise, clear; without that idea it remains vague, shadowy, describable perhaps as a longing—a longing for something we know not what. In the second place, and consequently, until the idea of a cause has arisen there is no outlet towards volition; not only volition subjectively impossible, but there cannot even arise the question, whether the object of the wish is attainable.

It is a truth not to be overlooked, that, if this analysis be correct, that idea of the object, out of which a direct wish emerges, and towards which it tends, has inevitably a character, not only of complexity, but also of greater or less distinctness and vacillation. This is in perfect harmony with the character of wishing in itself, and with the function which it discharges as a step in mental processes. Its own character inclines towards indistinctness, in proportion to the approach it makes to the subjectivity of feeling; its transitive function, as mediating between cognition and volition, compels it to vacillate, and even to relax its hold on the central point of the idea, in proportion to the closeness of its reference to action. The ultimate reference to self, and to a state of feeling of which self is the subject, can never be lost entirely in consciousness without disappearance of the character of the fact as a wish; but this reference is naturally and irresistibly forced into the background by the necessity of giving prominence to the cause, through which lies the only path to action.

These considerations go far to account for the prevalent opinion as to the objects of the facts which we commonly describe as appetite and desire. They may be said, indeed, to justify our using, in description of the object of such a wish, forms of expression implying no analysis going deeper than the datum of unreflective consciousness; and convenience and clearness concur in driving us on such expressions. But the result of the more accurate dissection must not thus be allowed to slip out of view; and opportunities may often occur for appealing to it.

II. In regard to the Affections (of Stewart) the first and chief doctrine to be asserted is this.—All the four characteristics of the objects of Simple wishes belong also to the objects of these wishes, the Complex: the description is correct for these as for those. It must be maintained, without qualification, that the true object of an affection, benevolent or malevolent, is a mental state of the subject, not of any other person or persons. The seeming paradox requires to be justified.—The description of the object, complete for simple wishes, is not complete for wishes that are complex. The object of a wish belonging to this order has two characteristics in addition to the four. First, the idea of cause, inessential to the object of the lower order of wishes, becomes essential here. Secondly, this cause must be a mental state, and specifically a feeling, pleasant or painful, sensation or emotion, of some conscious and sensitive being or beings different from the subject. How, then, do we account for the promiscuous which, in our consciousness of an affection, is unquestionably held by the idea of the person we commonly speak of as the object? It is accounted for on the same principle as the corresponding difficulty in the former case; but here the answer is even easier. The idea of cause, and of a state of the person loved or disliked as being the cause, cannot but come up in a wish of this character: the wish is not possible without it. It is, further, the state of that person, not our own state, that will be directly affected by the subsequent volition. Therefore our consciousness is ruled over, or even monopolized, by the thought of that person and of the state in which our volition will place him.—To all conceivable objections, again, there is this reply. An affection of mine would not be exhausted by the pleasure or pain, the happiness or misery, of the person to whom I wish well or ill: it could not be exhausted till I should come to know that state of his, and to experience the correspondent emotion. Yet here, as in the other case, our phraseology is conveniently modelled on the unanalytic view; the more correct doctrine being reserved for use when the other threatens to lead astray.

Nor does the doctrine really raise any ethical difficulties. The moral relations of the affections, indeed, do not come out clearly, until distinct account is thus taken of the subjective reference made in the last resort by all of them. It is only thus that we recognise precisely the functions of the two great laws, which govern affections and the consequent volitions and actions.—The law of Sympathy originates the pleasure which attends our imagination of the pleasure or pain of others, the pain which attends our imagination of their pain or misery. The law of Duty, a higher law, the highest of all laws,—the law in virtue of which we have pleasure in the thought of that which is right, and pain in the thought of that which is wrong,—discharges, in regard to the affections, a double function. It intensifies and sublimates the sympathetic pleasure which is concomitant on goodwill to our fellow-men; and, when there has been excited the pleasure incident to ill-will, it supplies the place of the sympathetic check, and opens the mind to new images suggestive of worthy emotions. Sympathy is actually pleasant; a good conscience is actually pleasant; both of these truths are laws in our nature; and woe to us if our nature were not so ruled! Nor is this a resolution of affection into selfishness. Small risk does that man incur of undue regard to self; whose unhappiness is greatest, not in remembering disappointment of his own desires, but in witnessing the miseries of others; the man who has learned to find his highest happiness, not in the nourishment or gratification of wishes which do not pass beyond himself, but in the sympathetic contemplation of the wellbeing of others, and in the conscientious wish to promote their happiness or alleviate their suffering.

It is further to be noticed that, when the object of wishes has been identified correctly, the question whether Data for Theories of Literature and Art.

An Affection is a desire or an aversion is seen to be quite different from the question, whether it is Benevolent or Malevolent. Good-will and ill-will may alike, according to circumstances, develop themselves in either form. In being conscious of a benevolent affection, I may either desire for the person thought of a state describable as pleasure or happiness; or I may be averse to his being the subject of a state of pain or misery. In being conscious of a malevolent affection my position is alternative in the opposite way.

13. In regard to Willing, we are here bound chiefly to keep in sight the real and radical distinctions which separate a volition from the antecedent wish.

They are different even when regarded subjectively, or as states of mind. Indeed, though a volition must be preceded by a wish, there are wishes which though they might be succeeded by volition are not so; and there are wishes which cannot be so succeeded. This is a point which will by-and-by be put to special use.

Again, wishing and willing must be both different in character, and non-concurrent in time, in respect of the difference of their objects, and the relations in which the objects stand to each other. This distinction is clear even on the common view as to the objects of wishing: it emerges with added strength of evidence on the more analytic view of the character of those objects. In a given process embracing both mental facts, the two objects are regarded by us in a light which pre-supposes both their non-identity, and the difference between the wish and the volition. While we still look forward to the consequent action as future, we consider the object of the wish as an end or purpose, the object of the volition as a means towards that end: during and after performance of the action, the object of the volition is for us a cause, the object of the wish is the relative effect. The distinction is obvious as to Simple Wishes. It holds also as to Wishes Complex: for though the idea of a cause is there necessary, it is only the idea of a cause intervening between the object of the wish and that cause which is the object of the volition.

The object of a volition, that which I will, is a fact, either of my own mind or of my own body, which I know or believe myself to have the power of bringing into existence; and I will it because I know or believe it to be a cause, or one of the elements making up a cause, either adequate to produce as its effect the state of feeling which had been the object of an antecedent desire, or adequate to avert the state which had been the object of an antecedent aversion. The object of a volition is, in one word, an Action: a fact consequent on volition is the only kind of fact to which the name of action is strictly and properly applicable.

Further, as the object of a wish must have been imagined antecedently, so must it have been with the object of a volition. We cannot but know what we will; and the nature of the case precludes cognition in any other form than that of imagination. An image of the act must intervene between the wish and the resulting volition. In the volitional stage, as in the preceding, the rapidity of the process may doubtless be so great that the two successive facts shall not at the time be distinguishable from each other: but their real consecution and difference must not be lost sight of. The circumstance produces a complication which should be noted by the student of eloquence.

The process may, and with effects not less important rhetorically, be complicated still further by the intervention of processes of Deliberation. This name indicates a series of comparative judgments: the things compared are two or more judgments inconsistent with each other; and, if the progress towards action is not broken off, the issue must be a judgment accepting one of them as true to the rejection of the others. We may and do deliberate as to both of the objects,—as to the object of the wish and as to the object of the volition,—as to the end, and as to the means: and hence the imagining of each of the two successive objects may be preceded, delayed, and conditioned by an elaborate series of inferences.

14. In the psychological outline now closed, there has in effect been anticipated the theory of Persuasion; that is, the section of Rhetoric which is at once the most logical and the most extensively available for use.

For, in performing completely the process called persuasion, what we aim at is the generation of volition in the minds of others; and there have come up before us here, one after another, all the steps of the process which issues in volition, that is, of the process which, in persuasion, we seek to originate in the minds of others. In the simplest view that is even conceivable, that process involves the following successive steps (feeling being in the meantime overlooked):

a fact of imagination synthetic, yielding an image of the object of the wish; a fact of wishing, in the form either of desire or of aversion; and lastly, the resulting fact of volition. If, however, a dissection attempted in the last section be sound, the process must always be less simple. There must first be imagination and consequent wish, referable to the object which we are desirous of or averse from for its own sake as end. There must next be imagination, referable to that action of our own which is regarded as a means towards the satisfaction of the first wish; and only out of this second image can the volition arise. Feeling, however,—and, specifically, emotion,—pleasure or pain, really (as we must hold) accompanying each of those steps, will necessarily, at some stage or other, and probably more than once, emerge into an evanescent prominence, and for a moment intervene between the facts which are distinctively objective.

It was hinted, however, that rhetorical rules cannot grasp closely any but the first two of the steps thus described:—the Image and the subsequently emergent Emotion. It must likewise be kept in mind that, as also hinted, these two steps are common to eloquence and to poetry. Eloquence aims at continuing the process to its consummation. Pure poetry aims at turning the process back on its first step; and it is a question to be raised hereafter, on account of its bearing on rhetorical points, what effect is produced when poetry does aim at proceeding further.

There has to be added one other doctrine, which could not be explained satisfactorily till all our materials were accumulated. The problem regards the influence of will on cognition or intellect; and it is raised by this question:—what is the real nature of that mental state, which we seem to know so familiarly under the name of Attention.

Attention might be said to be the concentration of consciousness on certain objects. It is plain that attention is often the result of volition: the knotty question is, whether it is always so? It may be that those are right, who hold that an instinctive concentration of thought, an attention not determined by will, is a necessary condition of all consciousness: but it is not easy to see one's way through the difficulties which stand between us and that conclusion. At present it is enough to make this assertion:—that Attention strictly so called, a concentration of thought determined by will, is an indispensable condition of the rise of consciousness above that confused state, of which feeling is the norm. A fact of attention, in this sense of the word, is a mental process, consequent on volition and its antecedents: it must either be constituted exclusively by cognitive facts, or have cognition as its first determining step; and lastly, it must involve what is usually called Abstraction, or the throwing certain objects out of conscious- III. ANALYSIS OF THE PROCESSES CONSTITUTING THE ART OF ELOQUENCE.

15. When we seek to identify those normal and elementary forms, into which all literary processes must be resolvable, we might perhaps expect to find those forms naturally determined by the characteristic differences of the three purposes, with a distinctive view to one or another of which communication must always be made. But the first of those purposes, the generation of belief or judgment, is entertained in so many dissimilar shapes, and aimed at from data so exceedingly various, that absolute similarity, even in prominent features, is not to be looked for in all the processes leading towards it. In recognizing two distinguishable kinds of processes, as each tending towards this end, we accept the smallest number of distinctions that can yield any clearness of doctrine.

While, therefore, the Purposes of communication by language are only Three, the Processes relative (within that sphere) to the attainment of these purposes must be set down as Four.

Firstly, The name of Exposition will here denote all processes, in which the generation of belief or explicit knowledge is aimed at through any means other than argument.

Secondly, The name of Argumentation will suggest, at once, processes in which, the generation of belief or explicit knowledge being the purpose, the means used is argument or proof.

Thirdly, The name of Persuasion is applied by common consent to all processes, in which the end aimed at is the generation of volition.

Fourthly, The name of Poetical Representation may indicate all processes, in which language is used for the generation of pleasure through imagination.

The substance of the Theory of Eloquence consists in the analysis of the first three of those four processes; and these will next be taken in the order in which they have been named: which order, likewise, as noted before (section 2), is that in which they occur when all of them are completely incorporated into one discourse. In the same section those weaknesses were touched on, which attach to the theories of exposition and argumentation, and which leave the theory of persuasion as the strong ground of a rhetorical system.

I. THE PROCESS OF EXPOSITION.

16. In the cursory examination, which is all that this process requires, the first point is the setting aside of those cases where the generation of belief is dependent on the matter asserted, from those where it is dependent on the manner in which the assertion is made. Evidently it is only on cases of the latter kind that any firm hold can be caught, even by the very few rhetorical laws here obtainable.

1. Belief may be commanded, without proof, by the character of that which is asserted. It may be a truth self-evident to all men; and, that either as being a universal condition of human knowledge, or as being vouched so thoroughly by experience that it is admitted unquestioningly as a practical rule of life. Or it may be something which, though not self-evident, is yet undeniably admitted by those to whom it is stated.

In neither of these varieties of the first case are rules properly rhetorical either needed or attainable. The task of the speaker or writer is, at the utmost, nothing more than that of reminding his hearers or readers of something which supposedly ought to be brought distinctly to their remembrance. If anything else is requisite, it can only be explanation of the words used; and, in certain kinds of eloquence, much time is often bestowed on such explanation, involving not seldom much of argument. When the process is purely expository, the only qualifications required by the party communicating are two: clear thinking, clear and distinct apprehension of the objects treated; perspicuous language, that clearness of expression which does not necessarily attend clearness of thought, but towards which clearness of thought leads, and which, when thought is obscure, cannot be attained unless through a momentary accident.

II. Belief may be commanded, without proof, by the manner of communication. Belief may thus be commanded in either of two ways.

1. It may be generated by the aspect in which the assertion itself is made to appear. The alleged truth is so represented that the recipient wishes it to be true. This is really one of those complex cases, in which the several communicative processes are fused wholly or partially into each other. What is performed is, in fact, an incomplete process of persuasion: that process is carried on to the formation of the wish; and then the minds which are affected by it are led aside towards belief instead of being urged further onwards to volition. Things which we desire to believe are undoubtedly believed by us infinitely more readily than things to which we are averse, or about which we are indifferent; and a lively act of imagination, giving rise to an intense wish, is a step which, especially in minds untrained to the testing of evidence, stands close to positive belief, if only no circumstances are obtruded which make the fact in question to be impossible or highly improbable.

2. The belief may be generated by the aspect in which the speaker or writer is able to represent his own character and position. This variety of the process is the first of the three πορίας explained in the Rhetoric of Aristotle. It is the method of generating belief which he describes as residing in the exhibited character of the speaker,—as taking effect when the discourse is so framed as to make the speaker appear worthy of credit.

In a word, the case is one in which the writer or speaker aims at taking the position of a witness; and, the discourse being assumed to supply the only means which the audience have of judging as to his character, he has to aim at exhibiting himself as possessing all the qualifications of a witness who is trustworthy. In one who gives judicial testimony, the essential qualifications are of two kinds, intellectual and moral; and these are the quarters on which the clearest light must be thrown by the discourse, when an orator or literary man strives to give to his words the weight of testimony. Which of the two is the more important, is a question of circumstances.

Clearly, in both respects, rules of art must be all but powerless. That which the man is, will essentially determine that which he can seem to be. The only field indeed in which forethought and art may raise seeming far above being, is not literature proper, framed for being pondered over in the closet, but oratory proper, designed for oral delivery. Just as a jury forms, from the manner in which a witness gives his evidence, an impression favourable to his intelligence and honesty; so may they, or any other audience, especially a large and mixed one, be impressed similarly towards a public speaker, by features of his manner, which are really the fruit of elaborate study and practice. The small literary efficiency of this means of impressing belief has almost banished it from notice in modern works on rhetoric; although its admirable oratorical power, especially in the shape of skill in elocution, commended it naturally to Aristotle, whose precepts had their chief practical end in the instruction of public speakers. Weak, however, as rhetorical theory is here, the points deserve to be paused over for a moment.

(1.) In regard to the moral qualification, in its bearing on communication strictly literary, very little can be elicited with advantage. A literary man is presumably an honest witness, ready to report his knowledge conscientiously and correctly. He can hardly exhibit himself in any other light, unless by betraying innate moral weakness or depravity. Yet literary statements affect us strongly, both with prepossession and with prejudice, even when the moral elevation or sinking is not very decided, or when the difference extends no further than to disposition or temper. There is all the unlikeliness in the world between the distrust with which we learn to treat the assertions of the savage and gloomy Swift, and the kindly confidence we repose in what is said by the cheerful and kindly Addison; nor does the sympathetic glow which is shed over us by the genial Goldsmith accompany us when our teaching is derived from the honest but arrogant Johnson.

(2.) The intellectual position of the writer must be established both as to opportunities, as to intelligence, and as to knowledge. But, first, ostentation either of intellectual power or of resulting knowledge would be a violation of the first section of the rule, as tending to excite moral distrust; and parade of ability or skill of any kind, by calling away attention from the matter to admiration of the writer, would cool the tendency to faith, even if its moral effect were not directly adverse.

In the creation of impressions favourable to the intellectual character of the writer, the cast of his style is of great importance; although here, as in regard to most points affecting language, little more can usefully be done than the calling of attention to the principle. In Bentham's posthumous essay on Language, an attempt is made to generalize this doctrine. Intellectual strength, it is said, is indicated by a character of style which may be called Dignity or Self-possessedness. It has the effect of indicating the writer's mastery both over himself and over his matter. It is distinguishable through its want of certain faults, especially two: first, laxity, a general prevalence of offences against perspicuity in the use of words; and secondly, a tendency to grope about among ideas without at once finding the right one, out of which arises a superfluity of ideas as well as of words.

(3.) To those two essential qualifications of the witness, Aristotle adds, for the orator, a third, Good-will towards those whom he wishes to impress with belief. For oratory dealing with party-questions, the production of a favourable impression in this direction is clearly of great moment. In literature the circumstances give but seldom occasion for raising such questions. But in some kinds of literary compositions,—as, for instance, History,—there is continual occasion both for watching the means of fairly causing such impressions, and for guarding against the distrust which may spring up where the adverse inclination of the writer is not or ought not to be concealed. When, before canvassing proofs, we do distrust an historical statement bearing on a party-question, our want of faith in the historian as adverse to our own opinions is almost always complicated by distrust in the assertion itself, as one which we are unwilling to believe.

Perhaps it is scarcely worth while to add, that the same favourable impression, which may generate without proof a belief that otherwise would have been totally absent, must, a fortiori, be efficacious in facilitating belief, in cases where proof is offered but is not in itself sufficient.

II. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION.

(1.) THE CHARACTER OF ITS RHETORICAL THEORY.

17. This process must by us be studied for a purpose which may become the clearer, if we first contrast it with another purpose, for which also it is analysed by a science and the having a primary and preferable hold on it.

As a process of thought, Argumentation is subject to Logical Laws: as a process of communicated thought, it is subject to Rhetorical Laws. The process which we review, being the process in which argumentative thought is communicated, is not completely theorised unless, while its rhetorical laws are directly laid down, its logical laws are presupposed. The complete theory may be said to comprehend the solutions of two several problems.

The first is the Logical problem. It may be expressed thus. Given certain propositions as premises: it is required to determine whether any conclusion, and what conclusion if any, may validly be inferred from them.—The second problem, the Rhetorical, is not enounced so easily, in a shape at once sufficiently precise and sufficiently comprehensive. The following may be taken as a fair exposition of it. Given a certain proposition as a conclusion: it is required to determine through what premises, and through what use of those premises, the truth of the given conclusion may be made evident to persons who would not otherwise believe it.

The contrariety between the two problems should be marked from several aspects.

The solution of the logical problem enables us to test arguments: we take our stand on the data, the first two steps in the argumentative process; and we find the conclusion, the third step, or pronounce it impossible. The solution is exact, exhaustive, and peremptory; and it bears directly on the instance given.—The solution of the rhetorical problem is designed for enabling us to perform the more difficult task of constructing arguments, and of constructing them so that they shall be effective on other minds than our own. We take our stand on the conclusion, the third step in the argumentative process; and we seek the premises, the first and second steps, that these may be adduced in proof of the conclusion. The solution of the problem is approximate, incomplete, and probable instead of being peremptory; and accordingly its use extends no further than this, that it suggests to us the outline of a method, by the wise use of which (besides collateral advantages), the finding of premises to prove given conclusions may be made easier than it would be if we were set about without the use of any method guided by law. That, accordingly, in which we are aided by this section of rhetoric, is first of all the Finding or Discovery of Premises, the other aids being consequent and dependent on this. It might be called likewise, in logical phrase, the Finding of Middle Terms, or media of proof; for what must be gained, in the first instance, is a term with which we might successively compare each of the terms of our given conclusion; and this term, the middle, being once discovered, the construction of the premises with it and the two others is a matter of course.

We express really the same analysis, but in a more familiar shape, if we say that this essential part of the rhetorical theory of argumentation aids us in the Finding of Arguments. For the word "Argument," strictly meaning the middle term, signifies very often, in common speech, the assumed facts on which a conclusion is rested, and often also the whole argumentative process.

Names of similar import described, among the classical rhetoricians, this dialectical or semi-dialectical section of rhetoric. It was the "Exposis" of the Greeks, the "Inventio" of the Romans and schoolmen. What it dealt with was called the Invention of Arguments in our own older language, when the distinction was not yet taken precisely between invention and discovery.

(II.) THE CLASSIFICATION OF ARGUMENTS.

18. In most of our modern systems of Rhetoric, the theory of argumentation is a dead blank. Either an appeal is taken to Logic as the only science which can give any aid to the process; or else we are told that both the one science and the other are useless, and that the only guides to be relied on are knowledge of the matter, and practised sagacity, and sound sense.

The elaborate and special topical systems of the old world have not been, and are not likely to be, recalled into life by any one. But of systems of universal topics, intended to cover all departments of knowledge likely to be argued about, without descending into the details of any, there are more than one that have exhibited much acuteness and ingenuity. Among those which, while they have available points, are palpably deficient in generalization, Priestley's may be cited, for the sake of some features of likeness which will come to light immediately. All arguments, says he, are founded on one or another of nine relations. We must argue from premises which express one or another of these things—Definitions; Adjuncts; Antecedents; Consequents; Means; Analogy; Contrariety; Example; Authority.

It may be observed, likewise, that there is one recent scheme of relations, which, though not applied by its author to rhetorical use, might be so applied without much difficulty; while it is not only, as might be expected, highly philosophical in conception, but also much closer than Priestley's to the scheme immediately to be explained. This is the doctrine as to the Import of Propositions laid down in Mill's Logic. All propositions, says Mr Mill, must import one or another of five things—Existence; Coexistence; Sequence; Causation; Resemblance.

We attain a simplicity yet greater, without losing any principle that appears to be essential, when we recur to that universal classification of all possible arguments, which was expounded in the oldest and most celebrated of all extant rhetorical treatises, and has been elucidated with admirable effect in the best rhetorical work of our own time.

Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, distributes all arguments into three classes. His third class, the argument from \(\varepsilon\alpha\pi\delta\beta\gamma\eta\pi\alpha\), or Example, is easily identified; but much darkness has rested on the question as to the nature and difference of each of his first and second kinds—the argument from \(\varepsilon\alpha\pi\delta\beta\gamma\eta\pi\alpha\), or Probability, and that from \(\varepsilon\alpha\pi\delta\beta\gamma\eta\pi\alpha\), or Sign. The only interpretation that is rational or self-consistent is one which is assigned by some of the commentators, such as Majorinus; and this reading, adopted by Archbishop Whately, may safely be believed to yield, as he alleges, the genuine classification of Aristotle.

According to Whately's scheme, the first kind of Argument is the \(\varepsilon\alpha\pi\delta\beta\gamma\eta\pi\alpha\) of Aristotle; the argument from Antecedent Probability, which is described and analysed as leading us from cause to effect. The second kind is Aristotle's \(\varepsilon\alpha\pi\delta\beta\gamma\eta\pi\alpha\); the argument from Sign or Symptom, declared to lead, not strictly from effect to cause, but from a symptom to the thing indicated by it. The third kind, Aristotle's \(\varepsilon\alpha\pi\delta\beta\gamma\eta\pi\alpha\), is the argument from Example.

What is now to be given is an explanation of the Aristotelian scheme on this interpretation of it, and with much use of suggestions supplied by the interpreter. An attempt is made, however, to trace the rhetorical rules upwards to their principles.

19. In arguing or inferring, we pass from the known to the unknown; from something which is assumed as known already, to something which is not known till it has been inferred. Our inferred truth, the conclusion of our inference, must be one only; let it, for brevity, be called X. Our known truth, the datum, is likewise one in the aspect in which at first it naturally offers itself; let it be designated as A.

But, though the truths which are the matter of inference thus seem to be no more than two, the logical analysis, which shows them to be necessarily three (for the cases of immediate inference are reducible to the same principle which rules the syllogism), is vindicated even without the use of logical forms. From a known truth A, considered simply and by itself, an unknown truth X cannot possibly be inferred. We cannot from A infer X, unless on the assumption that there exists some Relation between them. This is our third truth, a second assumed truth—that A and X are in some way or other mutually related. Even if we continue to express our reasoning in popular forms, we either make this second assumption silently, or incorporate it in the expression of our A. The assumption is made in this case as really and as thoroughly as it is made when, setting forth the inference in its developed logical shape, we exhibit the assumption explicitly as a second premise.

Taken strictly, then, the relation required is quite independent of all considerations derived from the uses to which it may be put. It is not strictly a relation even between the steps of the inference as such; still less is it a relation dependent on the forms the inference may take, or on the purposes to which it may be applied. It is a relation of matter, an objective relation; it is a relation between the objects which are the matter of the inference.

Hence comes the doctrine from which our classification of arguments must start.

I. From a known truth A we cannot infer an unknown truth X, unless in virtue of some objective Relation assumed to exist between A and X.

Accordingly, our classification of arguments ought to rest on a classification of the relations between all objects of thought. The construction of such a classification is a high and deep problem in ontology or metaphysics proper; and the experienced impossibility of reaching an exhaustive solution of it entails imperfection on our transformation of the solution into a practical shape. But it is not difficult to gain an approximate solution, which is exact enough for the application now needed.

Every thinkable relation of things must be placed by us in the one or the other of two classes.

First, it may be a relation direct, real, or purely objec- tive; that is, it may be a relation which we believe, rightly or wrongly, to subsist between the objects themselves individually. One of the widest of such relations is that of Causality. A may be a cause, and X the relative effect; or A may be an effect, and X the relative cause. But we have a generalization, yet wider, and perhaps the very widest that is possible, in the relation of Condition. A condition of a thing is any thing but for which it would not be what it is: A may be the condition, X the thing conditioned, or contrariwise. Now our doctrine is this: that all direct or purely objective relations are merely modifications of this one relation of Condition.

Secondly, the relation may be indirect, conceptual, or objecto-subjective; that is, it may be a relation which is thought, not as subsisting directly between the objects themselves, but as established between them indirectly, through our manner of thinking of them, or through the point of view from which we regard them. All these indirect relations, emergent through our own thinking, are resolvable into the one relation of Resemblance, which founds the process of classification. We think of A and X as being like each other; and, in respect of this likeness, we think of them as contained in one and the same class. Now, undoubtedly, in all real knowledge, the relation of Resemblance presupposes, and is no more than an imperfect evolution of, some real relation between the objects as conditioning and conditioned. But we are often able to discover a resemblance justifying classification, while we have as yet an imperfect apprehension of the real relation which is the root: and, besides this, the thinking of the relation under the form of resemblance between members of a class, gives us all the conveniences and advantages of general or universal reasoning, one especial advantage being the ability to shift our point of view. Therefore, as well as for special reasons which will immediately come to light, the relation of Resemblance actually lies at the foundation of our inferences much oftener than the more decisive relation of Condition.

Our classification of arguments, in fine, may rest on this theorem.

II. All those Relations of objects in virtue of which inference from A to X is possible, may practically be considered as resolvable into these two,—Condition and Resemblance.

Arguments, again, fall primarily into two classes, according as a relation of the one kind or of the other is that which is assumed.

III. All arguments are reducible to the one or the other of Two Classes. In arguments of the First Class, the relation between A and X is that of Condition; in arguments of the Second Class, the relation between A and X is that of Resemblance.

It cannot be noted too early, that these two classes of arguments differ signally in logical validity; not essentially, indeed, but in the uses they are practically put to. Arguments of the first class admit of being so framed as to be logically impregnable. Arguments of the second class, having data such as they always receive in practice, cannot be so framed as to escape from a logical fallacy. The point is marked by Aristotle. It rests on a principle having wide applications in philosophy; and the proof and illustration of it will appear when we reach particulars.

In the meantime, our classification must be carried down a step farther.

When the relation is that of Resemblance, the inference holds equally from A to X, and backward from X to A. Consequently arguments of the second class have no variation affecting the inferential character.

But when the relation is that of Condition, it is far from being a question indifferent, in which direction the inference is taken. An inference from a conditioning fact to the fact which is conditioned, determined, or limited by it, is an inference very dissimilar in character to an inference the opposite way, from the conditioned fact to the fact which is its condition. Therefore arguments of the first class fall into two genera.

We have thus a final resolution of all arguments into Three Kinds, which correspond, substantially and in order, to Aristotle's three kinds as understood by Whately.

IV. The first class of arguments being distributable into two genera, the kinds of arguments which require separate analysis are three in all.—1. In arguments of the First Kind, A is a condition of X: we infer from condition to thing conditioned. The direction of the inference will be indicated if we describe these as Arguments from Condition. 2. In arguments of the Second Kind, A is conditioned by X: we infer from a thing conditioned to something which is a condition of it. The A being symptomatic of the X, these are aptly called Arguments from Symptom, or from Sign. 3. In arguments of the Third Kind, A and X resemble each other, and in respect of the point of resemblance are referred to the same class. These may be called Arguments from Resemblance or from Classification.

Each of these three kinds must now be examined more nearly.

1. The Argument from Condition.

20. The theory of this kind of argument may be drawn together in five propositions following:

I. If facts are known which are the sum or aggregate of all the conditions determining a fact unknown, the unknown fact may be inferred from these with positive certainty. It condition is possible, therefore, to gain through the argument from the relation a conclusion which is demonstratively true. Cases in which the data may be said to possess this character, causality, as embracing all the conditions which are immediate and liable to variation, are frequent in reasonings about the phenomena and events of the corporeal world.

II. If the known facts fall short, by even one, of making up the aggregate of all the conditions, the conclusion in which the unknown fact is inferred sinks to one degree or another of mere likelihood or probability. In reasonings about mental phenomena, involving human character and conduct, the data may be said to fall always short of the aggregate of conditions; and this is the kind of matter for dealing with which rhetorical rules are oftenest needed and most likely to be appealed to. Therefore, in practice, this kind of argument may be said to yield oftentimes conclusions having only a higher or lower degree of probability.

III. When the aggregate of the conditions is not made up in the data, the degree of probability belonging to the conclusion depends much less on the proportional number of the conditions known, than on the character of them or some of them. The decisive question is, whether among the known conditions there be any which is describable (popularly rather than philosophically) as the cause of the fact dependent.

IV. If among the conditions of a dependent fact there be discoverable some one which seems to exert, while the others do not seem to exert, a positive power or efficiency in the production of the dependent fact, we consider this efficient condition as a cause, and the dependent fact as its effect. If the cause or efficient condition is known to exist, there arises a presumption for the existence of the effect; yielding a conclusion whose probability is proportional to the probability of concurrence of all the negative conditions, and is destroyed by evidence that any one of these negative conditions is wanting. If the cause is not known to exist, the existence of the effect is not made in the lowest degree probable, even by the known concurrence of all the negative conditions. V. This application of the idea of causality admits a specification referable to reasonings in regard to human character and conduct. If an act of will is one of the conditions of a fact, we hold this act of will to be the cause of the fact. If the act of will is known to have taken place, the occurrence of the consequent fact may be inferred with a probability, modifiable or destroyable by the known occurrence or non-occurrence of the other conditions. If the act of will is not known or presumed to have taken place, no probability of the occurrence of the consequent fact is raised even by the known concurrence of all the other conditions.

This kind of argument cannot be admitted to have been theorized broadly enough, till it is traced beyond the idea of cause into the higher idea of condition. The argument plainly has its root in the thought, that the concurrence of all the conditions of a fact must carry with it the fact which is dependent on them. Our specifying of certain conditions as causes is only an after-thought; it suggests itself to us as a limitation, under which we may still hold the inference together, when it falls asunder in the attempt to grasp it by the broader end.

That the thought of the causal relation is really inessential, is proved by the easy and effective use of the argument which may so often be made in reasonings about the phenomena of body, in regard to which we truly never do apprehend the causal nexus, becoming acquainted with laws only, that is, with conditions affecting classes of objects. Even in dealing with material objects, it is true, we are driven on the search after true causes, in every case where we are uncertain as to having been able to gather up all the circumstances on which depends a fact we wish to determine. But in doing so, we are beginning to tread on that boggy ground in which physical science has so often lost her footing. Our deductions begin to put on that character of uncertainty, which bedims more or less all our thinking about mental attributes and events.

When we rise fairly into this higher sphere, and endeavoured to infer what has been or will be the course of human actions, we see man's rationally determined will conflicting with other principles of his nature, and with the wills of his fellow-men, and with the obstacles interposed by things external and bodily; and we are driven from the field of demonstration, by the impossibility of knowing exactly all the secret facts out of which the complicated struggle springs. But we seize and cling to that which is our normal instance of causation, namely, the act of will. If that act can be proved, we know that the clue is in our hands; and the closer we can approach to the proof of it, the nearer is the moment when we shall walk confidently through the maze. Failing direct proof of the act of will, we seek proof of those actuating antecedents which we call motives; proof, that is, of desires or aversions which, naturally or probably or inevitably, would issue in volition.

Arguing from motives, indeed, is one of the most common instances of the uses to which this argument is put. Concomitant circumstances (the dealing with which would yield arguments of our second kind) raise the question, whether a man committed a certain act. The means of determination that will first be thought of by any of us is the discovery, whether he was or was not actuated by any wish which that act would have helped to gratify. If we cannot discover the pre-existence of some such desire or aversion, hardly any evidence short of actual observation will either induce us to believe in his commission of the act, or encourage us to hope that we should be able to convince others. But let there be given the wish, the motive: then the consequent volition, and the act in which it is exhausted, become at once facts which are more or less probable. Yet the complication and the doubt are not wiped away. The proved motive may be checked by motives counteracting; the desire to kill or to rob may be stifled by prudence, or by fear of shame, or by awakening conscience: or, if the internal history of the actor discloses no facts throwing uncertainty on the event, the external circumstances may have made the act difficult or impossible. In a word, from the antecedent and conditioning facts, taken by themselves, we cannot infer the act with peremptory demonstrativeness, unless we have come into possession of an array of conditioning data, possessing a completeness which never perhaps was reached in any case, historical, judicial, or ordinary, exposed to such doubt as to leave an opening for argument in any shape. Therefore arguments drawn from other sources will be required in corroboration.

The analysis of this argument has thus been carried far enough to show what the kind of facts is among which materials may be sought for it; and perhaps also far enough to suggest some of its practical uses, and of the terms on which these are attainable.

Two or three hints may be subjoined:

First, In the attempt to prove a fact, which we know to have been preceded by certain other facts, our first business should be the identification of all those precedent facts which seem to come up to the character of conditions. Antecedents which are clearly not conditions will be set aside as barren.

Secondly, Among the conditions, if clearly we do not know all of them, our task is that of discovering which (it may be one, or it may be a combination of more) appear to have an efficient causal bearing on the fact to be proved. All other conditions are often describable negatively, as constituted, in Whately's phrase, by the absence of obstacles. "If," says he, "the cause be fully sufficient, and no impediment intervene, the effect in question follows certainly; and the nearer we approach to this, the stronger the argument."

Thirdly, The individual conditions of an individual fact are often justly describable as being instances of a general or universal law. Such a law, accordingly, may be stated in its generalized form as a condition of the fact in question. This view would supply the substance of an exact deductive syllogism or syllogisms; and much is often to be gained, in ease of convincing others, by starting from such a general principle.

Fourthly, An argument of this kind may always be made impregnable against logical attack, by an exact and candid incorporation, into the premise, of the degree of probability which is assigned to the conclusion.

Lastly, and contrariwise, The fallacy most likely to be committed in the use of the argument is the over-statement, in the conclusion, of the degree of probability which was assumed in the premise.

2. The Argument from Symptom.

21. This kind of argument, the simplest of all, is sufficiently theorized in one proposition.

I. A fact being known which is conditioned by facts unknown, each or any of the conditioning facts may be inferred; and each of them, whatever be its character or its comparative importance, may alike be inferred with positive certainty.

The correlation put in question, by this kind of argument and the preceding, displayed but a cloudy prospect when we looked forward from facts conditioning to facts conditioned. If even one has failed among those facts which are truly conditions, the dependent fact has not taken place; and the possibility of such failure, so very seldom, if ever, totally excludable in questions here interesting us, alloys our conclusion with more or less of doubt.

When the correlation is viewed from the opposite quarter of the horizon, it brightens with broad and steady light. Evidently our position is now such as to dispel all uncertainty. If the dependent fact is known to have occurred, how much are we entitled to infer in regard to the conditions? Why, that all of them must have occurred. For, if it were not so, if even one of them had failed, the dependent fact would be non-existent. Therefore the dependent fact, and its relation to the others, being justifiably assumed, it is open to us to infer any one or more of the conditions at will.

It should be noticed also with emphasis, that the relation of causality is here utterly ineffective. From the effect we may of course infer the cause; but only because it is one of the conditions. We may, from the same datum, infer with equal certainty the most trifling or purely negative of the conditions by which the efficiency of the cause was limited; and a condition of this character may be involved so necessarily in the nature and origin of the dependent fact, that it may thence be inferable quite peremptorily, though the individual circumstances constituting the cause should remain undiscoverable.

Nor does it happen seldom that a dependent fact, and all questions as to its cause, derive their whole practical importance from the materials they yield for determining some one of those seemingly insignificant conditions. Suppose a man to fall suddenly dead this afternoon. The circumstances observed as attending his death, and those which are detected on dissection of his body, are symptoms from which medical men will, if required, endeavour to decide what the disease was that killed him; yet their opinions may rise no higher than conjecture, and though established, might be valuable only in the interest of science. But of his dying this afternoon it is a palpable condition, though in no sense a cause, that he must have been alive this morning; and his having been so may have opened to him and his family the succession to valuable property. There has recently been brought before the Scottish courts of law a question of this very kind, stirred by the tragic fate of Franklin's Arctic expedition.

In the use of this argument, the point to be worked most carefully is, the ascertaining that the facts sought to be inferred are truly conditions of the given fact, and of no other. They must not, on the one side, be circumstances which might or might not have been antecedents of the given fact; circumstances the non-occurrence of which would have left it possible that the given fact might still have occurred. They must not, on the other side, be circumstances which, though symptomatic of the given fact, are also symptomatic of some other fact or facts different from it. The fallacy to which the argument is exposed must consist in a violation of the one or the other, or of both, of these cautions: in the assumption that X is a condition of A when it is only an accidental and inessential antecedent; or in the assumption that X can be a condition of nothing but A, when it may be also a condition of B or of C.

In attempting to infer from any one symptomatic fact, it is very often out of our power, through the imperfection of our acquaintance with the real relations between A and X, to gain premises which shall be more than probable, or capable of justifying more than a probable conclusion. We are able to assert only this; that our X is more or less probably a genuine condition of our A, and of it only. Herein lies the weakness besetting single arguments of this kind. It is removed by the accumulation of symptoms, all of which found arguments leading to the same conclusion; while all of them converge in the closing argument, founded on the mere fact of the accumulation of probabilities, on the impossibility or high improbability of the concurrence being consistent with any conclusion but that whereto each of the separate arguments tends. Arguments from symptom, thus weak in isolation when the relations of the facts are obscure, may safely be alleged to be capable of becoming, even in such a case, stronger by accumulation than arguments founded on any other kind of proof whatever.

Their weakness and their strength are alike instanced in that with which we are familiar in law, especially in the practice of criminal law, under the name of Circumstantial Evidence. Such evidence consists in facts founding arguments from symptom.

The doctrine of this kind of argument is not complete, until there is added to it the result of an original analysis made by Whately. This supplement is important enough to deserve being placed as a second leading proposition.

II. The Argument from Testimony is really an argument from symptom. Testimony is an assertion which would not have been made if it had not been true; so far only as the assertion and its truth bear this relation to each other, does the case possess the genuine character of testimony. The dependent fact, the A of the argument, is the fact that the testimony has been given; the condition, the X, is the fact that the testimony is true.

Faith in testimony is a rule of our conduct; distrust in testimony is only the exception. Accordingly, in trials at law, and elsewhere, also, when our knowledge of the facts comes wholly from the evidence of witnesses, we silently overlook the character of the source so long as there is no reason for suspecting that the source is tainted. We think out our conclusions from the testified circumstances, with the same confidence which we should have reposed in them if they had occurred before our own eyes. We do not think of the testimony as testimony, or probe it on that assumption, unless self-contradiction or other suspicious points raise distinctly the question, whether the witness has or has not told the truth.

3. The Argument from Resemblance.

22. This argument is easily recognisable when it is called The Argument from Example. The question raised is, whether a given law, say P, is obeyed by an object x, whose subject or non-subjection to that law we have it not in our power to determine by observation. We hold ourselves entitled to assume that the law is obeyed in at least one instance,—that is, by the observed object a. On the strength of the logical of this known instance or example, we infer that the law is obeyed in the unknown instance also. The point on which the theory of the argument rests, is the character of the relation between the known example and the unknown. They are referred to the same class (say S).

Our datum A is the assumption that a certain thing (say P) is true of a known individual a (or it may be more than one, but always fewer than all of the individuals constituting its class); our conclusion X is the assertion that the same thing (P) is true of the individual x not known unless related to a. The relation on which the inference hangs is the fact, that a and x resemble each other in some point different from that which is in question. This last step in the dissection dictates the form of the inference. Resembling individuals are referred to the same class; therefore that which is held to justify the inference from a to x is, that the two individuals, the known and the unknown, are members of one class (S). The risk of error arises from this, that the comparison between a and x is made in regard to some attribute different from that on the common possession of which the class S has been founded.

The argument takes a shape like this:—a is a P; but both a and x are S's; therefore x is a P.

It seems to be certain (though there is one high authority to the contrary) that the reasoning is elliptical. An intermediate conclusion is taken for granted, but suppressed; and there are really performed two successive acts of argumentation, both of which are explicable (though for the first the explication might often be dispensed with, even for The first of the two syllogisms is Inductive, being an inference from the particular or individual to the universal; the second is Deductive, being an inference from the universal to the particular or individual.

The skeleton of the inductive syllogism is laid bare in this formula:—a is a P; a is an S; therefore all the S's are P's. The conclusion gained by this induction becomes the major premise of the deductive syllogism, which may be formalized thus:—all the S's are P's; x is an S; therefore x is a P.

The deductive syllogism requires but a passing glance. Formally or logically it is faultless. If its conclusion is not certainly true, this must be because of some weakness in the assumptions it rests on. The minor premise, in which the unknown instance x is asserted to belong to the class S, can hardly ever be unwarranted. But its major premise has been borrowed from the preceding syllogism; and the method by which it was there come at is open to exception.

The inductive syllogism is logically fallacious. The flaw is an illicit process of the minor, which consists in inferring of "all" where we were entitled to infer only of "some," or "fewer than all." The premises would justify the conclusion, that "some of the S's are P's;" they do not justify the conclusion that "all the S's are P's."

The laws which are here operative prevail widely, not only in processes of communication, but over the whole domain of discovery and invention. The character of the "Inductive Philosophy" has been elucidated in various sections of this Encyclopaedia, especially in the Preliminary Dissertations. In one of the special articles an attempt was made to show briefly, in accordance with the same principles which are here founded on, how, on the one hand, all our practical inductions are necessarily faulty in form; and how, on the other hand, all the laws which have been laid down for inductive discovery, from Bacon to Mill and Whewell, are nothing else than expedients by the use of which the formal error may be reduced to a minimum which is practically inappreciable. (Logic, especially §§102, 103.) The Perfect Induction, in which, from the sum of all the constitutive particulars, we infer the constituted universal, is logically faultless; but it is practically useless, because our data never embrace all the particulars in any case where it is worth while to infer at all. Our actual processes of this sort are always Imperfect Inductions, in which our known particulars fall short of the sum by a larger or smaller proportion, and which therefore can logically lead only to a conclusion falling correspondingly short of universality.

The philosophical principles which rule Induction as the great method of scientific discovery pass over without restriction into the rhetorical field. The results of induction there exhibit themselves as the foundation of that which is the most popular and striking, but also the most dangerous, of all kinds of argumentation.

The Argument from Example does exercise a peculiar force of impression, especially on minds imperfectly accustomed to analysis, or allowed little time for analysing. It seems to make a direct appeal to experience. The two objects, the known and the unknown, a and x, are, if the materials are well selected, known to belong to one and the same class, to have the same name, in respect that both of them obey a certain law (the S). The a is likewise known to belong to another class, to have another name, in respect that it obeys another law (the P), which is the law whose compass is really in question. The inference attempted is, that x also obeys the law P. The principle of the inference is, that the first law implies the second. If it really does so, the conclusion will be true, though not rightly inferred: if it does not, the conclusion will be false.

Whether the first law does imply the second, is a question dependent on the exactness and success with which both laws have previously been examined.

The efficiency, again, of this antecedent scrutiny, will have been determined chiefly by the character of the matter argued about. The leading distinction is that which was indicated lately, between phenomena of the corporeal world and phenomena of mind. The former, taken as a class, admit of scrutiny, which, if instituted with adequate means, leads, though often by a long and tangled path, to positive knowledge in regard to all practical relations. The latter, taken as a class, are wrapped up in relations so complicated and obscure, that speculations as to human character and conduct must always rest within some or other of the degrees of mere probability. Universal laws are attainable, but are too vague to yield individual applications that shall be free from doubt; and laws of narrower compass intertwine and conflict together so incessantly and perplexingly, that the very satisfactory approach to certainty which we may usually attain as to large classes of events, diminishes as we narrow our classes, and dwindles into a succession of conjectures when we seek to carry beyond the verge of actual observation our acquaintance with the individual steps of individual human actions.

It is evident, in short, that, in argumentation about questions of the kind on which rhetorical rules have the firmest bearing, the Argument from Example is much more efficient for impression than for rational conviction; and hence much more powerful when addressed to unanalytic minds than when addressed to such as are acute in the taking of distinctions.

The outline of the theory may be set forth as follows:

I. An attribute being affirmable of one or more, but not all, of the objects constituting a given class, we hold ourselves entitled to affirm the same attribute, with greater or less probability, of another object in regard to which we know only that it is included in that class. But the inference rests on the assumption, that the attribute in question is common to all the objects of the class, or is implied in the attribute or law on which the class is founded. This assumption is always reached illogically; and the truth or probability of the conclusion to which it leads is dependent on the amount of knowledge which is attainable, and has antecedently been attained, in regard to the objects compared.

When we speak of an argument from Induction, we mean, as has been seen, an argument embracing only the first of the two syllogisms constituting this kind of argument. The name of argument from Example or Instance should belong specifically to the elliptical argument, which passes over the universal conclusion to reach the particular or individual. If we speak of an argument from Likeness or Parallelism, we refer to this kind; and Analogy is an indirect likeness, not very clearly separable from likeness that is direct. Arguments from Unlikeness or Contrariety also are referable to this kind; for unlikeness or contrariety can subsist only between objects which are comparable as belonging in some view or other to the same class. When we speak of an Argument from Experience, we really refer to the antecedents of the argument, to the manner in which the data have been gained; and the argument itself is from Induction or Example.

(III.) APPLICATION OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF ARGUMENTS.

23. The leading use derivable from a classification of arguments, and the only use of it which has been systematized thoroughly by rhetoricians or dialecticians, is theory that which it is maintained to serve by aiding in the Discovery of Premises or media of proof.

That the discovery of premises may really be aided by the possession of a well-digested stock of materials, is a truism. It is hardly less a truism, that the digesting of materials may be facilitated immensely by the possession of a well-devised scheme of distributive principles. Now, it is doubtless true that every special department of human knowledge, every kind of matter that supplies objects to be reasoned about, has principles peculiar to itself; and affecting very extensively the distribution of the truths which constitute its system. But the rules of arrangement which are dictated by the peculiar principles, say of a science or of any other organizable collection of facts or laws, are no more than subordinate. They are over-ridden by other and wider principles,—principles which must be common to the given department with others, and which dictate higher rules of arrangement. These, again, fall similarly within the sway of certain principles which are the widest of all, and by which is prescribed the great outline of every system of knowledge.

It is scarcely rash to say that, for all those departments of knowledge whose objects are described as Contingent Truths,—for all, in short, which fall beyond the sphere of the exact sciences,—the highest principles of arrangement that can be reached are those, or something very like those, which lie at the base of the classification of arguments now expounded. In this or that department of knowledge, and in the application of arguments to this or that special purpose, the classification may be found to be quite barren of suggestions; but this will occur only because, for particular reasons, the arguments which are available lie wholly within one or another of the three divisions that have been chalked out. When the arguments accessible and required are such that they belong to different kinds from among our three, it will be found that the threefold scheme supplies a framework into which they will fall naturally and easily, and within whose several compartments all subdivisions prompted by the specific character of the matter will be distributable without confusion or intermixture.

Nor, even if the threefold scheme is not directly used, will the principles on which it stands be unfruitful of suggestive hints to those who care to master them and reflect on them.—The first point to be considered, when the discovery of arguments is aimed at, is the character of the conclusion for which we wish to find premises,—the nature of the relation in virtue of which the known and the unknown are connected in our thoughts, and are likely to be connected in the thoughts of others. Is our conclusion evidently a dependent fact? Our search is guided first and chiefly towards its conditions, the facts on which it is dependent; and among these we dig for some fact which may be accepted as a cause. If our conclusion is itself a fact on which we know others to be consequent, our exertions are directed towards the finding out, among these, of some which are not only consequent but dependent on it; of some in regard to which we may be assured that, but for the fact which is our conclusion, these could not be facts at all. But we may not be able to avail ourselves of either of these relations; and our incapacity may spring from either of two sources. We may not be able to discover any known fact as to which we can peremptorily assert, that it is directly either a condition of our conclusion or conditioned by it; or, still more frequently, although we can for ourselves trace the relation of condition as connecting our conclusion with some other fact, we may be satisfied that the connection will either be hard to be understood, or unlikely to be readily admitted by those whom we wish to convince. In either of these events, we are driven on the search for facts known to be in certain points similar to that which we desire to establish: we found on that acknowledged similarity, and on the classification and nomenclature which have their birth in it; and we found as strongly as we may on the presumption, that similarity in certain features implies similarity in others more or less directly allied to them.

Still more likely is it to happen, that even in the quarter in which our strongest proofs are detected, these are found insufficient to justify any reasonable expectation of our being able to establish more than a probability in favour of our conclusion. Such a state of matters puts us on the search for concurrent proofs of other kinds. To cases of this sort are referable considerations which will next be stated.

24. The several Kinds of Arguments possess different Applicability degrees of Applicability to the different kinds of matter. The doctrine in regard to these differences has been sketched by Whately briefly but satisfactorily; and to his exposition nothing needs to be added but a few features on the margins of the plan.

Two remarks may be premised.—First, the cases in which it is worth while to consider such questions of applicability are those in which, whether on account of the character of the proposition to be established, or on account of the position of the persons to be convinced, it is anticipated that conviction will not be reached unless through several arguments all pointing towards the desired conclusion. In the next place, though all the arguments converge towards one focus, they are likely to converge by different paths, or to discharge different functions. Certain of them, describable as Probatory, will be those on which the stress of the proof mainly rests. Others will be Preparatory, serving the use of paving the way, whether by the removal of prejudices or objections, or by the imparting of prepossessions positively favourable. Others will be properly Confirmatory, as strengthening positions which the main group of arguments has not fortified beyond attack.

Practically considered, then, all the kinds of questions on which rhetorical theory has any effective bearing may be said to be three: Matters of Opinion, or, in other words, questions of principle, or questions in which the conclusion is a general or universal proposition, not the statement of an individual fact: Questions as to Individual Facts that are Past: Questions as to Individual Facts that are Future.

1. In the endeavour to generate belief in universal propositions, the arguments chiefly available are those from Condition. The weakness incident to each argument of this kind, taken singly, may be cured by accumulation; several concurring probabilities may yield positive certainty. These arguments are often aided, sometimes in the way of preparation, sometimes in the way of corroboration, by the authority of competent judges, which founds arguments from Testimony. In both ways, likewise, aid is furnished by arguments from Example, which are most efficient when close analysis cannot be relied on.

2. In the endeavour to generate belief in individual facts or events that are past, arguments from Symptom are made attainable by the nature of the case, and are those which are chiefly available. Testimony, founding arguments referable to that class, holds a prominent place. In all difficult cases, however, there are used, as preparatory or as corroborative, or for both purposes, arguments from Condition, (oftenest from motives), and arguments from Example.

3. In the endeavour to generate belief in individual facts or events which are future, the argument from symptom is of course excluded by the nature of the case. If the process of conviction is attempted on fair and legitimate grounds, and is addressed to minds competent in respect of ability and knowledge, the body of the probation consists in arguments from Condition; and arguments from Example are introduced only in corroboration. But if the process is unfairly conducted, or if the qualifications of the minds addressed are poor, the functions of the two kinds of arguments are very often and naturally reversed.

25. It remains to be asked whether the materials that have been collected, or others combinable with them, are capable of suggesting any laws for the Arrangement of Arguments.

There are just three relations of arguments which have been, or can be, alleged to determine the order in which they should be used. They might conceivably be arranged either according to their Kind, or according to their Purpose, or according to their Comparative Strength.

The third of these principles has dictated to rhetorical writers several canons, and particularly these two. It has been advised by some to arrange arguments by the rule of the climax, rising from the weakest to the strongest; and it has been advised by others to arrange them by a rule borrowed from military tactics, placing the weakest in the middle, where their shortcomings may be covered by the stronger forces that flank them on each wing. It is needless to examine or contrast either these two conflicting rules or any others derived from the same principle. For the principle itself is hollow and worthless. If an arrangement seemingly prescribed by it should be found to be effective, this can only be because there really lies under it a deeper law, either that of kind or that of purpose. In reference to strength, perhaps the only rule that could usefully be gathered is this: that arguments possessing no real force of conviction over those to whom they are addressed ought never to be used, unless they cannot possibly be dispensed with.

The only rules of real value that can be laid down for the order of arguments depend primarily on their kind, and secondarily on their purpose.

1. In reference to Kind, it should first of all be accepted as a rule, not to be violated unless for the most imperative reason prompted by special emergency of purpose, that arguments of the same kind are to be grouped together, no intrusion by arguments of another kind being permitted. A departure from this method cannot but give birth to confusion both of thinking and of expression.

As to the order of the several kinds, when all are available, required, and used, the natural and general arrangement is that in which the three kinds have now been examined. Causal arguments raise an antecedent or preliminary likelihood in favour of the conclusion; arguments from symptom support the conclusion more or less firmly by evidence derived from known facts seeming to stand in dependence on it; and arguments from example remove lingering doubts, by showing that the conclusion is at the very least not inconsistent with that which experience has shown to be true in similar or analogous cases.

2. The question of Purpose has, in effect, been raised in the last paragraph. The rule for the ordinary and normal arrangement of the three kinds of arguments is dictated by the consideration, that each of the three does ordinarily serve, better than the others, one of the three special purposes, preparation, direct probation, corroboration.

Purpose and kind, however, may and often do jar with each other.

The largest class of cases is that in which the causal relation is not likely to be distinctly apprehended, and in which therefore the argument from condition is unfit to act as preparatory. The remedy oftentimes applicable is one already noted for a different purpose: the office of preparation is devolved on the argument from example.

The conflict between kind and purpose becomes yet more decided, when an argumentative discourse is addressed to persons labouring under opinions or prejudices strongly adverse to the conclusion which the debater desires them to entertain. Adverse prepossession, indeed, is always to be supposed possible where the writer or speaker has not the first word. Accordingly the question here arises, What should be the place of Refutation? The unfavourable position of an argumentator who has to make the refutation of an adversary the main part of his task, may justify a farther deviation from rules than any other circumstances he could be placed in. The more deeply the counter-opinion may be supposed to be rooted in the minds of the recipients, the earlier should the refutatory treatment be entered on. An opinion which we wish to sow cannot make even the beginnings of germination, till opposing prejudices have been rooted out.

III. THE PROCESS OF PERSUASION.

26. To this process, as presenting the field on which are won the most dazzling triumphs of oratory, the name of Eloquence is very usually given by way of eminence; and the theory hence the distance is short to that closer limitation, hardly of uncommon, which refuses the name of Eloquence to all communicative processes, except such as either entertain the design of persuasion, or exhibit a preponderance of its distinctive elements. Against all such limitations a protest was taken at the beginning of this treatise.

It is true, however, that we have here that compartment in the domain of Eloquence, which is not only the most powerfully and generally interesting, but more readily susceptible than any other of being subordinated to a theory that is peculiar and independent. In imaginative and emotive eloquence, doubtless, much more thoroughly than in that which is merely argumentative, brilliant success is unattainable, unless when its foundation is laid in native genius. Yet reflective study of the discoverable laws of the process will not only guide and strengthen, for results useful and even eminent, powers of all degrees below the highest, but will teach to the highest powers themselves much that may advantageously direct and plume their flight. The ship that is bent on a dangerous voyage must indeed be ably commanded and fully manned; but her captain does not set sail till he has obtained the most accurate charts. The rhetorical laws of persuasion, though their use presupposes the possession of an ability and knowledge which they cannot impart, do yet possess extensive uses, negative and cautionary. They are the charts of a broad and stormy sea, whose currents are heady but not lawless, and whose soundings, though deep, are not beyond the reach of the plummet. Eloquence, in this its loftiest region, not less than in regions that are humbler, is decisively an art, a process whose steps are dictated by preformed design, and whose theory is discoverable and has been discovered. It stands in no way differently from other arts demanding and rewarding the exertion of elevated energies, in having, as conditions imposed on all applications of its theory, such maxims as these: That the use of all rules of art is chiefly no more than negative and prohibitory; and that, even for such purposes, the utility arises, not from the rule itself, but from intelligent and complete apprehension of its principle.

Our psychological analysis of the mental process which may issue in volition, must now be kept carefully in sight. In its normal shape, the process unfolds itself as constituted by at least two steps which are characteristically cognitive or transcend cognition: the first, a fact of Imagination; the second, a fact of Wishing, whether desire or aversion. On the latter of these the volition follows. Not less incumbent on us is it to remember, how this most prominent series of steps is modified by attendant Emotions. While it was maintained, in the psychological outline, that the emotion is really an obscure concomitant of each of those steps, it was observed, also, that the emotion may force itself into prominence as a step intervening between each two of them. Indeed, the substance of one part of the doctrine which was laid down is this: that in proportion to the force of the cognitive or higher fact will be the certainty that the Emotion (at first overpowered by that fact) will recur, and in its turn become prominent. It must now be alleged broadly that Persuasive Eloquence aims at the generation of a process in which the cognitive and higher steps shall have such force as to bring up a consequent emotion at every step. In the most advanced stage of our researches we may have to glance at cases proceeding far towards the completion of the process. Complication also of the cognitive and higher steps, such as those which were pointed out when we specially examined volition, would suggest considerations having much value for the dissection and treatment of complex and exceptional cases. But such questions may be ignored while we investigate the general theory of Persuasion. The main reason why they are inessential is this: that the determining steps in the process are the first two. The others are ruled by these; and, if repeated or varied, they must be so through and after repetition and variation of these their antecedents.

Let this, then, be remembered as a cardinal point—that the theory of Persuasion is virtually complete, when it has determined the laws regulating the generation of the first two steps: that in which the prominent fact is the Imagination of the object, the wish for which is to be the prompter towards action; and, next, that in which the prominent fact is the Emotion which is consequent on the Image, and which must be excited before the wish can have birth. The process whose laws we have to seek is the generation, through language, of Images excitative of Emotions tending towards desire or aversion.

The field thus staked out may be fenced off in sections. In the first place, we cannot safely, at any stage of our survey, accept anything but the Images as our chief object of scrutiny. Everything of specific doctrine that is attainable and useful relates primarily to the images; and it relates to the one or the other of the two aspects which must be combined in a complete inspection of them. The positive and specific laws of persuasive eloquence, accordingly, fall into two sections. The first of these contains Laws of Form; and those laws fall into two sub-sections—laws affecting the Images, and laws affecting the consequent Emotions. In both parts of this section we are absolved from all obligation to consider the further tendency of the emotions. In other words, the laws here emerging are common to Eloquence and Poetry. In the second section we retire into our own exclusive territory. The laws contained in it are Laws of Matter; and the question here arising is, what kinds of objects are, when imaginatively represented, likely to operate, through desire or aversion, towards the excitement of volition.

In the way, however, of introduction to these two groups of determinate laws, certain considerations should be suggested, which, although not perfectly digestible into a system, may yet be methodized to a certain extent; and which deserve to be classified, as forming a section of preliminary and general doctrines. Our sections of laws will thus be three.

(I.) LAWS OF PERSONAL RELATION.

27. Persuasion, like every other communicative process, is a game which must have at least two players. The parties, it is true, hold attitudes which through all changes are opposed to each other: the one is steadily aggressive, the other only defensive or receptive. Our chief attention is rightly given to the active side; but the position of the side which is comparatively passive can no more be neglected with safety, in the attempt to understand the evolutions, than it can be in the actual performance of them.

A maxim which might be called the Law of Adaptation runs through the whole theory of communication, like the heart-strand round which is twisted the cordage forming a rope. The duty of the operator is not that of making good his own position, but that of reconciling his own position with the position of the persons operated upon. This is strictly the fact even in exposition and argumentation; and, in the performance of these processes in individual cases, the necessity of adaptation presses itself on every intelligent debater. But in the general theorizing of processes aiming at the communication of belief, the maxim is not forced into that prominence which it imperatively exacts when we begin to look into the theory of persuasion. In the attempt to generate belief, the communicator and the recipient stand rather in different postures than on different ground; in the attempt to excite imagination and emotion the ground is different as well as the posture. Here, therefore, the active party of the two is urgently called on to consider the relation of the other.

Imagination, and consequent Emotion, are to be excited by the discourse. Accordingly the images must be presented both vividly and in their emotive relations; and the communicator must possess adequately both imaginative and emotive susceptibility; while, besides these qualifications, he must also have power and skill of language sufficient for due expression both of the images and of the emotions. It is no less true, on the other hand, that the process, even if fitly performed, will fail of all effect, or be but very partially successful, unless the recipients be on their part fitly qualified. Fortunately, however, the qualifications needed on this side are lower in degree and rarely wanting. Susceptibility is quite as frequent and as keen in those who hear or read as in those who speak or write. Imagination, too, of that receptive character which can readily form a scene or a character whose features are drawn for it by a stronger hand, is a gift diffused with beneficent abundance; and therefore the field of influence is widely open for that self-dependent power, so much more rarely given, which weds its scattered experiences into unions so novel and inspires its images with a strength so life-like, that we rightly call such imagination original, and exaggerate but excusably in describing it as creative.

A further step of dissection is required, both for justifying one of the demands which are thus made on the orator, and for founding more than one corollary which will find a place hereafter.

It was asserted that one who is to excite others to feeling, must himself not only imagine but feel. The assertion is common-place and universally admitted: its reasons may reward a little scrutiny. Those to whom emotive images are imparted are acted on by them in each of two ways.

In the first place, the images operate Directly, through their own objective force. An image representing an interesting object cannot fail, even though it should be inefficiently imparted, to excite emotion in a mind which possesses activity of imagination enabling it to frame the image for itself from the hints that have been set before it. The same image, if exhibited with the fulness and brightness of oratorical genius, will excite emotion in minds which would not be excitable under less energetic prompting.

In the second place, the images operate Indirectly. They do so when they are presented in an aspect shewing their having excited, in the mind of the presenter, emotions of the character which he desires to transfuse into the minds of others. In a word, they operate through the great Law of Sympathy. Of this mighty spring of human emotion, and desire, and action, we must never allow ourselves quite to lose sight while we endeavour to trace the workings of emotive eloquence. If there were room for illustrative description of its effects, these might most wisely be given in the beautiful declamation with which Quintilian strives to enforce the law of emotion on the orator. It should be remarked particularly, however, that, in all attempts at passionate excitement, sympathy must, whether we will or not, be active either for us or against us. An image which Processes we have fancied but faintly or depicted but poorly, may hence derive great emotive efficacy, if only it has evidently affected ourselves deeply. An image strongly framed and brilliantly expressed may have its moving power multiplied a thousandfold, by the evidence that it has deeply moved ourselves. But if, even when such an image has been displayed, we, the framers, are cold under its light, there is imminent risk that those who watch us will be infected with a sympathetic chill.

(II.) LAWS OF FORM.

28. Inquiry into the form of the emotive images,—the manner in which they may be represented effectively,—calls our attention necessarily towards the Words in which they are expressed. All the laws of form gather some of their data from truths directly involved in the functions of language; and this is the fit place for so much as is genuine and useful in those cumbrous Rules of Style, which have been constructed as aids to imaginative and passionate eloquence. But here, as elsewhere, the reasons of the rules will occupy us more than the rules themselves.

The whole doctrine of this first and decisive step in the process of persuasion, rests on those Laws of Imagination which were outlined in our psychological introduction.

The deepest courses of the foundation are laid in that primary law, which limits imagination to objects thought of as Individuals.—Fencing the class of imaginable objects round about by this impassable barrier, we must, however, beware of shutting out certain kinds of objects, which, though very abundant within the domain of imagination, do often lie dangerously close to its frontiers. We must steadily avoid the error of supposing, that objects of sense are the only objects that can be imagined. In philosophical strictness, indeed, such objects are imaginable only as having been, or as being capable of becoming, objects of perception; that is, as having been, or being thought of as being, factors or elements in mental facts. But in imagination, as in perception, their objective characteristics monopolize the attention so thoroughly, that the subjective side vanishes altogether from spontaneous consciousness, and is recognisable only through energetic reflection. It is likewise true, that our imagining and remembering of objects perceived is beyond all comparison more clear and vivid, than our imagining and remembering of facts of consciousness in which perception has had no part. So widely does this law rule, that our imagining of facts purely mental has to be made clear and bright through analogies drawn from our ideas of corporeal phenomena; a truth which is instanced in every word or phrase by which we strive to express mental facts. This difference in ease of imaginability, between objects of the one class and objects of the other, will immediately be put to use. But it must be remembered firmly that objects of the one class are imaginable as well as objects of the other. Nor is it too early to note this truth on the other side; that, while our imagination of corporeal objects is the more vivid, our imagination of mental phenomena is in a like degree the more interesting or excitative of emotion. Indeed it is only through their relation to mind that external objects, whether perceived or imagined, are interesting or emotive at all.

Another point of doctrine having a broad applicability to the theory of persuasion is this.—Imagination, of the kind which has here been called synthetic, has a much wider sway than that which we are apt to assign to it. The listener who seems to be merely gathering in passively the sweet fancies expressed in a recited poem, or the stirring pictures painted by a fervid orator, is really, if he does form the images for himself in the faintest degree, performing an imaginative process of the very same kind,—a process constituted by facts obeying the same laws,—as that which, in the mind of the poet or the orator, has given birth to the imagery by which his derived activity is prompted. The difference between the two processes is a world-wide one; but, great as it is, it is nothing else than a difference in degree. The recipient must synthesize as well as the communicator; although he does synthesize from materials whose exuberance makes his task easy, and is able after all to form only a picture which almost always is as dim as the last rays of twilight, in comparison with the tropical sunshine of the imagery whose hints he strives to re-compose.

By thus placing ourselves close enough to the recipient to see clearly the position he truly holds, we gain a glimpse of the relations between him and the other party, which invites us to examine more minutely the ground that lies between them.—No image formed in one mind can, by any medium of communication that is either possible or conceivable, be transposed into any other mind with either complete or exact similarity of elements. The image as it lived in the mind of the original imaginer is one thing; the image which the attempt to communicate it has evoked in any other mind is another thing. Besides the immeasurable shortcoming caused by that shortcoming in imaginative power which was pointed to in the last paragraph, there is a shortcoming (and this the only one against which any precautions can be taken) arising from this fact—that the original image has been communicated through certain media, each of which is inadequate in its own peculiar way, but all of which have imperfection of efficacy as a common characteristic, an imperfection disappointing to the inventor and crippling to the mental mobility of those for whose excitement the invention has been framed. What is the most exquisite statue or the most masterly painting, to the vision of grandeur or of beauty which hovered in the airy dreamland of the artist's fantasy, undimmed as yet by the shadows of that common daylight in which he had to aim at giving it visibility, and undeformed by the jarring of those mechanical obstacles against which he was to contend in giving a body to its likeness?

The fact lies straight in our path, that imperfections, different both in kind and in the specific character of the result, but still great and unavoidable, impede all attempts at the communication of imagery through language. In each of the points which are exposed to danger,—in respect of completeness and in respect of exactness,—the communicated image, the image raised in the recipient mind, is made, by the imperfections specially incident to language, to be more or less, and often very far, dissimilar and inferior to the image by the expression of which it was suggested. The picture or the statue is one visible thing; an observant spectator, if he shuts his eyes and remembers what he has seen, is in possession of an image which represents with reasonable correctness the work of art, however far it may fall short of the artist's ideal. The suggestive weakness of the arts of design lies in their tendency to let us rest content with mere sight and memory, instead of attempting to soar to the imagination of the artist's creative thought. The suggestive weakness belonging to language operates in a different direction. If an image so communicated is operative at all, it cannot be so by being merely excitative of memory; for there is nothing to remember, the words being mere symbols, empty till they suggest the relative ideas. Suggestion must take place; poetry and eloquence are excitative of imagination through suggestion, association of ideas, and through that channel only; the doctrine is of great value in the theory of both arts. But, in either of two ways, the object suggested may not be of the kind it should have been. On the one hand, the words expressing the image may suggest some image widely different; or, on the other hand, they may suggest some mental process which is not imagination at all, or has not imagination for its most prominent element. The modifications under which the several failures thus hinted at are most likely to occur, will appear in some degree if we take them as illustrations of two leading propositions, under which may be specified all that is essential to the formal doctrine of imagery designed to excite emotion.

29. (I.) The shortcomings incident to the result of attempts at communicating emotive imagery through language, are traceable to three several Characteristics inseparable from the method of communication.—First, the communication takes place, not directly through perception or simple reproduction, but through suggestive relations prompting an act of synthetic imagination. Secondly, the suggestive ideas are communicated, not simultaneously, but successively. Thirdly, the symbolic character of words, while it is the foundation of their pre-eminence among all media of communication, does yet impose on them certain specific disqualifications.

(i.) Evidently, the restrictions imposed by the first of these considerations do not well admit of being formulized into specific rules. The doctrine, however, accompanies us through all more minute inquiries, and is always to be remembered as constituting a condition precedent, under which only these have truth or value. Perhaps it may be worth while to work out of it two corollaries, which, vague as they are, come in contact at more points than one with the relation between the communicator and the recipient.

First, the formation of the image by the mind recipient is the easier, in proportion as the image which the words are designed to express is the simpler, or constituted by the fewer parts or elements capable of being separately imagined.

Secondly, while the character of imaginable objects, and that of the process issuing in synthetic imagination, concur in making it impossible for any image so formed to be absolutely simple, an image expressed in words must, on account of the indirect character of the method, be even less simple, or must be constituted by a larger number of imaginable parts, than an image of the same object might have been if it were the simple reproduction of what was given in perception. Consequently, in representation of this kind, the relation between the parts and the whole demands a recognition especially emphatic. The formation of a complex image by the mind recipient is the easier, in proportion as the image which the words are designed to express possesses unity, or (to speak more accurately) systematic totality; that is, in proportion as all the constitutive ideas are evolved in subordination to one prominent and paramount idea.

The pre-requisite for the application of these principles to practice, is the successful striving, in the formation of the image in the mind from which it is to issue, after the closest possible approach to simplicity, and the utmost reduction of complexity to its central and combining law. Such success can be won only by vigour both of imagination and of judgment; and these are not the fruit of rules. Nevertheless, the aiming at a mark too distant to be hit is excellent practice for the shooter; and in intellectual as in moral aspiration, the station which we struggle to attain cannot be too high. We are helped also by every hint, which clears up our idea either of the end we are to look to or of the means which lie between us and it.

The hints thus thrown out stand in no real contradiction to a maxim which has frequently been assigned by rhetoricians from Cicero downwards. It recommends Circumstantiality as an excellence in a word-picture drawn for the purpose of aiding persuasion. That a certain complexity of features is indispensable, was broadly asserted in our second corollary. It may farther be allowed that emotive images must generally have greater fulness of parts, and consequently of expression, than that which is either required or advantageous in the thinking and expression of argument. But when circumstantiality is advised, it is only meant that there shall not be wanting circumstances, features, incidents, sufficient both in number and in character to suggest lively images, and to present these in interesting relations. It is a question of particulars, how far the elaboration ought to go. Sometimes brevity, and a brevity that is extreme, may be dictated by the position of the auditors. Some of the most hasty of those thunder-flashes which dazzle in the orations of Demosthenes, are shot forth briefly, because they are references to facts as familiar and as exciting as their daily life to every one who heard him. Oftenest account has to be taken of the powers of the poet or orator. High genius possesses strong tools, for the want of which ordinary talent must make up by the use of others that work more slowly. But, on all sides beyond and around, expatiation is hemmed in by the principle of our corollaries. Fulness of detail tempts both towards tediousness and towards confusion; and the two are equally hostile to the easy and vivid excitement of imagination in those who suffer under them.

(ii.) The law for which the ground is cleared in the second of the characteristics laid down in our theorem, owes the most valuable illustrations it has received, to Lessing, by whom it was first distinctly exhibited and put to use; and to Fischer, the latest of those who have systematically expounded it. It comes to light most readily in a comparison between the procedure of poetry and that adopted by the arts of design; and it is in aesthetics only, or specially in the theory of poetry, that it has hitherto been fully used. But it rules not less directly in the imaginative section of eloquence.

It rests on two pillars. On the one side stands the peculiar nature of the process of communication by language, as working through succession; over against this foundation stands the independent activity which must be exerted by the receptive mind, and which may and must be exerted more freely when language is its prompter than in any other case.

While the arts of design represent in space, literature represents in time. The former, therefore, barred from representing change and succession, are strong in the representation of simultaneity: visible objects of considerable complexity are representable in sculpture; and painting is limited in its accumulation of features by nothing but the bounds within which the eye can take in a scene as one whole. Language, in its picturing forth of images, is not indeed shut out from the representation of simultaneity so utterly as those arts are from the representation of succession; language, in its grasp of objects, is infinitely more elastic than visual perception; and this mainly because it hints to the mind rather than dictates to it, and is thus not so truly the instrument of art as the mover of imagination the real instrument. Still, in respect of the expressed image (which, not the image raised in the recipient mind, is here in view), language is on this side hemmed in within a very narrow territory. Its strength, its characteristic field of adventure, lies in the representation of change and succession.

Therefore, in the first place, language, as a prompter of imagination, has, as its royal appanage, the domain of mind, not that of body. The field over which it bears sway, the class of objects which its nature fits it for representing, is constituted by mental phenomena, the very essence of whose manifestation is succession and change, phenomena which are not cognisable in consciousness otherwise than as successive changes. This is what its operation in time empowers language to do. Let us ask, next, what that operation prohibits it from doing.

Language, then, as a prompter of imagination, has hardly any power at all in the direct representation of objects of sense. Such an object must be simple in the extreme, if words can paint it so as to excite an image at all like the original. As to the giving of expression to the physical characteristics of external things, the sciences descriptive of body (especially those dealing with bodies organic) bear testimony to the difficulty which words have in performing the task; though patient study of descriptions is there demanded and granted, and though the resultant scientific idea of the object is not required to come up to a complete reproduction of its visible appearance. But he who, treating a corporeal object, designs his language-picture of it to be at the utmost a sketch, from which a mind-picture of it shall be painted by others, does, on the one hand, desire to create in those other minds much more than a scientific skeleton; while, again, he is not entitled to expect that those minds shall work out the result through exertions of untiring industry. If the object is very complex, the features of it which were first described may be absolutely forgotten before the description arrives at the last; it will be impossible, also, to avoid raising subordinate elements into so undue a prominence as to generate confusion worse confounded; and, over and above these difficulties, the weary pain of the continuous effort which the receptive mind is commanded to make, must throw it out of the imaginative mood either into inertness or into conjectural questioning. Nor is this all. If the receptive mind possesses its needful share of imaginative activity, its own energy will speedily free it from the dominion of its task-master. From some of the earliest suggestions conveyed to it, it will begin to frame fancies for itself: it will attend to these, not to the later hints of its instructor; or it will catch up these hints as sounds are caught by a man half-asleep, and weave some of them, with its own visions, into a web to which the words it hears have lent but few threads either of warp or of woof. In fine, when a description is vaunted as "pictorial" or "graphic," it may be that the epithets are used in a sense in which they denote a real excellence. Oftener and more naturally, they signify what is not a healthy growth of art, but an excrescence symptomatic of disease.

How is the cure to be found or the distemper prevented? By the translation of simultaneity into succession; by guiding our words to the representation, not of something which is here or there, but of something which (standing in a suggestive relation to it) was in time past, and is now changing to something else, and will hereafter change into yet another thing. Suggestive language represents bodies through their changes: its sphere is action, not that which acts or is acted on; its world is a world of motion, not of rest. Yet further, it cannot represent what has been called the action of bodies, otherwise than through analogies with action proper, the activity of mind, or with some or other of those mental changes out of which action issues or in which it seeks its consummation and its end. Individual changes of body become known to us only through individual changes which they excite in our minds. Even if the bodily change is the thing which we desire to make the leading object of the image,—yet the mental effect, whether feeling, or wish, or volition, or thought, must come up and be expressed as that which will individualize the image of the corporeal excitant. If that which we desire to make the prominent feature of the image be any of the relative mental changes, the corporeal attributes sink necessarily into the background.

The corporeal class of attributes will be the prominent features if we aim chiefly at making the image vivid,—that is, at intensifying the first step in the persuasive or poetical process. The mental class of attributes will be the prominent features if we aim chiefly at making the image emotive or interesting,—that is, at intensifying the second step of the process. But neither class can ever fail to find expression in the words by which we communicate that image.

The law, then, into which the hint thrown out in the second characteristic has effloresced, may be drawn to a point in some such shape as this.—As a process operating through succession and change, imaginative and emotive representation through language has mental changes assigned to it as constituting its distinctive sphere of objects; and, in the endeavour to represent corporeal things, the process is limited to the expression of changes loosely describable as actions, and standing related to action proper and its mental concomitants.

(iii.) The third of the characteristics calls for less explanation. It points at the power which language has, not only of exciting imagination, but of prompting thinking proper,—that is, especially, the formation of concepts, and general reasoning through these. As being symbols through which we can think, and as being the only kind of symbols through which we can think to good purpose, words are essential conditions of our ability to extend our thoughts beyond the individual to the universal, from objects taken in isolation to classes which objects constitute. We are enabled to do so through our possession of common terms, the names of classes; by seizing hold of these, we swing ourselves upward out of the clear but not elevated region filled by singular terms, the names of individuals.

But the law of compensation rules in the whole world: every good thing must have its price paid. Common terms occur continually among our words; because the idea of a class is continually springing up among our thoughts. Consequently language is constantly tempting us out of the field of mere imagination, into one which lies indeed on a higher level, but which yet, being a different field, may be one we did not wish to enter. It is absolutely impossible that an image expressed in words should stop short with exciting the imagination of those who receive it; it must excite judgment also; it must set them a-thinking; it must lead them, for a short way or a long one, into trains of reasoning. This is, in one view, a mighty and a blessed effect. Eloquence would be powerless were it not produced; poetry without it would be a mere plaything; poetry is dignified by it with its prerogative as one of the great rulers (though a ruler not sitting on the highest of the thrones) of human thought and of moral activity. In a view which is raised more directly by our present studies, the tendency even of imaginative language to prompt judgment is a weakness; and language used in persuasive representation must be strengthened against it.

The weakness is universally acknowledged; and rhetoricians, whether able or not to detect its most remote sources, have hardly ever failed either to discover the remedy or to describe it with sufficient clearness. A place is usually given to it among the rules for attaining that quality of style which is called Animation or Vivacity; by which is meant an aptness of language for exciting imagination and emotion. The common rule may be fitted into the system here under exposition, by being framed in such a shape as the following:

Singular terms, the names of objects thought of as individuals, are the only terms which are directly suggestive of Imagination only, to the exclusion of other modes of thought. These, then, are the words fittest to excite images, and are preferable to all others when they are obtainable, and when no concurrent aim forbids their exclusive use. But common terms, the names of classes,—which do not suggest imagination (or individuality its object) otherwise than indirectly and incidentally,—must and should be of frequent occurrence. Now, that indirect suggestiveness of individuality, which is possessed by common terms, is in the inverse ratio of the extensiveness of the classes they denote, or in the direct ratio of their specification or approach to individu- ality. Therefore, for the excitement of imagination, when an idea may be expressed by either or any of two or more common terms, the Less Extensive Term should be preferred to the more extensive. A special method, which is both common and very effective, is the limitation of the species or characterization of the individual by Descriptive Epithets.

30. In the last section we have studied the nature and the partially applicable remedies of certain failures in effect, which are due to imperfections cleaving inseparably to the process of communication by words. There will now pass before us certain failures in effect, which may or may not take place, but which do take place frequently, and which are attributable, not to anything in the process, but to something in the matter it works on, or in the relation of this matter to the persons whom the communication is designed to affect.

It is desired that by these persons the object represented to them shall be imagined vividly, and shall excite consequent emotion. But the object may, while it is nevertheless one which must be impressed as strongly as possible, be either more or less difficult to imagine, or more or less deficient in emotive interest; and this, either because of its own nature, or (more frequently) because it is ill understood or little cared about by those on whom the thought of it is to be urged.

Against the evil issue thus threatened,—of inertness in imagining, or coldness in feeling,—provision is ministered through that broadly beneficent power of language, to denote all objects and suggest all modes of consciousness, which came in our way a little ago as one of the obstacles impeding imaginative suggestion. Words prompt us, not to imagine only, but to judge, reason, compare. Our object cannot fail, no object can, to be susceptible of becoming a term of comparison: for it must be classifiable, through resemblance, analogy, or some other relation, with innumerable other objects; and among these we shall certainly be able to discover some, which do not labour under any of the defects disqualifying the primary object. Such secondary objects will suggest the primary one; and, in virtue of the laws of suggestion, the cognitions and feelings which they have excited will be transferred to it, as elements of a new mental fact of which it becomes the object. The mental eye will now see the object in a shape to which those others have given improved distinctness; the mental eye will now see it through a light into which the warmth of their colours has been transfused.

These are questions touching the matter of images as well as their form. But they are most conveniently treated here, not later; because the expedients dictated by the answers to them issue in transformations of language. The principle of these, as just explained, is hinted at, and the kinds of expedients worth theorizing are named, in the following proposition:

(II.) The flexibility, and the compass, of the suggestive power possessed by language, concur in bestowing on processes of suggestive representation which take language as their vehicle the capacity both of vivifying imagination and of intensifying emotion, by the use of what may be called Indirect Representation. This consists in substituting, for the image which it is desired to excite, the image of some other object, relative to the object of the first and therefore suggestive of it. The principal method of indirect representation is the use of Figurative Language; and the introduction of Illustrative Examples rests on the same principles.

Figurative language embraces two forms of expression: Figures proper, and Tropes. The best of our English books on style (Irving's) takes exception both to the correctness and to the usefulness of the distinction between the two. But it must be said, with deference, that neither of the exceptions appears to be well founded.

Of the Trope proper the most prominent example is the Metaphor, which suggests through similarity. In the trope, a word or phrase is turned from its usual and appropriate meaning; signifying most obviously one object, it is used to denote another object, which in some way or other is like the first. The Figure proper is exemplified in the Apostrophe and the Exclamation. In the figure, the words are used in their obvious and appropriate meanings; but the form into which they are combined is prompted by emotion of the speaker. Another example, and a very instructive one, is the Interrogation. The question is not a figurative expression when it is really put with the wish of obtaining an answer: it becomes figurative when it is (and often and naturally it is) merely a passionate way of expressing an assertion. I am not speaking figuratively if I ask for information.—"What o'clock do you suppose it to be?" I am converting the question into a figure, if I intend under it an indignant remonstrance against delay in the arrival of a railway-train. There are, it must be allowed, figurative forms of speech whose place is open to controversy: the question arises, whether they are tropes or figures. But the principle of the distinction is quite broad enough for fixing the class even of these; and, it may be hinted, the fact of the doubt should teach caution in the use of such forms; since it must arise from some uncertainty or imperfection in their operation. The Simile is the most notable of these. In a very strict view, it might be denied to be a figurative expression at all: it is merely an assertion that two objects are like each other: it is the datum of a Metaphor. This relation, however, leads to a description of the simile which is more just to it: it is a metaphor in embryo, a metaphor in the first stage of its development. The Allegory (proverbially the most "headstrong" and dangerous of all figurative forms) is easily disposed of: it is just a concatenated series of metaphors.

In form, then, or as modes of expression, the Trope and the Figure differ. Do they differ correspondingly in their mode of operation on those to whom they are addressed? They do, on a principle which we have already recognised as effecting very extensive differences in the steps of persuasion. Tropes operate directly; but Figures operate indirectly.

A Trope directly excites the imagination to the formation of the image wanted. Its motive power is rooted in the character of the two correlated objects, and in the suggestive influence which that correlation exercises. The result which a spoken trope produces, in the mind of the hearer, is an image of the primary object under the change of aspect caused by its being viewed from the side of the secondary object; and the emotion which likewise is excited is consequent on this step.

A Figure excites the imagination to the formation of the image, not directly through any suggestion of an image painted by the words, but indirectly through Sympathy. The imagination does, in fact, seem to be excited by a reflexed path, being preceded by emotion. A figure of speech, as being prompted by emotion, is symptomatic of emotion on the part of the speaker; and the recognition of this fact rouses sympathetically a similar emotion in the mind of the hearer. This communicated emotion leads back to imagination of the cause which has moved the mind of the speaker; this cause is, or suggests (but in a changed and emotive aspect), the primary object, that which the speaker wishes us to imagine; and the emotion which is to lead us to desire or aversion is consequent on those antecedent steps.

If this analysis is in the main correct, it justifies more than one practical corollary, exhibiting marked differences in the comparative availability of the two kinds of figurative expression.

First, Deliberate selection of objects and expressions, guided by intelligent application of rules, may aid much towards the efficient use of tropes. But the use of figures will always be inefficient, or even displeasing, unless when it is prompted by genuine and spontaneous imagination and emotion.

Secondly, The prevalence of tropes on the one hand, or of figures on the other, tends, more than any other feature referable to style, to determine the character of eloquence as being more or less animated or passionate. Figures, being symptoms of emotion, are the key-note of animated communication; although plainly the abuse or over-abundance of them degrades eloquence into declamation or rant. A style which is poor in figures is not relieved, by abundance of tropes, from the risk of being deficient in the power of exciting strong emotion.

Thirdly, Tropes may be said to be equally effective in their way, whether the words expressing them be heard or only read. Figures do not reach the climax of their suggestiveness till they issue from the lips of a speaker. The most pregnant expressions of emotion, recorded for calm perusal in after-days, cannot work with a tithe of that sympathetic force and immediacy, which the spoken words possess when they are aided by the voice, and the gestures, and the countenance, and the whole living and present activity of him who utters them.

Fourthly, Besides other restrictions and distinctions which are almost self-evident, it follows that spoken oratory must owe very much of its suggestive effectiveness to the prevalence of figures; and that orations whose style is deficient in figures will fall with comparative coldness on the ear to which they are first addressed, even though richness in tropes or in other forms of imagery may make them, when recorded, singularly attractive to readers. Two of the most eloquent of all men supply illustration by contrast. The style of Burke is luxuriantly topical; and of the few figures which he uses, almost all belong to the least lively kinds. Admirable as his speeches are, and finely and vigorously as his scenes, and personages, and feelings strike us when we study them in the closet, there is sufficient proof that his impressiveness as a parliamentary orator fell infinitely short of the fame he had and has through the publication of his addresses. The one prominent characteristic of his style goes far towards accounting for the fact. Of Demosthenes, believed to have been the most effective of all public speakers, it has been alleged that he has no tropes at all. It is true that he has very few; and these are slightly and sketchily touched. But in figures he abounds beyond any other orator, ancient or modern. It is only in his business-passages that he rests contented with a succession of calmly-stated propositions. Whenever he is himself excited, and wishes to excite his hearers, assertion rises into the figurative forms which it wins from passion; and, especially, scene after scene, and appeal after appeal, are poured forth in an uninterrupted shower of vehement interrogation.

Thus much must suffice for the contrast between Tropes and Figures. There is a little that may advantageously be remarked in regard to the various phases emerging under each of the two kinds separately.

As to Figures, their genuine differences of form are not many; and the simplicity of the law on which their effect rests makes most of those differences inessential. One distinction at least is worth recollecting.—There are figures which make no avowed appeal to sympathy; forms of speech which might find place in a soliloquy. Such are the Exclamation and the Apostrophe. These are favourite figures in the oratory of Chatham, of a man who, proud and self-reliant, though passionate, spoke as if to unload his heart of its burden of indignation and scorn, seldom as if caring even to awe his audience, and never with the air of condescending to conciliate them. Other figures are avowed appeals to sympathy; forms of speech implying dialogue. Here the great example is the Interrogation. This is the figure which, incalculably oftener than any other, is used by Demosthenes. By him his audience was never forgotten, never slighted: he is not satisfied with pouring out his flood of passion, leaving it to overflow where it might; he flings an image at them as if it were a boomerang, whose course is not finished till it has rebounded to the hand of the thrower.

Of Tropes, almost as provokingly as of figures, the theory has been hidden, by rhetoricians not looking deeper than the words, behind a thick curtain of nomenclature. The few names, which would have sufficed for denoting the natural kinds, they have treated as boys treat a little snowball, which they roll along the ground till it has grown too large to be moved farther. The winter's toy is melted by the first warm breath of spring; and the ventilation which some thinking introduces is, unluckily, enough to show that the cumbrous terminology which has been applied to topical language contains few items usable in a rational theory of the mental character of tropes. But tropes have been treated, by not a few rhetorical writers, with great sagacity and good-sense. There is equal excellence of taste and of ability in this as in other parts of Irving's Elements of Composition, lately referred to; and Whately never fails to fortify his doctrines strongly against assaults from the practical side. For the tracing of tropes, however, to their mental sources, we have still nothing so instructive as the glimpses which were caught by the eye of Campbell, piercing forward with a wonderful instinctive acuteness from among the mists of a fragmentary psychology. A systematic survey of the differences among tropes, in respect both of their means and of their results, could hardly yield any classification of them more satisfactory than that which he proposed. "Tropes," says he, "are subservient to vivacity, by presenting to the mind some image, which, from the original principles of our nature, more strongly attaches the fancy than could have been done by the proper terms whose place they occupy. They produce this effect in these four cases: First, When they can aptly represent a species by an individual, or a genus by a species (the more general by the less general); Secondly, When they serve to fix the attention on the most interesting particular, or that with which the subject is most intimately connected; Thirdly, When they exhibit things intelligible by things sensible; Fourthly, When they suggest things lifeless by things animate." Let us see how this scheme may be fitted into the system of laws which it has here been sought to explain.

All tropes operate by substituting, in the first instance, the image of a secondary object for the image of the object which is primary. They become aids towards volition, as towards poetical pleasure, either by vivifying the image or by intensifying the consequent emotion: the secondary object either is imagined more vividly than the primary; or it is more interesting, more excitative of feeling. The choice of tropes depends on the question, whether it be to the image or to the emotion that we design to impart added strength.

Suppose it is desired to strengthen the Image. This is to be effected by raising the image of a secondary object which is more easily imaginable than the primary.—First, then, if we are confined in our selection to objects of the same great class,—phenomena of body or phenomena of mind,—we cannot aid the formation of the image unless by adopting the rule which directed us to substitute the less extensive term for the more extensive. When, in so doing, we descend only from one class-name or common term to another class-name which is narrower, we use one of the varieties of the trope which the old rhetoricians call Synecdoche. When we descend from a class-name to a singular term, the trope is an Antonomasia. In both cases the suggestive relation is coadjuvance. Secondly, if our primary object is a body or a corporeal phenomenon, we cannot facilitate the imagination of it by substituting a phenomenon of mind. But if our primary object is a fact of consciousness, it is in our power to facilitate the imagination of it immensely, by substituting for it an object corporeal. Our trope is one of the kinds of the Metaphor, and the prominent suggestive relation is Similarity; though undoubtedly, often or always, the chain has many intertwined links, some of which rest on coadjuvance, and others on contrariety.—For Campbell's first class of tropes, and for his third, places have thus been found, as ministering to the strengthening of the image.

Again, let the design be to strengthen, not the image, but the Emotion. The method of doing so is the substitution of a secondary object which is more interesting than the primary.—First, accordingly, the nature of the case may shut out the possibility of exchange between mental states and things external. If so—the primary object being always susceptible of dissection, either into parts simultaneously combined, or into changes happening in succession,—our course must be the selection of that element, factor, circumstance, which is more interesting than any other, and substituting the image of this for that of the complex object, whose complication had prevented this element from attracting exact attention. Causes and effects may thus be interchanged, things concomitant for each other, a part individually thinkable for the individual whole of which it is a constituent. Tropes of this flexible character embrace some varieties of the Synecdoche, with all the various kinds that have been clumsily ranged together under the name of Metonymy. The suggestive relation is coadjuvance.—Secondly, A fact of consciousness would lose instead of gaining interest by having a corporeal object substituted for it. But, since a corporeal object really inhibits the whole of its emotive interest from its relation to mind, increased power of exciting emotion may and must be gained when an object of that first class is displaced in favour of an object belonging to the other. While a poet makes thought, and passion, and will more brilliantly imaginable for us, by clothing them in the shapes and colours of inanimate nature, he makes nature and externality the source of the profoundest feeling, and even the object of a fine ideal sympathy, by animating them with the life, and activity, and susceptibilities of mind. The latter is the higher and more refined process of the two; it reigns especially in our own recent poetry; the principle of it is the life-blood of fantasy to such poets as Wordsworth and Tennyson. The trope here is Metaphor; and the prominent suggestive relation is Similarity.—Campbell's second and fourth classes of tropes are thus placed together, as ministering to the strengthening of emotion.

(III.) LAWS OF MATTER.

31. In no application of persuasive eloquence, can a choice of objects be absolutely excluded. In the properly literary uses of the process the field of selection is almost unlimited: so is it in some departments not exclusively literary; as, for instance, the oratory of the pulpit. But there is room for adoption and rejection, even in those processes of communication, which have decisively a character of actual business dictating the outline of everything that is to be said. No fact whatever is simple; every fact which comes under practical discussion is in a high degree complex: every such fact may be presented in many different aspects; that is, through the exhibition of many different features from among those by which its totality is constituted. There is always scope for choice, therefore; though we look no further than to the event or other object through the desire or dislike of which it is attempted to arouse volition.

The boundaries of the ground are enlarged yet more, when we fall back on a distinction which has already been asserted to have a psychological basis. The completion of the process of persuasion,—the leading of others through wishing to volition,—involves consideration of other objects besides those which are to be the objects of desire or aversion. The attainment or prevention of these is the end; something else must be the means. In trying to persuade a man, we call his attention to at least two objects in succession: we invite him to desire the attainment of $a$; we invite him to believe that his doing the act $b$ will be the means of the attainment; and therefore we invite him to desire (and will) $b$ also. Thus even the direct (or immediate) objects are at least two: $a$, the end, the fact or event which is to be desired; $b$, the means, the act which is to be willed.

Nor is this all. If it were all, or nearly all, persuasion would be far from easy, perhaps; but it would not be the very difficult thing it often is. There will always be some other object. There may, and probably will be, many others, the exhibition of which is imperatively required for assistance in representing with due effect the desirability of the ultimate end, and the adequacy and possibility of the means.

There is, in short, a triplicity of complications. First, there is a complication of objects, as means, as ends, and as standing related to both. Next, there is a complication of processes: the imaginative representation, which is peculiar to persuasion, is mixed up with appeals to the judgment, either as exposition or as argumentation. Lastly, there is a complication of times as the sphere of the objects. Both the end and the means, the object of the desire and the object of the volition, are thought as future: the objects whose exhibition is required for setting those in their just light may range through all the modes of time; they may be future or present, but it will oftener happen that most of them are things past.

It is well, therefore, to inquire, whether the principles which have yielded us a few subjective or formal laws of persuasion, may not, when viewed from the objective side, supply some corollaries having use as guides in the choice of matter. The questions thus arising could hardly be treated in a way better adapted for practical application, than that in which they are treated by Campbell. His classification of "the circumstances chiefly instrumental in operating on the passions," will be the groundwork of the very few doctrines that are now to be laid down.

The principles which should rule the choice of matter or objects adequate for direct persuasive representation, may be brought to a point in the following group of propositions.

The Emotive Interest, through which images presented by language prompt wish and will, must, in the first place, rest on the capacity of the objects to influence, favourably or unfavourably, the well-being of some conscious and sensitive being or beings. Secondly, the emotive interest is most intense, when the persons whom the objects are capable of affecting are the persons to whom the images are addressed, and when, therefore, the personal interest is Direct. In all other cases the personal interest is Indirect, arising through Sympathy; and sympathetic interest is strong in proportion to the closeness of the relations, between those to whom the images are addressed, and those on whom the capacity of influence bears. Thirdly, the objects must consequently be representable as events; and they must possess, in a higher or lower degree, two characteristics, which are conditions of the power of events to excite lively interest, whether direct or sympathetic. These character- Rhetoric.

Processes may be signified by the two words, Probability and Importance; and their nature may most easily be explained by negations. 1. The events must not be merely imaginary, and thus destitute of all bearing on volition: they must be capable of exciting a belief (stronger or weaker, but strong in proportion to the closeness of their relation to the volition which is aimed at), in their actuality, whether past, present, or future. 2. The events must not be purely trifling or insignificant; which they may be either on account of their own character and adjuncts, or (though more rarely) on account of the persons concerned in them: from the one reason or from the other, or from both, they must derive such an importance as shall at least be sufficient to excite attention.

Campbell's seven "emotive circumstances" are readily reducible under the heads thus set forth; and his analysis is so apt and useful, as to supersede the necessity for anything beyond a few hints in the way of illustration.

Evidently, the qualifications of emotive objects rise in efficacy according to the scale which our law indicates. Probability and importance are conditions, but conditions only: they have no proper causal efficiency. It may be objected, indeed, that we shall certainly be interested keenly, to the effect of wish at least, if act and volition be impossible, by a momentous occurrence, positively known as affecting men many or distinguished. The answer to the objection is, that this is a sympathetic interest, for which the truth and importance of the event do no more than supply a groundwork. Equally clear is it, with no possible exception wide enough to qualify the practical uses of the law, that the strongest interest men in general can derive from sympathy, be their hearts as warm and expansive as they may, is feeble in comparison with that which inspires them in relation to their own happiness or misery.

The two conditions may reward a little attention.

The actuality of the event may be believed to be certain, morally or physically; but it cannot be emotive if the likelihood of it does not reach, at least, the low degree which is indicable by such a word as plausibility. It seems correct, also, to say, that the amount of likelihood which is the utmost attainable for an event contemplated as future, would be incalculably less effective if its object were a fact that is past, or one that is contemporaneous. The impression of probability to the extent which an individual case is thought to require, may evidently give occasion to the introduction of arguments, and will perhaps be, often than any other emergency, the adequate reason for such introduction. For the same end, the insinuation of belief through plausible exposition may be, and often is, singularly effective. If we had time to turn aside, and glance at the bearings (for there are many such) of these doctrines on poetry, this question might be put:—Whether the undigested allegory, which falls on most readers with so dead a coldness, is not stopped at the very first stage of its passage towards emotive excitement, by the initial impression it makes of an unreality which we cannot even fancy to be removed?

As to the second condition, one remark only is needed. There is frequent risk that those whom we desire to interest in an event, may think it to be, both in its own nature and in respect of its causes and consequences, so unimportant, that their attention can hardly be awakened to the imagination of it by any considerations of this sort. But, unless they are unusually low in the scale either of intelligence or of susceptibility, they can scarcely fail to take some sympathetic interest in any event which is known to be actual, and which affects any human being whatever. Towards keenness of interest, however, especially in the absence of personal relation, the importance of the persons having part in the event is a very active instrument of excitement.

The last four of Campbell's emotive circumstances are reducible to one principle, by a generalization to which he himself shows the way; and the taking of one or two subordinate distinctions suffices to systematize completely this part of his scheme.—Sympathetic interest, while it is or ought to be experienced by us towards all men, is quickened in a geometrical ratio as its sphere of objects is narrowed, in convergence towards the circle within which our personal affections revolve. Circumstances which imply such an approach are actively suggestive to us of reflections, which give to these an indirect power of excitement. Such circumstances are, first, proximity of events in time; and, secondly, proximity of events in place. It must be a question dependent on the concomitant features of a case, which of the two shall be the more strongly emotive. But both the one and the other move us, not otherwise than by suggesting the relations on which emotion generative of desire must directly rest; and the representation of an event in which such relations are explicitly prominent, must always be more effective than any indirect method of excitation. We are moved intensely by events concerning those who stand in close relation with ourselves; and, while benevolent and sympathetic affections may, in some finely-touched natures, be even more profound than those which centre in self; so, for fiery and angry tempers, or in circumstances which keenly irritate even tempers less harsh or hasty, hatred and revenge may for a time quite overpower regard for self. But, in all ordinary instances, the objects most excitative of desire or aversion, and of volition if action be possible, are undoubtedly events with whose progress and consequences our own happiness or suffering is known by us to be connected.

(iv.) Supplementary Questions.

32. There come up for consideration, lastly, two questions, which, though they involve form, involve matter also, of unsatisfactory earlier. In the first place, persuasion, like argumentation, may be attempted, not on minds open to its influence, but on minds prepossessed against it. How, then, if at all, by means different from argument, may emotions be got rid of, which would prevent the rise of the desire or volition aimed at? In the next place, although eloquence is not poetry, nor poetry eloquence, yet each of them has in it so many of the elements of the other that their results must sometimes coincide. Poetry has not infrequently been made the spur to action: persuasive eloquence has always been held to be, in some degree or other, amenable to the laws of beauty or taste. What can be determined as to the admissibility, into persuasion, of that imaginative pleasure, not tending towards action, the excitement of which is characteristic of poetry? A question nearly allied is this other: What place is there in eloquence for appeals to the sense of the ludicrous, through wit and humour?

The answer to the first of these questions may be given in the following shape. The answer to the second will follow in the next section.

1. For the removal of Emotions Unfavourable to the excitement of the wish and volition, which in a given case persuasion aims at, the methods most widely available are three.—First, The allaying of the emotion may be attempted, by the representation of the object in an aspect which does not tend to excite the unfavourable emotion, and the contemplation of which, therefore, is inconsistent with the continued intensity of the emotion. Secondly, The diversification of the emotion may be attempted, by the representation of some other object, which tends to excite the unfavourable emotion, and on which, therefore, it may be expended harmlessly. Thirdly, The extinguishing of the emotion may be attempted, by the representation of the object in an aspect tending to excite some other emotion, irreconcilable with the emotion which is to be removed. The three methods which have thus been described rest obviously on the same principle. The mind can never be totally blank; and in those changes whose agitation is the life of consciousness, emotion in some phase or other wells up incessantly to the surface. All the methods, therefore, are designed for converting the obstructive emotion into an emotion which shall not obstruct.—The emotion may cease to obstruct, if its intensity is diminished so far that it no longer prompts any wish at all; and here will emerge scope for argumentation, as in proof of improbability, insignificance, or want of real personal relation.—Again, the emotion may cease to obstruct, if there be suggested some other object of thought, which indeed keeps the emotion awake, but the character of which is such that the emotion or consequent wish bearing on it shall not be incongruous with the emotion and wish to which the persuasive process is directed. When dislike is felt towards a person in whose behalf we intercede, a hearing may be found for our words in his favour, if he ceases, though it were but for a short while, to be thought of as the object of the grudge, some other victim being suggested who as well deserves it.—Lastly, the emotion which is obnoxious may lose its hurtfulness, if there can be conjured up some other emotion, incompatible with the continued existence of it and its volitional consequents. This declaration of open war against an impeding emotion or desire, is more frequently called for and more extensively possible than either of the other methods of attack; but in a majority of cases it cannot be brought to bear, unless through and after processes of exposition or argumentation. The most signal of its occasions are ministered by the diversity, and the frequent incompatibility, of the relations in which every man stands towards every object which he can think of as attainable through exertions of his own. Hardly anything is there that can seem desirable to us as giving free play to some strong law of our nature, but the thought will arise, that the gratification of that desire would be attended with the pain consequent on disobedience to some other law. Well is it for us when deliberation is prompt and firm, and when choice is guided by wise and worthy motives. When there is doubt, and especially when that doubt is deeply founded, either on the character of the objects or on internal weakness of our own, the door is open for the entrance of influences from without, which may determine us with momentous effect either towards good or towards evil. Among such influences, powerful eloquence may be one of the most active. We have brooded longingly over a future act, which promises to gratify avarice, or hate, or ambition; our inclination towards it may be cooled or extinguished, by a startling representation of the gnawing pain of the remorse by which one day it would surely be followed; and our imagination may then be sensitive to the image of some other act, some act of forgiveness or self-sacrifice, which, in satisfying conscience and the love owing by man to man, would bestow the purest and highest happiness that can spring from within, but which, as being adverse to our preconceived passion, we could not bear to contemplate till that passion had been made to die away. Unfortunately, likewise, the progress might be in the opposite direction: we might be made to sink from the nourishment of a wish virtuously and nobly prompted, to the displacement of it by another, derived from mean and degrading sources of enjoyment. One of the most obvious, as well as most usually employed, of the antitheses which give room for such diversions of emotion and desire, is that which subsists between the serious and the ludicrous. Put the case, that the obstacle which bars our being led towards a certain wish or the consequent act, is our fear or our hatred of a person who would be benefited by it. It could rarely be possible, by force of mere words, whether argumentative or imaginative, to convert our ill-will directly into any benevolent affection. But even so, the ill-will might be rendered inoperative through feelings which, though still prompted by a bad opinion of the person, could not co-exist with our original desire of injuring or resisting him. If a man is simply ridiculous, if our feeling towards him is mere contempt, we cannot hate him cordially, and shall not fear him at all. This case,—the diversion of emotion and wish of a serious cast by the exhibition of the object in an aspect which is ludicrous,—introduces us to the second of the questions raised in the beginning of this section. For wit and humour rest on the emotion of the ludicrous; and they stand in relations which, though far from being clear, are very intimate, to the imaginative pleasure which is characteristic of poetry.

33. II. That Imaginative Pleasure, the excitement of which is the characteristic function of poetry, is so far in consistent with the kind of emotion which issues in volition, and the objects tending to excite these severally are in most instances so unlike each other, that emotions of the former class cannot in a process of persuasion be excited either intensely or very frequently, without difficulty, or without some risk of injury to the persuasive result. The emotion of the ludicrous, also, as excited by Wit and Humour, is indeed, oftener than purely poetical pleasure, excitable by objects available towards persuasion; but it likewise is equivocal in its effects, as not tending directly towards action. Nevertheless, both pure poetical pleasure, and the emotions excited by wit and humour, are often useable with advantage in persuasion, under the restriction always of being kept in subervience to the distinctive purpose of the process. Especially it is true, that the slight or moderate excitement of a pleasure properly poetical or contemplative, not only is often a natural consequence of the contemplation of objects tending principally towards the excitement of volition, but is even a condition towards the full effect of persuasive eloquence in a cultivated and refined state of society.

That, even in processes aiming at the purposes which constitute the distinctive province of eloquence, there is scope for the entertainment of the purpose which distinguishes poetry,—is a proposition, the truth of which is allowed, by implication, in doctrines which have a place, and which, being important as well as true, deserve to have a place, in every intelligent code of laws ever laid down to guide the student of rhetoric. No reasonable doubt can be thrown on the assertion, that certain elements truly poetical are admissible in eloquence as subordinate adjuncts and decorations. But difficulties begin to gather about us, like thickening mists, when we strive to determine analytically the relations between the means which subserve the poetical purpose, and those which subserve the persuasive,—and when we seek to derive hence a code of exact restrictions.

Such a code would bridge over, for passage from either side, the gap on whose opposite sides poetry and eloquence stand, covering ground which exhibits dissimilar landscapes, but which hides strata illustrative of analogous formation. The piers of the bridge, however, must be two: a theory of eloquence, a theory of poetry. For the former of these, there is given here no more than a plan; and the attempt even to design the latter, is forbidden alike by the purpose of the treatise and by its limits. We can venture on nothing beyond some hasty strokes, indicating a very few features, in respect of which the two classes of processes are least likely to conflict with each other.

It is in effect acknowledged by rhetoricians, that the effectiveness of eloquence is impaired, if not destroyed, by the intrusion of anything excitative of emotions contradictory of those which it is the prerogative of poetry to excite. For so much must be meant by the maxim, that neither in persuasion, nor even in argumentation, should there be admitted any object, or any treatment of any object, which would offend against the laws of taste. The rule is sound for any discourse intended to possess a character properly literary; that is, it is sound for the highest and worthiest class of cases to which rhetorical precepts are applicable. Though, likewise, taste should be understood as meaning good taste, the rule would continue to be sound for all discourses whose hearers or readers possess a reasonable amount of aesthetic cultivation. If the proviso be interpolated, that the taste of the audience, be it good or bad, is to give the standard, the rule holds for all cases possible. Every man is in some degree susceptible of a contemplative pleasure, incident to the exercise of his imagination; however widely the objects exciting that pleasure in a rude and coarse mind may differ from those which would excite it in a mind refined by nature and by training. And no man can fail to be interrupted in his progress towards belief and desire, if the object be set before him in a light which, independently of relations to action, affects him with an unpleasant feeling. So much is admitted when the question is considered from the negative side.

A positive rhetorical value is attached to poetical pleasure, in rules commonly laid down for style. Obedience to the laws of good taste is prescribed to language: it should, we are told, possess the quality called Beauty or Elegance. The rule is good for every composition of a class worthy of being criticised, and for every writer or speaker who is likely to reflect on his task in a thoughtful spirit. It is an instructive fact, however, that no one has ever been able to describe intelligibly any specific method (beyond rules properly grammatical) of putting the maxim in practice. The student of eloquence can only be told that, rules which bear on or tend towards Perspicuity being duly attended to, he will approach towards eloquence of style in proportion to his success in making his style Animated,—that is, in fitting it for the purpose of persuasion. The study of language is often helpful towards the excitement of imagination and of some consequent emotion; but what the character of that emotion is to be, is a question dependent, not on the words, but on the matter.

We reach higher ground on the positive side,—indeed we gain a rule which is practically more useful than any other relating to this question,—when we take account of a doctrine on which great stress has been placed in several preceding stages of our survey. In no use to which language can be put, is any quality of a composition more valuable than its power of commanding attention. Now Attention is excited by everything that is emotive. It is a question not always met by one answer,—which of the two shall arouse attention most effectively; an object moving us to pain, or one moving us to pleasure. So likewise, a positive answer could not be given to this other question,—whether attention will be attracted most keenly by an object raising feelings which prompt towards action, or by one which raises feelings not having that tendency. The chances are much in favour of objects urging us towards desire and will; and, for reasons lying in the same quarter, the chance is also, that attention will be more keenly awakened by painful objects than by pleasant ones. So much the less danger is there, that objects such or so represented as to incline by both paths in the opposite direction,—that is, away from action and away from pain,—should, if they are suggested sparingly, interpose any serious check or wide diversion to the course into which persuasion aims at inviting the mind. Therefore, far from seldom, when both theme and audience are favourable to the finer influences, persuasive eloquence may warrantably seek to awaken or enliven or revive attention, through images which do not immediately lead beyond the play of fancy and the pleasure which is attendant on it. When, indeed, the use of such expedients is guided by genius and skill, the excitants of the poetic or semi-poetic vision and emotion may be gathered from among the adjuncts of the very object on which action is to be directed; the transitory change of mood, too, is not unlikely to allow the gathering of new energy of consciousness; and the check which for a moment threw the wave of feeling backward upon thought, may give even a fiercer impulse to the gush with which afterwards it plunges forward into passion.

34. The legitimacy of the poetical element as an aid to the rela-eloquence, not only as a powerful means of calling up attention be- tention, but also as a direct step on the way towards the end twen per-aimed at by persuasion, will be put on a ground yet broader, and may perhaps be extended to more various applicability-representa-tics, through the answer which may correctly be given to it, a question now to be put.

Poetry and Persuasive Eloquence pursue for a certain distance the very same track; at what point do their routes necessarily diverge? More specially, they concur in working through the excitement of Imagination and consequent Emotion; persuasion, however, must have as its next step the excitement of a Wish, whether it be a desire or an aversion: must it be held, then, that poetry cannot take this step,—that it would be unfaithful to its function if it should excite the Wish that something were, or that something were not? The answer is this. It is not true that the excitement of desire, or even of its contrary, is excluded from the competency of poetry. Such an exclusion is quite inconsistent with all ordinary opinions; and it is very far indeed from being a necessary consequence of that exact separation between poetical and persuasive representation, which it has here been attempted to illustrate. The bearings of the question could not be set forth satisfactorily, without a full exposition of the theory of poetry which is now founded on; but a few hints, merely flitting along the edge of one section in that theory, will exhibit some of the data on which the answer must depend.

Contrast, first of all, a poet's warm description of poetry with the colder one given by a philosopher. Let us think especially of the third quality assigned to poetry, in those pregnant words of Milton, seized on admiringly by Cole-ridge. "Poetry," says he, "is simple, sensuous, passionate." Kant, on the other hand, asserts of the Beautiful, that it is "without interest;" and with him, as with most or all of the more recent Germans, all the emotions characteristic of poetry and the other fine arts are emotions of beauty. The two doctrines are quite reconcileable; but both require some explanation.

It must be maintained firmly, as the central doctrine of all the fine arts,—that, while their mode of operation is the excitement of imagination, their end, the result for the sake of which the operation is performed, is the excitement of Emotion, of a state of mind which is a feeling. If it is admitted that their end is pleasure, this is accepting the doctrine, only specifying it (and correctly) by saying that the emotion is pleasing. If the mental process which it excites shall travel onward even by one step further, in that normal development of consciousness which issues in action, the art has, in its result (which presumably is due to something in its procedure), trespassed on ground which it cannot continue to occupy without becoming an alien to its native domain. But if it has taken the one step only, its position is easily recoverable: the wish, the desire, the longing, may generate only a new emotion, purely contemplative; and,—such flowings and ebblings being successively prompted through successive images, whether suggested by the poem or by the fancy of the reader,—wish and emotion may float through the soul in a series of delightful alternations, each impelled and guided by some new image in the thronging train of airy fantasies. None of the emotions can be more than momentary; no emotion can be more. But it is for the sake of the emotion that the images and wishes are cherished; and, so long as the poetical mood endures, it is back into emotion that wish and image will incessantly fall. That which would most effectually annihilate the poetical mood, that which most certainly would make the mind cease to be susceptible of the visionary emotion, would be the development of the wish into a consequent volition. The calm lake which has been darkened by a passing cloud, becomes again the mirror of its woody bank as soon as the sunshine again breaks out; but when the mountain blast has swept over it, its surface, lashed into agitation, can no longer reflect the brilliant shadow. This, then, is what must not happen as the effect of poetry; the transformation of desire into will.

If such a transformation should take place incidentally, the mind which is the subject of it has been thrown down into a mood which is anti-poetical, and from which it cannot easily be elevated by the purest poetry which may next be presented to it. If a work poetical in name aims at such a transformation, it is really not a poem, but something else: with the introduction of such a design, it has ceased to be poetical, and has become persuasive. Understood under these explanations, Kant's proposition may be accepted as equally true and important.

Not less important are doctrines, which may be supposed to have been intended under the proposition which was quoted as its counterpart. Towards that one among those doctrines which here concerns us, the way has been opened by the assertion, that the transition from emotion to desire is not necessarily destructive of poetical effect. This assertion is not broad enough; for, though it is true, it contains scarcely half of the truth. Not only is it true that poetry may prompt wishes without being faithless to its vocation; it is true, moreover, that poetry does and must incessantly prompt wishes in all their higher modes,—as good-will or ill-will to persons, or as inclination or dislike to states of our own, dependent on things. It is equally a truth, and is a truth still more momentous, that to its capacity as a prompter of wishes poetry owes the possession of powers, the loss of which would degrade it into a mere toy, the playing of a few imaginative dreamers. That capacity is not what makes poetry to be poetry: it is not what makes any fine art to be a fine art. But so far as any fine art can exercise that capacity without impairing its own peculiar functions, just by so far is that art elevated above being a mere decoration of life and a mere pastime for leisure; the comparative freedom with which that capacity can be subordinated to poetical ends, is the most active of the causes which raise poetry immeasurably higher than any other of the fine arts; and the fulness of diversified suggestion with which, through that capacity, poetry can people the visionary land conjured up by its spell, is the fountain whence flow out the love and reverence with which poetical art is honoured by the universal human heart. That which confers the capacity is the symbolism of language. By the manner in which words operate, arts making them its vehicle are, as we have seen, shut out from certain modes of representation which are open to arts operating directly through perception. But, in their own manner, through symbolic suggestion, words can represent all conceivable objects. Therefore poetry embraces, in its light but vigorous grasp, all those classes of objects, to one of which separately each of the weaker fine arts has its province confined; therefore also poetry enters into sympathizing alliance with those processes of real life and action, most of which the other fine arts have neither hand to touch nor eye to see.

If we are to use the term Beauty as designative of objects which excite the pure emotion of contemplative art, whatever be the kind of process by which the emotion is awakened, the ordinary and obvious meaning of the word must receive a very large widening. That which we should naturally speak of as beautiful is an object of sight. Pleasing colour, or combinations of colour, may indeed be disposed of rightly by being regarded as no more than precedent conditions, and described as sensuously agreeable; and, when this exclusion has been made, Beauty proper is beauty of form. The arts of design are the only fine arts whose works are beautiful in this sense. Even such a work is not high in its class, unless the form which it presents and suggests shall to Beauty add what is usually called Expression,—that is, the capacity of suggesting emotions tending towards wish. Whether beauty of form is possible in the absence of expression, is a question which, though the answer is not far to seek, cannot be touched at present. The two antithetical terms do, at least, denote the predominance of the one or the other of two diverse attributes. The law of those arts might thus be said to be, that beauty shall predominate over expression; intensity and fulness of expression enliven and elevate a picture or a statue, but expose it to the risk of overstepping its proper function. Now, poetry has doubtless the power to suggest images of beautiful forms. Not only, however, is the suggestion vague, the same words exciting different images in every two different minds; but, over and above, it subserves in no more than a very slight degree the poetical effect. If beauty is beauty of form, the law of poetry is not beauty, but expression.

It is desirable, however, that we should be able to designate by one common name all phases of the pure contemplative emotion characteristic of all the fine arts; and the word Beauty, originally given to sensuous agreeableness, and raised in the language of art to denote attributes of form, offers itself temptingly for use. Of all objects excitative of pure poetical emotion, it is convenient to say that they are Beautiful; and it may not be unsafe to call them so, if we can guarantee our steady remembrance of the fact, that their beauty is Expressive Beauty. The necessity for implication of the limiting epithet reminds us at once of the world-wide sphere of poetical objects, and of that tendency to put the objects to extraneous uses by which poetry is beset more than any other art of its class.

Terms being thus understood, Expressive Beauty might be said to be the central law of poetry. Pure poetical pleasure is generated by images which, whether they be pictures of nature or of life, or of human consciousness as it works within, are barred by their ideal character from all immediate bearing, not only on action, but even on wishes tending to action, either of our own or of others. The glittering shower of fancies, and feelings, and longings, which the fountain throws up, cannot flow outward to form a brook, but incessantly, in sunshine and music, falls back into the encircling basin. Poetry having no other elements than these, would be pure; but it would not be strong. It would be lyrical in spirit, whatever it might be in form; and much more is demanded of it. If the poet would stir up the heart from its depths, he must look abroad on life, and feel the passions of humanity: he must conjure into the circle of his art shapes expressive of the purest joy, and the deepest suffering, and the most energetic action; that, by sympathy, and hope, and fear, the atmosphere may be agitated into healthy circulation.

Thus, from the heart of its empire, where it would only be a sluggard-king dreaming on his day-bed, Poetry, justly desiring active rule, and sometimes imprudently ambitious of foreign conquest, travels outwards towards or up, to the frontiers of its dominions, and that by any of many diverging paths. In every direction, as the distance increases, the operation of the central laws becomes weaker, Processes though spontaneous activity is developed more and more energetically; and, if the borders are fairly crossed, the laws of the poetical realm cannot be enforced, unless as an invader might impose on the conquered any laws he chooses to bring with him.

When we remember that the sway of eloquence stretches over all those contiguous territories which poetry is so often tempted to reconnoitre or to visit, it becomes plain that the two are actually connected by bonds much stronger than those which show themselves on the surface. If poetry, by drawing closer its relations with life and action, can often inspire itself with increased force and profundity of passion; so eloquence may, though seldom and with less safety, rise to higher refinement and elevation without essential loss of strength, through idealization of imagery, and consequent softening of desire and emotion.

Poetry seeks its frontiers by two high roads, leading in directions diametrically opposite. The one of these, pointing as it were to the cold north, soon enters desert tracts, and has few by-paths worth traversing: the other ushers us into scenes where everything around is full of warm interest and overflowing with luxuriant activity. In the first of those quarters the principle of animation is the emotion of the Ludicrous. When objects capable of exciting this feeling are contemplated from those idealized points of view which exclude immediate reference to action, they yield images whose aesthetical character is describable by such names as Wit and Humour; the former of which may be said to have its objective root in incongruity of ideas, the other in the incongruities of human nature. It is so difficult to reconcile feelings of this class with loftier and more worthy aspirations, that the excitement of them is hardly admitted in any of the fine arts, except painting and poetry; while even in poetry their sphere is narrow, in comparison at least with that which belongs to serious emotion. In eloquence, they have a scope which is very much wider; and, when the character of the matter and purpose does allow either persuasion or argumentation to call in the aid of the ludicrous, the circumstances always allow, and often require for the production of full effect, that the representation be idealized or aesthetically softened in such a way as to make it rightly describable as witty or humorous. It is on this side, indeed, that eloquence, though coming in contact only with one small frontier-province of poetry, touches the poetical domain more closely than it can on the opposite or serious side.

On this other side, poetry seeks to gather materials out of all phases and all degrees of serious emotion and passion, and desire and aversion. The kinds of the objects are not more diverse than the uses to which the art strives to put them. Milton's phrase, already used, may be understood widely enough to cover all varieties of the applications, to which poetry thus seeks to put the seriously emotive relations of life and action. Let us say that poetry, when it shoots off at this pole from the sphere of the purely Beautiful, passes into that of the Passionate. We come nearer to some of the problems which the name suggests, by saying that the genera of the passionate are reducible to two: the Sublime, which tends towards development in the Epic; the Pathetic, whose characteristic development takes place in Tragedy.—In the Sublime, the predominant emotion may be said to be an idealized modification of Fear. Being so modified by being taken out of immediate relation to action, and being modified further by specific characteristics of the objects (which affect variously both its kind and the degree of its intensity), fear becomes the kernel of emotions to which perhaps all branches of the sublime may be referred—Awe, Reverence, Wonder. If the objects, as real, tend to excite emotions justly describable by such names, it must be the fault of the poet if the same emotions are not excitable by the poetical representation of them. But genius and skill of art may purify into those phases the impressions made by objects, which, in the reality, would be merely terrific or horrible; while, contrariwise, whatever be the character of the objects, want of skill or coarseness of feeling in the poet may throw a work, or a scene or image of it, out of the true province of poetry, by giving predominance to the unidealized phases of the emotions.—To the Pathetic, as a variety of the passionate, would be referable all cases in which the emotion, whatever be its kind, is aroused, not directly, but through Sympathy. Sympathetic emotion, imaginatively reflected or thrown back, falls into modifications of poetic emotion, which, though by no means the only modifications that may be called tragic, are those on which Tragedy is dependent oftener and more widely than on any others.—If the pathetic should rise so that it seems to merge in the sublime, there is still this ground for a separation such as that which has been hinted at, that the emotion of sublimity generated through sympathy remains relative or subjective, while there is another region of the sublime in which emotion is excited directly,—that is, through thought in which the prominent idea is that of the object.

35. The applicabilities of those distinctions to rhetorical use can be but very rapidly touched on.

In the first place, the idealization of passion has an incidental and subsidiary use, which, though it cannot penetrate deeply into the matter principally treated, stretches over forth almost all kinds of composition that are not poetical in design. It is often an apt means of awakening or enlivening attention. Pleasure of any kind, and imaginative pleasure not least, inclines us to concentrate our thoughts on the objects that excite us; and the inclination is suggestively transferable to objects with which those others are in relation. Though the staple of a discourse should be severe abstract reasoning, the mental eye may the more promptly admit the clear and cold light of truth, if it has been strengthened and excited by semi-poetic fancies flickering on the distant horizon. On occasions not a few, likewise, ideal imagery acts in the same direction, not only in virtue of its own force, but also by raising prepossessions in favour of the mind from which it springs.

Questions more doubtful confront us when we come to consider specific adaptations, involving cases in which the poetical mood might become a prominent feature in the mental state excited.

The most delicate of all cases, is that of a discourse designed for carrying on the process of persuasion to its consummation. Such a discourse must have a practical bearing so immediate, that hazard would almost always be incurred by any aspiration rising, for more than a very brief flight, above the level of actuality. Equally practical in effect, and therefore equally intolerant of invitations towards the contemplative, are most of those discourses in which, though the persuasive process in its earlier stages holds a conspicuous place, still it is really no more than subsidiary, the purpose ultimately striven after being the generation of belief, the enforcing on an audience acquiescence in the truth of a proposition. In describing such instances, however, we are taking it for granted, not only that the occasion is in substance a matter of active business, but also that the effect on the recipients, be it what it may, is designed to be immediate. But if judicial oratory be held to fall within this description, with some applications (certainly not all) of oratory to political and other social questions, we are yet entitled to say that there are many other cases, still oratorical rather than strictly literary, in which the design is different, and the field raised more or less above that of every-day life. Especially, it happens very often, as in many discourses of a religious cast, that the end looked to lies beyond any mental state that is excited at the moment. What is wished for is the excitement of such a frame of mind as shall prompt subsequent thought; so that, though volition should be the result ultimately in view, it shall only spring up hereafter, seemingly from the spontaneous action of the resolving mind, but really from germs which have been sown by the speaker. The ground is thus enlarged on all sides; and passionate poetry surrenders many a spoil to the successful forays of passionate eloquence, provided always the objects be such that each of the arts may, in its own way, handle them to advantage. It is, however, when the poetic voice is but imperfectly modulated that oratory may most freely emulate its tones. Eloquence of all kinds, indeed, speedily grows languid in the rarefied atmosphere which fans the serenely sensitive existence of the highest poetical art: if its breathing is to be free and its action energetic, it must not climb above those subalpine heights, on which the dense air of real life has been relieved but in a slight degree from the superincumbent pressure.

But, further, though the spirit of these restrictive cautions must guide us everywhere, yet the quarter on which they tell most strongly fills a space comparatively narrow in that large territory, which is here claimed for Eloquence and alleged to be subject to its laws. The mass of pure literature is made up of works which owe their literary character, not to circumstances raising them above the occasion that prompted them, but to the intention with which they were brought into existence. Those works are not intended for generating one immediate effect,—not for producing one state of mind, which both has little complexity, and is concentrated on one group of objects. They are designed for producing a series of mental states, which shall expiate over many and diverse objects presented in succession; and they are designed for producing those states through deliberate study, in which the reader's thought works with an independent activity, marvellously unlike the receptive obedience with which the same mind would have been impelled to follow the same prompting if it had been pressed with the hurry and force of oral declamation.

All such works issue, as it was asserted in one of the prefatory sections, from a combination of more than one of the three elementary and normal processes, and most of them from a combination of all the three. It must carefully be remembered, too, that, in instances which occur continuously, each of these processes is performed in part only; there is a turning off from the road after the earlier stages of the journey. In the appeal to the judgment, the end desired may be, not to establish belief, but only to prepare the way for it: thus exposition may go no further than analysis of ideas or explanation of words; and the occasion may entitle argumentation to rest in the suggestion of conjectures. Still more frequent, and more frequent in pure literature than in oratory, is the occurrence of a process, in which persuasion, used only as an aid, is satisfied with the conjuring up of emotive images, or, at furthest, stops short with the raising of vague desires. History, for instance, and its hand-maid Biography, are essentially expository. But in these kinds of composition there is no phase of eloquence that may not cooperate with the main purpose, from the passionate picturing of characters and events, to the calm inculcation of universal truth. Nor would it be either just or safe to pronounce sentence of outlawry on certain branches of prose literature, which dwell so temptingly on the very borders, that they themselves are often doubtful to which of the two kingdoms their allegiance is preferably due. The novel and romance should be dealt with on this footing; that they are works essentially poetical in design, but sacrificing purity and elevation of aesthetic effect to the interest and variety of a biographical kind of individualization, for which verse would not allow scope. Many other kinds of literary works we have, and some of these interesting and brilliant in a high degree, to which there must be extended a tolerance still more liberal, yet not so liberal as to absolve them from all obedience to law. In such works the writer is content with his position as the man of genius, without claiming also the rank of a literary artist: he casts forth, because he chooses to do so, the products of his vigorous reason, or rich imagination, or profound sensibility, without seeming to aspire to the production of any one class of effects, and perhaps without conjecturing or caring what might be the issue.

Evidently, even in those legitimate forms of literature in which unity or totality of effect is firmly kept in view, there is thus room for such a diversifying of the means of impression as to preclude the possibility of passive subjection to any specific code of laws. But, while every literary freeman resists to the death the fetters which pedantic rules would rivet on him, no literary man can scorn with impunity the constitutional code of that realm of thought, in which, by attempting literary creation, he enrols himself as a citizen.

Those assertions must be repeated which were our point of departure. The distinct conception of one paramount purpose is the root of everything that is really great and strong in any department of literary art. The only purposes towards which literature can intelligently work are those which have now been recognised. The processes which have been represented as leading severally to the attainment of those purposes are the norms of all literary methods. Genius can, in a certain degree, achieve success in spite of itself; it can force its way in defiance of obstacles which it has reared up in its own path: vigour of thought, of imagination, or of passion, can bear receptive minds along with it, though its procedure should be incoherent; and to kindred souls it can suggest results possessing a symmetry which it had itself inadequately conceived. But the finest or loftiest genius can give birth to no work of art which shall be either great or enduring, unless it has learned, from reflection or from instinct, the few broad principles on which the character of art depends. Laws which are rooted in the nature of things never fail to avenge themselves on those who disobey them.

APPENDIX.

THE LAWS OF PROSE STYLE.

36. Questions of Style, which are the prominent feature Outline of in many systems of rhetoric, and the whole contents of many the prin- others, have with us been made to stand far in the back-epis rut- ground. This is thought to be the place which becomes ing prose style. them. That characteristic manner of expression, which is what we understand by the style peculiar to a writer or speaker, may indeed have derived some of its points from the study of models or of rules; but it is determined mainly by the cast of the man's own intellect and character, and is really peculiar or forcible in proportion to the amount in which he possesses individual peculiarity or strength.

A general theory of communication can fitly consider this question only:—what qualities must not be wanting in language if the style constituted by the words is to be good,—that is, if it is to be fit for serving the uses to which language is put? Adequate knowledge both of things and names being presupposed, this answer is given:—that style cannot be good unless it obeys laws belonging to each of two several orders.—In the first place, there are laws, disobedience to which, if thorough-going, makes language unfit to be a medium of communication for any purpose whatever. These laws constitute the science of Grammar; and, in fact, a very large proportion of the rules laid down for style are grammatical, not rhetorical. These are the most workable of all rules of style; and they cannot be too III. For the attainment of Perspicuity, Animation, and Elegance, severally, language must be brought to bear on the specific purpose in respect of three particulars: the Choice of Words or Phrases, the Number of them, the Putting Together of them.

1. (i.) So far as the Choice of words and phrases is concerned, language is made Perspicuous by its possession of two qualities: Purity and Precision. The former consists in conformity to grammatical laws, which fits the words for conveying some meaning; the latter consists in conformity to the thought of the speaker or writer, which fits the words for conveying the meaning intended. When the choice is spoken of as embracing phrases as well as single words, there is designed such a description of this one element of perspicuity as shall enable it to cover all questions purely grammatical. Purity, then, grammatical correctness, is, within certain limits (which it is never worth while to transgress), a condition of perspicuity. It is on perspicuity alone that grammatical considerations have a direct bearing. But purity is not enough: therefore perspicuity, though resting on grammar, is not wholly dependent on grammatical laws. The words must be precise also; which word, as here understood, has a wider meaning than that which it often receives from critics and teachers of style. Let us understand the term as embracing everything that makes a word or phrase to represent the desired idea, to represent it exactly, to represent it completely, and to represent no other: and its meaning will then comprehend all the special rules (such as retrenchment of superfluities), to the expression of which it is sometimes restricted.—(ii.) In respect to the Number of the words or phrases, the only universal rule which can safely be propounded does in truth merely remind us, that words are but ministers of thought, that they should be used for a purpose distinctly apprehended, and that, when not so used, they are worse than useless. The number of words having been used which is sufficient to convey the meaning perspicuously, every additional word lessens perspicuity. The words required may be few, or they may be many: no rule can touch the exigences of individual cases.—(iii.) It is through failure in the Combination of words and phrases,—that is, in the construction of sentences,—oftener than through any other fault, that persons untrained in composition fall into obscurity or ambiguity. The books lay down a few excellent rules for particular cases; and some of them are still more instructive through the collection of examples. The whole doctrine may be gathered under one principle. Clear thinking must have unity of object: a complex thought, if clear, has some one element which predominates over the rest, and in due subordination to which all the others are placed. Every sentence is designed for giving expression to one leading thought: let the sentence be so framed that the pre-eminence of that thought shall unequivocally be signified. Let the expression of subsidiary thoughts be grouped about the leading assertion in such a way as to show their dependence on it; each inferior member and clause being likewise so arranged that its own unity be not lost sight of.

2. In the analysis of persuasion, we were brought so frequently on questions as to language, that the means of attaining Animation of style can hardly now be described otherwise than by borrowing from preceding illustrations.—(i.) In the Choice of words and phrases, animation is attained through two methods: it is attained directly, by the preference of the less extensive term to the more extensive; it is attained indirectly, by the preference of figurative expressions to unfigurative.—(ii.) In regard to the Number of words, the only rule must be that which was laid down as affecting perspicuity. The caution, given some time ago, may be repeated: that animation is likely to require a fulness of expression greater than that which would be appro-

Processes constituting Eloquence.

sedulously attended to by the unpractised student of composition.—In the second place, there are laws, disobedience to which unfitting language only for some one purpose, leaving it (under limitations to be marked immediately) available for purposes which are different. These are the only laws of style that are properly rhetorical; but they are nothing else than the laws of the processes of communication we have already studied, or corollaries drawn from those laws by the easiest deduction. They have been brought out already in illustration of the theory of the processes, at all points where they apply served that use, and were not too obvious to deserve being explicitly stated.

It may be well, however, to draw together under one outline a digested sketch of the principles of both kinds, within which must fall all specific Rules of Style. Poetical composition, which commonly and most wisely adopts metrical forms, is beyond our purview; and, for the purposes entertained by eloquence, the words may be held to be always couched in the form of prose.

I. The Purposes of language being three, and none of the three being absolutely excluded from the competency of eloquence, Prose Language, if it is to be fit for the attainment of all the three, must have each of three specific aptitudes. It is fitted for each of the three purposes by a combination of certain qualities; and each of the combinations receives one name. It is fitted for the purpose entertained in exposition and argumentation by Perspicuity; it is fitted for the purpose entertained in persuasion by Animation or Vivacity; it is fitted for the purpose entertained in poetical representation by Beauty or Elegance.

Language is said to be Perspicuous,—or adequate for communicating cognition or thought,—when it is free from each of three faults. It must not be obscure,—that is, convey no meaning clearly; it must not be ambiguous,—that is, convey more meanings than one; it must not be unintelligible,—that is, convey no meaning at all. But language has not the degree of perspicuity it ought to have, unless it conveys its one meaning readily as well as clearly.

Language is said to be Animated, when it is adequate for the purpose of persuasion. But the only element of this adequacy for which rules of style can give any assistance, is, or arises directly out of, the special aptitude of the words for exciting Imagination, the first step in the process.

Language is said to be Elegant or Beautiful, when it gratifies the taste,—that is, excites imaginative pleasure. In respect of the words, this gratification stands yet more closely related to persuasion than it does in respect of the objects and their images.

II. Although each of these three names denotes a specific aptitude for one purpose, yet the relations which connect the purposes cause the second aptitude to be dependent on the first, and the third to be dependent both on the first and on the second. Language may be perspicuous without being more; but it cannot be animated without being perspicuous; and it cannot rightly be said to be elegant unless it be both perspicuous and animated.

Hence perspicuity is an essential quality of style: it can never be dispensed with. The other two are occasional qualities. In certain kinds of composition they would be out of place; in other kinds, they might safely be wanting; and they might be absent in certain parts of compositions which elsewhere admit or require them.

While, again, animation is dependent on perspicuity; so, contrariwise, animation increases perspicuity in certain cases, and lessens it in others. It increases perspicuity when, by aiding in the excitement of imagination, it makes attention more energetic. It lessens perspicuity when (as in philosophical or other abstract discussions), the ideas requiring very wide terms for their full expression, the desire of animation leads to the use of terms which are too narrow. RHEUMATISM is a painful affection of fibrous and muscular tissues, affecting principally the larger joints, and places covered by muscles; as the wrists, elbows, knees, hip-joint, back, and loins. The internal parts also, as the heart and diaphragm, are considered capable of being affected by rheumatism. When the joints about the back and loins are affected, the complaint is called lumbago; when the pain is in the hip-joint, it is called sciatica; and pleurodynia, or pain in the side, when the muscles of the chest are affected. Rheumatism may occur either with fever or without it; in the first case it is termed acute, and in the second chronic rheumatism. Not long after the application of the exciting cause, the patient feels pain and stiffness in one or more joints when he attempts to move them; this quickly increases till motion becomes almost impossible, from the excessive pain attending it. Along with this local and often very general pain there occur very strong fever, much thirst, heat, and dryness of skin, strength, fulness, and hardness of pulse. The feverish symptoms are somewhat increased towards evening; and when the patient gets warm in bed the pains are more severe. In a short time some of the affected joints swell, and the pain is a little relieved, but by no means removed.

As to the causes of this malady, it may be remarked that rheumatism is a disease of the constitution, and is induced by a poison circulating in the blood, and probably carried from one joint to another. The tendency to rheumatism is hereditary; and in some families this predisposition is very marked, and the disease is excited by the most trifling causes. Cold and damp are the most common causes of the disease, and hence the poor suffer much from it. Persons who get their clothes wet or damp, and neglect to change them, are often seized with rheumatism. Acute rheumatism is most common between the ages of fifteen and forty. It is not a dangerous disease as long as it is confined to the joints, but there is always the risk of the heart being attacked. Dr Parr remarks regarding the diagnosis of this disease, that "rheumatism is often so blended with gout as to prevent our seeing which is the principal complaint. In general, rheumatism occurs in consequence of an evident cause, as cold; the gout without any such cause. Rheumatism has no preceding complaints; gout is preceded by languor, flatulency, and indigestion; rheumatism is the disease of the strong and active; gout, of those advanced in life; rheumatism attacks the larger, gout the smaller joints; rheumatic limbs, though swollen, are not red like gouty. The fever of gout remits irregularly; that of rheumatism has exacerbations in the evening, and remissions in the morning. These circumstances will contribute to the distinction; but the cases so often run into each other, and differ by shades so transient and minute, that the greatest difficulty is found in the distinction of particular complaints. Rheumatic pains in the chest resemble pleurisy, and in the abdomen resemble inflammation of the bowels. In each case, the soreness to the touch, the pain felt at the origin or insertions of the muscles, while the more appropriate symptoms of the real inflammation of the part are absent, will sufficiently mark the nature of the disease."

Acute rheumatism is to be considered as an inflammatory and febrile disease, and, as such, to be treated in the first instance by cautious blood-letting, in quantity proportioned to the violence of the disease and the strength and constitution of the patient. In all cases the bowels must be well opened. The best medicine for this purpose is a draught containing half an ounce of Epsom salts, twenty or thirty drops of antimonial wine, thirty drops of colchicum wine, and an ounce of senna infusion. After the saline purgative it is often advisable to bring out a copious sweat, and to continue that sweat over the whole body for thirty-six or forty-eight hours. The most effectual and approved method of this is to employ the compound powder of ipecacuan and opium, commonly called Dover's powder; of this we give 10 or 12 grains, having put flannels next the patient's skin, and put him in blankets. When this dose has brought out a sweat, it is to be encouraged by drinking plentifully of warm gruel or barley-water; but if it should fail to occasion perspiration, another dose must be given at an interval of four hours, and this repeated every four hours till a copious sweat breaks out over the whole body. It is proper to abstain from drinking till the sweat breaks out, as drinking too soon after taking the powder is apt to occasion vomiting. When the perspiration has continued general and copious for a sufficient time, the load of bedclothes is to be gradually diminished; the body is to be rubbed dry with warm flannel, and great care taken for some time not to expose it to cold. When the pain and stiffness of the joints continue after the sweating, some stimulating embrocation is proper, as turpentine ointment, or volatile liniment, or camphorated oil. If the pain still continue obstinate, it may be necessary to apply a blister to any of the joints or muscular parts that require it. The essence of mustard, which has gained some reputation as an external application in rheumatism, is composed of oil of turpentine, camphor, and a portion of rosemary, to which is added a small quantity of flour of mustard.

Chronic rheumatism is distinguished by the pained parts being cold and stiff, and not easily made to perspire; by being worse in cold weather than in warm; by the patient's being very sensible to the changes of weather; and by the general health being not very greatly impaired, at least till the disease has continued many months. The affected joints remain for a long time swollen and tender, and occasionally permanently thickened and distorted. The cure of chronic rheumatism is very difficult. Many expedients have been tried, and there is a necessity for varying the treatment in almost all instances of it. Sweating and friction are proper commencements, and these must be followed up by warm bathing, warm pumping, the use of the Bath waters, or sometimes by sea-bathing, by electricity, and the frequent use of the flesh-brush. The system is to be invigorated by bark, wine, iron, and other tonics. The ammoniated tincture of guaiac, in the dose of two or three drachms, has been employed with success; also the oil of turpentine, from ten to thirty drops mixed with honey, or what has been a good deal employed of late, cod-liver oil, from half an ounce to an ounce. The above doses are to be taken twice a-day, and persevered in for some time. Much attention is to be paid to the wearing of proper clothing, and not to expose the body to the vicissitudes of the weather, and especially to avoid cold and damp. Much benefit is often derived from wearing Pulvermacher's electric chains.