[150] See Norman J. DeWitt, “The Humanist Should Look to the Law,” Journal of General Education, IV (January, 1950), 149. Although it is not our concern here, it probably could be shown that the essential requirements of oratory themselves depend upon a certain organization of society, such as an aristocratic republicanism. When Burke declares that a true natural aristocracy “is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths” (Works [London, 1853-64], III, 85-86) my impression is that he has in mind something resembling our “uncontested term.” The “legitimate presumptions” are the settled things which afford the plane of maneuver.
[151] Address Preceding the Removal of the Senate from the Old to the New Chamber: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, January 4, 1859 (Washington, 1859), (Printed at the Office of the Congressional Globe), pp. 5, 7.
[152] There is commentary in the fact that the long commemorative address, with its assembled memories, was a distinctive institution of nineteenth-century America. Generalizations and “distance” were on such occasions the main resources.
[153] The Position and Function of the American Bar, as an Element of Conservatism in the State: An Address Delivered before the Law School in Cambridge, July 3, 1845. From Addresses and Orations of Rufus Choate (Boston: Little, Brown, 1891), pp. 141-43.
[154] A distinction must be made between “uncontested terms” and slogans. The former are parts of the general mosaic of belief; the latter are uncritical aspirations, or at the worst, shibboleths.
[155] E.g., Samuel T. Williamson, “How to Write Like a Social Scientist,” Saturday Review of Literature, XXX, No. 40 (October 4, 1947), 17.
[156] See Bertrand Russell, “The Postulate of Natural Kinds or of Limited Variety,” Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948), pp. 438-44.
[157] (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1939), p. 349.
[158] Melvin Seeman, “An Evaluation of Current Approaches to Personality Differences in Folk and Urban Societies,” Social Forces, XXV (December, 1946), 165.
[159] Identification and Analysis of Attribute-Cluster-Blocs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 214.