The ethics of
Rhetoric

The ethics of
Rhetoric

By RICHARD M. WEAVER

ὥστε συμβαίνει τὴν ρητορικὴν οἶον

παραφυές τι τῆς διαλεκτικῆς εἶναι καὶ

τῆς περὶ τὰ ἤθη πραγματείας

Thus it happens that rhetoric is an offshoot
of dialectic and also of ethical studies.

—Aristotle, Rhetoric

Chicago · HENRY REGNERY COMPANY · 1953

Copyright 1953 by Henry Regnery Company. Copyright under International
Copyright Union. Manufactured in the United States
of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-8796.

Second Printing, December, 1963

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments with thanks are due the following: Charles Scribner’s Sons for the passage from Allen Tate’s “The Subway,” from Poems 1922-1947; Karl Shapiro and Random House, Inc., for the passage from Essay on Rime; and the Viking Press, Inc., for the passage from Sherwood Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story.

The ethics of
Rhetoric

Chapter I
THE PHAEDRUS AND THE NATURE OF RHETORIC

Our subject begins with the threshold difficulty of defining the question which Plato’s Phaedrus was meant to answer. Students of this justly celebrated dialogue have felt uncertain of its unity of theme, and the tendency has been to designate it broadly as a discussion of the ethical and the beautiful. The explicit topics of the dialogue are, in order: love, the soul, speechmaking, and the spoken and written word, or what is generally termed by us “composition.” The development looks random, and some of the most interesting passages appear jeux d’esprit. The richness of the literary art diverts attention from the substance of the argument.

But a work of art which touches on many profound problems justifies more than one kind of reading. Our difficulty with the Phaedrus may be that our interpretation has been too literal and too topical. If we will bring to the reading of it even a portion of that imagination which Plato habitually exercised, we should perceive surely enough that it is consistently, and from beginning to end, about one thing, which is the nature of rhetoric.[1] Again, that point may have been missed because most readers conceive rhetoric to be a system of artifice rather than an idea,[2] and the Phaedrus, for all its apparent divagation, keeps very close to a single idea. A study of its rhetorical structure, especially, may give us the insight which has been withheld, while making us feel anew that Plato possessed the deepest divining rod among the ancients.

For the imaginative interpretation which we shall now undertake, we have both general and specific warrant. First, it scarcely needs pointing out that a Socratic dialogue is in itself an example of transcendence. Beginning with something simple and topical, it passes to more general levels of application; and not infrequently, it must make the leap into allegory for the final utterance. This means, of course, that a Socratic dialogue may be about its subject implicitly as well as explicitly. The implicit rendering is usually through some kind of figuration because it is the nature of this meaning to be ineffable in any other way. It is necessary, therefore, to be alert for what takes place through the analogical mode.

Second, it is a matter of curious interest that a warning against literal reading occurs at an early stage of the Phaedrus. Here in the opening pages, appearing as if to set the key of the theme, comes an allusion to the myth of Boreas and Oreithyia. On the very spot where the dialogue begins, Boreas is said to have carried off the maiden. Does Socrates believe that this tale is really true? Or is he in favor of a scientific explanation of what the myth alleges? Athens had scientific experts, and the scientific explanation was that the north wind had pushed her off some rocks where she was playing with a companion. In this way the poetical story is provided with a factual basis. The answer of Socrates is that many tales are open to this kind of rationalization, but that the result is tedious and actually irrelevant. It is irrelevant because our chief concern is with the nature of the man, and it is beside the point to probe into such matters while we are yet ignorant of ourselves. The scientific criticism of Greek mythology, which may be likened to the scientific criticism of the myths of the Bible in our own day, produces at best “a boorish sort of wisdom (ἀγροίκῳ τινὶ σοφίᾳ).” It is a limitation to suppose that the truth of the story lies in its historicity. The “boorish sort of wisdom” seeks to supplant poetic allegation with fact, just as an archaeologist might look for the foundations of the Garden of Eden. But while this sort of search goes on the truth flies off, on wings of imagination, and is not recoverable until the searcher attains a higher level of pursuit. Socrates is satisfied with the parable, and we infer from numerous other passages that he believed that some things are best told by parable and some perhaps discoverable only by parable. Real investigation goes forward with the help of analogy. “Freud without Sophocles is unthinkable,” a modern writer has said.[3]

With these precepts in mind, we turn to that part of the Phaedrus which has proved most puzzling: why is so much said about the absurd relationship of the lover and the non-lover? Socrates encounters Phaedrus outside the city wall. The latter has just come from hearing a discourse by Lysias which enchanted him with its eloquence. He is prevailed upon to repeat this discourse, and the two seek out a shady spot on the banks of the Ilissus. Now the discourse is remarkable because although it was “in a way, a love speech,” its argument was that people should grant favors to non-lovers rather than to lovers. “This is just the clever thing about it,” Phaedrus remarks. People are in the habit of preferring their lovers, but it is much more intelligent, as the argument of Lysias runs, to prefer a non-lover. Accordingly, the first major topic of the dialogue is a eulogy of the non-lover. The speech provides good subject matter for jesting on the part of Socrates, and looks like another exhibition of the childlike ingeniousness which gives the Greeks their charm. Is it merely a piece of literary trifling? Rather, it is Plato’s dramatistic presentation of a major thesis. Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, he is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.

Sophistications of theory cannot obscure the truth that there are but three ways for language to affect us. It can move us toward what is good; it can move us toward what is evil; or it can, in hypothetical third place, fail to move us at all.[4] Of course there are numberless degrees of effect under the first two heads, and the third, as will be shown, is an approximate rather than an absolute zero of effect. But any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus, just as it is of contemporary semantic theory. What Plato has succeeded in doing in this dialogue, whether by a remarkably effaced design, or unconsciously through the formal pressure of his conception, is to give us embodiments of the three types of discourse. These are respectively the non-lover, the evil lover, and the noble lover. We shall take up these figures in their sequence and show their relevance to the problem of language.

The eulogy of the non-lover in the speech of Lysias, as we hear it repeated to Socrates, stresses the fact that the non-lover follows a policy of enlightened self-interest. First of all, the non-lover does not neglect his affairs or commit extreme acts under the influence of passion. Since he acts from calculation, he never has occasion for remorse. No one ever says of him that he is not in his right mind, because all of his acts are within prudential bounds. The first point is, in sum, that the non-lover never sacrifices himself and therefore never feels the vexation which overtakes lovers when they recover from their passion and try to balance their pains with their profit. And the non-lover is constant whereas the lover is inconstant. The first argument then is that the non-lover demonstrates his superiority through prudence and objectivity. The second point of superiority found in non-lovers is that there are many more of them. If one is limited in one’s choice to one’s lovers, the range is small; but as there are always more non-lovers than lovers, one has a better chance in choosing among many of finding something worthy of one’s affection. A third point of superiority is that association with the non-lover does not excite public comment. If one is seen going about with the object of one’s love, one is likely to provoke gossip; but when one is seen conversing with the non-lover, people merely realize that “everybody must converse with somebody.” Therefore this kind of relationship does not affect one’s public standing, and one is not disturbed by what the neighbors are saying. Finally, non-lovers are not jealous of one’s associates. Accordingly they do not try to keep one from companions of intellect or wealth for fear that they may be outshone themselves. The lover, by contrast, tries to draw his beloved away from such companionship and so deprives him of improving associations. The argument is concluded with a generalization that one ought to grant favors not to the needy or the importunate, but to those who are able to repay. Such is the favorable account of the non-lover given by Lysias.

We must now observe how these points of superiority correspond to those of “semantically purified” speech. By “semantically purified speech” we mean the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is a simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. In its ideal conception, it would have less power to move than 2 + 2 = 4, since it is generally admitted that mathematical equations may have the beauty of elegance, and hence are not above suspicion where beauty is suspect. But this neuter language will be an unqualified medium of transmission of meanings from mind to mind, and by virtue of its minds can remain in an unprejudiced relationship to the world and also to other minds.

Since the characteristic of this language is absence of anything like affection, it exhibits toward the thing being represented merely a sober fidelity, like that of the non-lover toward his companion. Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity. Its “enlightened self-interest” takes the form of an unvarying accuracy and regularity in its symbolic references, most, if not all of which will be to verifiable data in the extramental world. Like a thrifty burgher, it has no romanticism about it; and it distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic. The burgher has his feet on the ground; and similarly the language of pure notation has its point-by-point contact with objective reality. As Stuart Chase, one of its modern proponents, says in The Tyranny of Words: “If we wish to understand the world and ourselves, it follows that we should use a language whose structure corresponds to physical structure”[5] (italics his). So this language is married to the world, and its marital fidelity contrasts with the extravagances of other languages.

In second place, this language is far more “available.” Whereas rhetorical language, or language which would persuade, must always be particularized to suit the occasion, drawing its effectiveness from many small nuances, a “utility” language is very general and one has no difficulty putting his meaning into it if he is satisfied with a paraphrase of that meaning. The 850 words recommended for Basic English, for example, are highly available in the sense that all native users of English have them instantly ready and learners of English can quickly acquire them. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the availability is a heavy tax upon all other qualities. Most of what we admire as energy and fullness tends to disappear when mere verbal counters are used. The conventional or public aspect of language can encroach upon the suggestive or symbolical aspect, until the naming is vague or blurred. In proportion as the medium is conventional in the widest sense and avoids all individualizing, personalizing, and heightening terms, it is common, and the commonness constitutes the negative virtue ascribed to the non-lover.

Finally, with reference to the third qualification of the non-lover, it is true that neuter language does not excite public opinion. This fact follows from its character outlined above. Rhetorical language on the other hand, for whatever purpose used, excites interest and with it either pleasure or alarm. People listen instinctively to the man whose speech betrays inclination. It does not matter what the inclination is toward, but we may say that the greater the degree of inclination, the greater the curiosity or response. Hence a “style” in speech always causes one to be a marked man, and the public may not be so much impressed—at least initially—by what the man is for or against as by the fact that he has a style. The way therefore to avoid public comment is to avoid the speech of affection and to use that of business, since, to echo the original proposition of Lysias, everybody knows that one must do business with others. From another standpoint, then, this is the language of prudence. These are the features which give neuter discourse an appeal to those who expect a scientific solution of human problems.

In summing up the trend of meaning, we note that Lysias has been praising a disinterested kind of relationship which avoids all excesses and irrationalities, all the dementia of love. It is a circumspect kind of relationship, which is preferred by all men who wish to do well in the world and avoid tempestuous courses. We have compared its detachment with the kind of abstraction to be found in scientific notation. But as an earnest of what is to come let us note, in taking leave of this part, that Phaedrus expresses admiration for the eloquence, especially of diction, with which the suit of the non-lover has been urged. This is our warning of the dilemma of the non-lover.

Now we turn to the second major speech of the dialogue, which is made by Socrates. Notwithstanding Phaedrus’ enthusiastic praise, Socrates is dissatisfied with the speech of the non-lover. He remembers having heard wiser things on the subject and feels that he can make a speech on the same theme “different from this and quite as good.” After some playful exchange, Socrates launches upon his own abuse of love, which centers on the point that the lover is an exploiter. Love (ἔρως) is defined as the kind of desire which overcomes rational opinion and moves toward the enjoyment of personal or bodily beauty. The lover wishes to make the object of his passion as pleasing to himself as possible; but to those possessed by this frenzy, only that which is subject to their will is pleasant. Accordingly, everything which is opposed, or is equal or better, the lover views with hostility. He naturally therefore tries to make the beloved inferior to himself in every respect. He is pleased if the beloved has intellectual limitations because they have the effect of making him manageable. For a similar reason he tries to keep him away from all influences which might “make a man of him,” and of course the greatest of these is divine philosophy. While he is working to keep him intellectually immature, he works also to keep him weak and effeminate, with such harmful result that the beloved is unable to play a man’s part in crises. The lover is, moreover, jealous of the possession of property because this gives the beloved an independence which he does not wish him to have. Thus the lover in exercising an unremitting compulsion over the beloved deprives him of all praiseworthy qualities, and this is the price the beloved pays for accepting a lover who is “necessarily without reason.” In brief, the lover is not motivated by benevolence toward the beloved, but by selfish appetite; and Socrates can aptly close with the quotation: “As wolves love lambs, so lovers love their loves.” The speech is on the single theme of exploitation. It is important for us to keep in mind the object of love as here described, because another kind of love with a different object is later introduced into the dialogue, and we shall discuss the counterpart of each.

As we look now for the parallel in language, we find ourselves confronting the second of the three alternatives: speech which influences us in the direction of what is evil. This we shall call base rhetoric because its end is the exploitation which Socrates has been condemning. We find that base rhetoric hates that which is opposed, or is equal or better because all such things are impediments to its will, and in the last analysis it knows only its will. Truth is the stubborn, objective restraint which this will endeavors to overcome. Base rhetoric is therefore always trying to keep its objects from the support which personal courage, noble associations, and divine philosophy provide a man.

The base rhetorician, we may say, is a man who has yielded to the wrong aspects of existence. He has allowed himself to succumb to the sights and shows, to the physical pleasures which conspire against noble life. He knows that the only way he can get a following in his pursuits (and a following seems necessary to maximum enjoyment of the pursuits) is to work against the true understanding of his followers. Consequently the things which would elevate he keeps out of sight, and the things with which he surrounds his “beloved” are those which minister immediately to desire. The beloved is thus emasculated in understanding in order that the lover may have his way. Or as Socrates expresses it, the selfish lover contrives things so that the beloved will be “most agreeable to him and most harmful to himself.”

Examples of this kind of contrivance occur on every hand in the impassioned language of journalism and political pleading. In the world of affairs which these seek to influence, the many are kept in a state of pupillage so that they will be most docile to their “lovers.” The techniques of the base lover, especially as exemplified in modern journalism, would make a long catalogue, but in general it is accurate to say that he seeks to keep the understanding in a passive state by never permitting an honest examination of alternatives. Nothing is more feared by him than a true dialectic, for this not only endangers his favored alternative, but also gives the “beloved”—how clearly here are these the “lambs” of Socrates’ figure—some training in intellectual independence. What he does therefore is dress up one alternative in all the cheap finery of immediate hopes and fears, knowing that if he can thus prevent a masculine exercise of imagination and will, he can have his way. By discussing only one side of an issue, by mentioning cause without consequence or consequence without cause, acts without agents or agents without agency,[6] he often successfully blocks definition and cause-and-effect reasoning. In this way his choices are arrayed in such meretricious images that one can quickly infer the juvenile mind which they would attract. Of course the base rhetorician today, with his vastly augmented power of propagation, has means of deluding which no ancient rhetor in forum or market place could have imagined.

Because Socrates has now made a speech against love, representing it as an evil, the non-lover seems to survive in estimation. We observe, however, that the non-lover, instead of being celebrated, is disposed of dialectically. “So, in a word, I say that the non-lover possesses all the advantages that are opposed to the disadvantages we found in the lover.” This is not without bearing upon the subject matter of the important third speech, to which we now turn.

At this point in the dialogue, Socrates is warned by his monitory spirit that he has been engaging in a defamation of love despite the fact that love is a divinity. “If love is, as indeed he is, a god or something divine, he can be nothing evil; but the two speeches just now said that he was evil.” These discourses were then an impiety—one representing non-love as admirable and the other attacking love as base. Socrates resolves to make amends, and the recantation which follows is one of the most elaborate developments in the Platonic system. The account of love which emerges from this new position may be summarized as follows.

Love is often censured as a form of madness, yet not all madness is evil. There is a madness which is simple degeneracy, but on the other hand there are kinds of madness which are really forms of inspiration, from which come the greatest gifts conferred on man. Prophecy is a kind of madness, and so too is poetry. “The poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madman.” Mere sanity, which is of human origin, is inferior to that madness which is inspired by the gods and which is a condition for the highest kind of achievement. In this category goes the madness of the true lover. His is a generous state which confers blessings to the ignoring of self, whereas the conduct of the non-lover displays all the selfishness of business: “the affection of the non-lover, which is alloyed with mortal prudence and follows mortal and parsimonious rules of conduct will beget in the beloved soul the narrowness which common folk praise as virtue; it will cause the soul to be a wanderer upon the earth for nine thousand years and a fool below the earth at last.” It is the vulgar who do not realize that the madness of the noble lover is an inspired madness because he has his thoughts turned toward a beauty of divine origin.

Now the attitude of the noble lover toward the beloved is in direct contrast with that of the evil lover, who, as we have seen, strives to possess and victimize the object of his affections. For once the noble lover has mastered the conflict within his own soul by conquering appetite and fixing his attention upon the intelligible and the divine, he conceives an exalted attitude toward the beloved. The noble lover now “follows the beloved in reverence and awe.” So those who are filled with this kind of love “exhibit no jealousy or meanness toward the loved one, but endeavor by every means in their power to lead him to the likeness of the god whom they honor.” Such is the conversion by which love turns from the exploitative to the creative.

Here it becomes necessary to bring our concepts together and to think of all speech having persuasive power as a kind of “love.”[7] Thus, rhetorical speech is madness to the extent that it departs from the line which mere sanity lays down. There is always in its statement a kind of excess or deficiency which is immediately discernible when the test of simple realism is applied. Simple realism operates on a principle of equation or correspondence; one thing must match another, or, representation must tally with thing represented, like items in a tradesman’s account. Any excess or deficiency on the part of the representation invokes the existence of the world of symbolism, which simple realism must deny. This explains why there is an immortal feud between men of business and the users of metaphor and metonymy, the poets and the rhetoricians.[8] The man of business, the narrow and parsimonious soul in the allusion of Socrates, desires a world which is a reliable materiality. But this the poet and rhetorician will never let him have, for each, with his own purpose, is trying to advance the borders of the imaginative world. A primrose by the river’s brim will not remain that in the poet’s account, but is promptly turned into something very much larger and something highly implicative. He who is accustomed to record the world with an abacus cannot follow these transfigurations; and indeed the very occurrence of them subtly undermines the premise of his business. It is the historic tendency of the tradesman, therefore, to confine passion to quite narrow channels so that it will not upset the decent business arrangements of the world. But if the poet, as the chief transformer of our picture of the world, is the peculiar enemy of this mentality, the rhetorician is also hostile when practicing the kind of love proper to him. The “passion” in his speech is revolutionary, and it has a practical end.

We have now indicated the significance of the three types of lovers; but the remainder of the Phaedrus has much more to say about the nature of rhetoric, and we must return to one or more points to place our subject in a wider context. The problem of rhetoric which occupied Plato persistently, not only in the Phaedrus but also in other dialogues where this art is reviewed, may be best stated as a question: if truth alone is not sufficient to persuade men, what else remains that can be legitimately added? In one of the exchanges with Phaedrus, Socrates puts the question in the mouth of a personified Rhetoric: “I do not compel anyone to learn to speak without knowing the truth, but if my advice is of any value, he learns that first and then acquires me. So what I claim is this, that without my help the knowledge of the truth does not give the art of persuasion.”

Now rhetoric as we have discussed it in relation to the lovers consists of truth plus its artful presentation, and for this reason it becomes necessary to say something more about the natural order of dialectic and rhetoric. In any general characterization rhetoric will include dialectic,[9] but for the study of method it is necessary to separate the two. Dialectic is a method of investigation whose object is the establishment of truth about doubtful propositions. Aristotle in the Topics gives a concise statement of its nature. “A dialectical problem is a subject of inquiry that contributes either to choice or avoidance, or to truth and knowledge, and that either by itself, or as a help to the solution of some other such problem. It must, moreover, be something on which either people hold no opinion either way, or the masses hold a contrary opinion to the philosophers, or the philosophers to the masses, or each of them among themselves.”[10] Plato is not perfectly clear about the distinction between positive and dialectical terms. In one passage[11] he contrasts the “positive” terms “iron” and “silver” with the “dialectical” terms “justice” and “goodness”; yet in other passages his “dialectical” terms seem to include categorizations of the external world. Thus Socrates indicates that distinguishing the horse from the ass is a dialectical operation;[12] and he tells us later that a good dialectician is able to divide things by classes “where the natural joints are” and will avoid breaking any part “after the manner of a bad carver.”[13] Such, perhaps, is Aristotle’s dialectic which contributes to truth and knowledge.

But there is a branch of dialectic which contributes to “choice or avoidance,” and it is with this that rhetoric is regularly found joined. Generally speaking, this is a rhetoric involving questions of policy, and the dialectic which precedes it will determine not the application of positive terms but that of terms which are subject to the contingency of evaluation. Here dialectical inquiry will concern itself not with what is “iron” but with what is “good.” It seeks to establish what belongs in the category of the “just” rather than what belongs in the genus Canis. As a general rule, simple object words such as “iron” and “house” have no connotations of policy, although it is frequently possible to give them these through speech situations in which there is added to their referential function a kind of impulse. We should have to interpret in this way “Fire!” or “Gold!” because these terms acquire something through intonation and relationship which places them in the class of evaluative expressions.

Any piece of persuasion, therefore, will contain as its first process a dialectic establishing terms which have to do with policy. Now a term of policy is essentially a term of motion, and here begins the congruence of rhetoric with the soul which underlies the speculation of the Phaedrus. In his myth of the charioteer, Socrates declares that every soul is immortal because “that which is ever moving is immortal.” Motion, it would appear from this definition, is part of the soul’s essence. And just because the soul is ever tending, positive or indifferent terms cannot partake of this congruence. But terms of tendency—goodness, justice, divinity, and the like—are terms of motion and therefore may be said to comport with the soul’s essence. The soul’s perception of goodness, justice, and divinity will depend upon its proper tendency, while at the same time contacts with these in discourse confirm and direct that tendency. The education of the soul is not a process of bringing it into correspondence with a physical structure like the external world, but rather a process of rightly affecting its motion. By this conception, a soul which is rightly affected calls that good which is good; but a soul which is wrongly turned calls that good which is evil. What Plato has prepared us to see is that the virtuous rhetorician, who is a lover of truth, has a soul of such movement that its dialectical perceptions are consonant with those of a divine mind. Or, in the language of more technical philosophy, this soul is aware of axiological systems which have ontic status. The good soul, consequently, will not urge a perversion of justice as justice in order to impose upon the commonwealth. Insofar as the soul has its impulse in the right direction, its definitions will agree with the true nature of intelligible things.

There is, then, no true rhetoric without dialectic, for the dialectic provides that basis of “high speculation about nature” without which rhetoric in the narrower sense has nothing to work upon. Yet, when the disputed terms have been established, we are at the limit of dialectic. How does the noble rhetorician proceed from this point on? That the clearest demonstration in terms of logical inclusion and exclusion often fails to win assent we hardly need state; therefore, to what does the rhetorician resort at this critical passage? It is the stage at which he passes from the logical to the analogical, or it is where figuration comes into rhetoric.

To look at this for a moment through a practical illustration, let us suppose that a speaker has convinced his listeners that his position is “true” as far as dialectical inquiry may be pushed. Now he sets about moving the listeners toward that position, but there is no way to move them except through the operation of analogy. The analogy proceeds by showing that the position being urged resembles or partakes of something greater and finer. It will be represented, in sum, as one of the steps leading toward ultimate good. Let us further suppose our speaker to be arguing for the payment of a just debt. The payment of the just debt is not itself justice, but the payment of this particular debt is one of the many things which would have to be done before this could be a completely just world. It is just, then, because it partakes of the ideal justice, or it is a small analogue of all justice (in practice it will be found that the rhetorician makes extensive use of synecdoche, whereby the small part is used as a vivid suggestion of the grandeur of the whole). It is by bringing out these resemblances that the good rhetorician leads those who listen in the direction of what is good. In effect, he performs a cure of souls by giving impulse, chiefly through figuration, toward an ideal good.

We now see the true rhetorician as a noble lover of the good, who works through dialectic and through poetic or analogical association. However he is compelled to modulate by the peculiar features of an occasion, this is his method.

It may not be superfluous to draw attention to the fact that what we have here outlined is the method of the Phaedrus itself. The dialectic appears in the dispute about love. The current thesis that love is praiseworthy is countered by the antithesis that love is blameworthy. This position is fully developed in the speech of Lysias and in the first speech of Socrates. But this position is countered by a new thesis that after all love is praiseworthy because it is a divine thing. Of course, this is love on a higher level, or love re-defined. This is the regular process of transcendence which we have noted before. Now, having rescued love from the imputation of evil by excluding certain things from its definition, what does Socrates do? Quite in accordance with our analysis, he turns rhetorician. He tries to make this love as attractive as possible by bringing in the splendid figure of the charioteer.[14] In the narrower conception of this art, the allegory is the rhetoric, for it excites and fills us with desire for this kind of love, depicted with many terms having tendency toward the good. But in the broader conception the art must include also the dialectic, which succeeded in placing love in the category of divine things before filling our imaginations with attributes of divinity.[15] It is so regularly the method of Plato to follow a subtle analysis with a striking myth that it is not unreasonable to call him the master rhetorician. This goes far to explain why those who reject his philosophy sometimes remark his literary art with mingled admiration and annoyance.

The objection sometimes made that rhetoric cannot be used by a lover of truth because it indulges in “exaggerations” can be answered as follows. There is an exaggeration which is mere wantonness, and with this the true rhetorician has nothing to do. Such exaggeration is purely impressionistic in aim. Like caricature, whose only object is to amuse, it seizes upon any trait or aspect which could produce titillation and exploits this without conscience. If all rhetoric were like this, we should have to grant that rhetoricians are persons of very low responsibility and their art a disreputable one. But the rhetorician we have now defined is not interested in sensationalism.

The exaggeration which this rhetorician employs is not caricature but prophecy; and it would be a fair formulation to say that true rhetoric is concerned with the potency of things. The literalist, like the anti-poet described earlier, is troubled by its failure to conform to a present reality. What he fails to appreciate is that potentiality is a mode of existence, and that all prophecy is about the tendency of things. The discourse of the noble rhetorician, accordingly, will be about real potentiality or possible actuality, whereas that of the mere exaggerator is about unreal potentiality. Naturally this distinction rests upon a supposal that the rhetorician has insight, and we could not defend him in the absence of that condition. But given insight, he has the duty to represent to us the as yet unactualized future. It would be, for example, a misrepresentation of current facts but not of potential ones to talk about the joys of peace in a time of war. During the Second World War, at the depth of Britain’s political and military disaster, Winston Churchill likened the future of Europe to “broad sunlit uplands.” Now if one had regard only for the hour, this was a piece of mendacity such as the worst charlatans are found committing; but if one took Churchill’s premises and then considered the potentiality, the picture was within bounds of actualization. His “exaggeration” was that the defeat of the enemy would place Europe in a position for long and peaceful progress. At the time the surface trends ran the other way; the actuality was a valley of humiliation. Yet the hope which transfigured this to “broad sunlit uplands” was not irresponsible, and we conclude by saying that the rhetorician talks about both what exists simply and what exists by favor of human imagination and effort.[16]

This interest in actualization is a further distinction between pure dialectic and rhetoric. With its forecast of the actual possibility, rhetoric passes from mere scientific demonstration of an idea to its relation to prudential conduct. A dialectic must take place in vacuo, and the fact alone that it contains contraries leaves it an intellectual thing. Rhetoric, on the other hand, always espouses one of the contraries. This espousal is followed by some attempt at impingement upon actuality. That is why rhetoric, with its passion for the actual, is more complete than mere dialectic with its dry understanding. It is more complete on the premise that man is a creature of passion who must live out that passion in the world. Pure contemplation does not suffice for this end. As Jacques Maritain has expressed it: “love ... is not directed at possibilities or pure essences; it is directed at what exists; one does not love possibilities, one loves that which exists or is destined to exist.”[17] The complete man, then, is the “lover” added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician. Understanding followed by actualization seems to be the order of creation, and there is no need for the role of rhetoric to be misconceived.

The pure dialectician is left in the theoretical position of the non-lover, who can attain understanding but who cannot add impulse to truth. We are compelled to say “theoretical position” because it is by no means certain that in the world of actual speech the non-lover has more than a putative existence. We have seen previously that his speech would consist of strictly referential words which would serve only as designata. Now the question arises: at what point is motive to come into such language? Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives has pointed to “the pattern of embarrassment behind the contemporary ideal of a language that will best promote good action by entirely eliminating the element of exhortation or command. Insofar as such a project succeeded, its terms would involve a narrowing of circumference to a point where the principle of personal action is eliminated from language, so that an act would follow from it only as a non-sequitur, a kind of humanitarian after-thought.”[18]

The fault of this conception of language is that scientific intention turns out to be enclosed in artistic intention and not vice versa. Let us test this by taking as an example one of those “fact-finding committees” so favored by modern representative governments. A language in which all else is suppressed in favor of nuclear meanings would be an ideal instrumentality for the report of such a committee. But this committee, if it lived up to the ideal of its conception, would have to be followed by an “attitude-finding committee” to tell us what its explorations really mean. In real practice the fact-finding committee understands well enough that it is also an attitude-finding committee, and where it cannot show inclination through language of tendency, it usually manages to do so through selection and arrangement of the otherwise inarticulate facts. To recur here to the original situation in the dialogue, we recall that the eloquent Lysias, posing as a non-lover, had concealed designs upon Phaedrus, so that his fine speech was really a sheep’s clothing. Socrates discerned in him a “peculiar craftiness.” One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse. We cannot deny that there are degrees of objectivity in the reference of speech. But this is not the same as an assurance that a vocabulary of reduced meanings will solve the problems of mankind. Many of those problems will have to be handled, as Socrates well knew, by the student of souls, who must primarily make use of the language of tendency. The soul is impulse, not simply cognition; and finally one’s interest in rhetoric depends on how much poignancy one senses in existence.[19]

Rhetoric moves the soul with a movement which cannot finally be justified logically. It can only be valued analogically with reference to some supreme image. Therefore when the rhetorician encounters some soul “sinking beneath the double load of forgetfulness and vice” he seeks to re-animate it by holding up to its sight the order of presumptive goods. This order is necessarily a hierarchy leading up to the ultimate good. All of the terms in a rhetorical vocabulary are like links in a chain stretching up to some master link which transmits its influence down through the linkages. It is impossible to talk about rhetoric as effective expression without having as a term giving intelligibility to the whole discourse, the Good. Of course, inferior concepts of the Good may be and often are placed in this ultimate position; and there is nothing to keep a base lover from inverting the proper order and saying, “Evil, be thou my good.” Yet the fact remains that in any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily an aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions, to say nothing of supplementing his logical and pathetic proofs with an ethical proof.

All things considered, rhetoric, noble or base, is a great power in the world; and we note accordingly that at the center of the public life of every people there is a fierce struggle over who shall control the means of rhetorical propagation. Today we set up “offices of information,” which like the sly lover in the dialogue, pose as non-lovers while pushing their suits. But there is no reason to despair over the fact that men will never give up seeking to influence one another. We would not desire it to be otherwise; neuter discourse is a false idol, to worship which is to commit the very offense for which Socrates made expiation in his second speech.

Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.[20] The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuousity into life, produced by a consciousness that “nothing is lost.” Yet this is preferable to that desolation which proceeds from an infinite dispersion or feeling of unaccountability. Even so, the choice between them is hardly ours to make; we did not create the order of things, but being accountable for our impulses, we wish these to be just.

Thus when we finally divest rhetoric of all the notions of artifice which have grown up around it, we are left with something very much like Spinoza’s “intellectual love of God.” This is its essence and the fons et origo of its power. It is “intellectual” because, as we have previously seen, there is no honest rhetoric without a preceding dialectic. The kind of rhetoric which is justly condemned is utterance in support of a position before that position has been adjudicated with reference to the whole universe of discourse[21]—and of such the world always produces more than enough. It is “love” because it is something in addition to bare theoretical truth. That element in addition is a desire to bring truth into a kind of existence, or to give it an actuality to which theory is indifferent. Now what is to be said about our last expression, “of God”? Echoes of theological warfare will cause many to desire a substitute for this, and we should not object. As long as we have in ultimate place the highest good man can intuit, the relationship is made perfect. We shall be content with “intellectual love of the Good.” It is still the intellectual love of good which causes the noble lover to desire not to devour his beloved but to shape him according to the gods as far as mortal power allows. So rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and he who feels no influence of it is truly outside the communion of minds. Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.

It may be granted that in this essay we have gone some distance from the banks of the Ilissus. What began as a simple account of passion becomes by transcendence an allegory of all speech. No one would think of suggesting that Plato had in mind every application which has here been made, but that need not arise as an issue. The structure of the dialogue, the way in which the judgments about speech concentre, and especially the close association of the true, the beautiful, and the good, constitute a unity of implication. The central idea is that all speech, which is the means the gods have given man to express his soul, is a form of eros, in the proper interpretation of the word. With that truth the rhetorician will always be brought face to face as soon as he ventures beyond the consideration of mere artifice and device.

Chapter II
DIALECTIC AND RHETORIC AT DAYTON, TENNESSEE

We have maintained that dialectic and rhetoric are distinguishable stages of argumentation, although often they are not distinguished by the professional mind, to say nothing of the popular mind. Dialectic is that stage which defines the subject satisfactorily with regard to the logos, or the set of propositions making up some coherent universe of discourse; and we can therefore say that a dialectical position is established when its relation to an opposite has been made clear and it is thus rationally rather than empirically sustained. Despite the inconclusiveness of Plato on this subject, we shall say that facts are never dialectically determined—although they may be elaborated in a dialectical system—and that the urgency of facts is never a dialectical concern. For similar reasons Professor Adler, in his searching study of dialectic, maintains the position that “Facts, that is non-discursive elements, are never determinative of dialectic in a logical or intellectual sense....”[22]

What a successful dialectic secures for any position therefore, as we noted in the opening chapter, is not actuality but possibility; and what rhetoric thereafter accomplishes is to take any dialectically secured position (since positive positions, like the “position” that water freezes at 32°F., are not matters for rhetorical appeal) and show its relationship to the world of prudential conduct. This is tantamount to saying that what the specifically rhetorical plea asks of us is belief, which is a preliminary to action.

It may be helpful to state this relationship through an example less complex than that of the Platonic dialogue. The speaker who in a dialectical contest has taken the position that “magnanimity is a virtue” has by his process of opposition and exclusion won our intellectual assent, inasmuch as we see the abstract possibility of this position in the world of discourse. He has not, however, produced in us a resolve to practice magnanimity. To accomplish this he must pass from the realm of possibility to that of actuality; it is not the logical invincibility of “magnanimity” enclosed in the class “virtue” which wins our assent; rather it is the contemplation of magnanimity sub specie actuality. Accordingly when we say that rhetoric instills belief and action, we are saying that it intersects possibility with the plane of actuality and hence of the imperative.[23]

A failure to appreciate this distinction is responsible for many lame performances in our public controversies. The effects are, in outline, that the dialectician cannot understand why his demonstration does not win converts; and the rhetorician cannot understand why his appeal is rejected as specious. The answer, as we have begun to indicate, is that the dialectic has not made reference to reality, which men confronted with problems of conduct require; and the rhetorician has not searched the grounds of the position on which he has perhaps spent much eloquence. True, the dialectician and the rhetorician are often one man, and the two processes may not lie apart in his work; but no student of the art of argumentation can doubt that some extraordinary confusions would be prevented by a knowledge of the theory of this distinction. Beyond this, representative government would receive a tonic effect from any improvement of the ability of an electorate to distinguish logical positions from the detail of rhetorical amplification. The British, through their custom of putting questions to public speakers and to officers of government in Parliament, probably come nearest to getting some dialectical clarification from their public figures. In the United States, where there is no such custom, it is up to each disputant to force the other to reveal his grounds; and this, in the ardor of shoring up his own position rhetorically, he often fails to do with any thoroughness. It should therefore be profitable to try the kind of analysis we have explained upon some celebrated public controversy, with the object of showing how such grasp of rhetorical theory could have made the issues clearer.

For this purpose, it would be hard to think of a better example than the Scopes “evolution” trial of a generation ago. There is no denying that this trial had many aspects of the farcical, and it might seem at first glance not serious enough to warrant this type of examination. Yet at the time it was considered serious enough to draw the most celebrated trial lawyers of the country, as well as some of the most eminent scientists; moreover, after one has cut through the sensationalism with which journalism and a few of the principals clothed the encounter, one finds a unique alignment of dialectical and rhetorical positions.

The background of the trial can be narrated briefly. On March 21, 1925, the state of Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of the theory of evolution in publicly supported schools. The language of the law was as follows:

Section 1. Be it enacted by the general assembly of the state of Tennessee, that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals and all other public schools of the state, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

That same spring John T. Scopes, a young instructor in biology in the high school at Dayton, made an agreement with some local citizens to teach such a theory and to cause himself to be indicted therefor with the object of testing the validity of the law. The indictment was duly returned, and the two sides prepared for the contest. The issue excited the nation as a whole; and the trial drew as opposing counsel Clarence Darrow, the celebrated Chicago lawyer, and William Jennings Bryan, the former political leader and evangelical lecturer.

The remarkable aspect of this trial was that almost from the first the defense, pleading the cause of science, was forced into the role of rhetorician; whereas the prosecution, pleading the cause of the state, clung stubbornly to a dialectical position. This development occurred because the argument of the defense, once the legal technicalities were got over, was that evolution is “true.” The argument of the prosecution was that its teaching was unlawful. These two arguments depend upon rhetoric and dialectic respectively. Because of this circumstance, the famous trial turned into an argument about the orders of knowledge, although this fact was never clearly expressed, if it was ever discerned, by either side, and that is the main subject of our analysis. But before going into the matter of the trial, a slight prologue may be in order.

It is only the first step beyond philosophic naïvete to realize that there are different orders of knowledge, or that not all knowledge is of the same kind of thing. Adler, whose analysis I am satisfied to accept to some extent, distinguishes the orders as follows. First there is the order of facts about existing physical entities. These constitute the simple data of science. Next come the statements which are statements about these facts; these are the propositions or theories of science. Next there come the statements about these statements: “The propositions which these last statements express form a partial universe of discourse which is the body of philosophical opinion.”[24]

To illustrate in sequence: the anatomical measurements of Pithecanthropus erectus would be knowledge of the first order. A theory based on these measurements which placed him in a certain group of related organisms would be knowledge of the second order. A statement about the value or the implications of the theory of this placement would be knowledge of the third order; it would be the judgment of a scientific theory from a dialectical position.

It is at once apparent that the Tennessee “anti-evolution” law was a statement of the third class. That is to say, it was neither a collection of scientific facts, nor a statement about those facts (i.e., a theory or a generalization); it was a statement about a statement (the scientists’ statement) purporting to be based on those facts. It was, to use Adler’s phrase, a philosophical opinion, though expressed in the language of law. Now since the body of philosophical opinion is on a level which surmounts the partial universe of science, how is it possible for the latter ever to refute the former? In short, is there any number of facts, together with generalizations based on facts, which would be sufficient to overcome a dialectical position?

Throughout the trial the defense tended to take the view that science could carry the day just by being scientific. But in doing this, one assumes that there are no points outside the empirical realm from which one can form judgments about science. Science, by this conception, must contain not only its facts, but also the means of its own evaluation, so that the statements about the statements of science are science too.

The published record of the trial runs to approximately three hundred pages, and it would obviously be difficult to present a digest of all that was said. But through a carefully selected series of excerpts, it may be possible to show how blows were traded back and forth from the two positions. The following passages, though not continuous, afford the clearest picture of the dialectical-rhetorical conflict which underlay the entire trial.

The Court (in charging the grand jury)

You will bear in mind that in this investigation you are not interested to inquire into the policy of this legislation.[25]

The Defense

Mr. Darrow: I don’t suppose the court has considered the question of competency of evidence. My associates and myself have fairly definite ideas as to it, but I don’t know how the counsel on the other side feel about it. I think that scientists are competent evidence—or competent witnesses here, to explain what evolution is, and that they are competent on both sides.

The Prosecution

Attorney-General Stewart: If the Court please, in this case, as Mr. Darrow stated, the defense is going to insist on introducing scientists and Bible students to give their ideas on certain views of this law, and that, I am frank to state, will be resisted by the state as vigorously as we know how to resist it. We have had a conference or two about the matter, and we think that it isn’t competent evidence; that is, it is not competent to bring into this case scientists who testify as to what the theory of evolution is or interpret the Bible or anything of that sort.

The Defense

Mr. Neal: The defendant moves the court to quash the indictment in this case for the following reasons: In that it violates Sec. 12, Art. XI, of the Constitution of Tennessee: “It shall be the duty of the general assembly in all future periods of the government to cherish literature and science....” I want to say that our main contention after all, may it please your honor, is that this is not a proper thing for any legislature, the legislature of Tennessee or the legislature of the United States, to attempt to make and assign a rule in regard to. In this law there is an attempt to pronounce a judgment and a conclusion in the realm of science and in the realm of religion.

The Prosecution

Mr. McKenzie: Under the law you cannot teach in the common schools the Bible. Why should it be improper to provide that you cannot teach this other theory?

The Defense

Mr. Darrow: Can a legislative body say, “You cannot read a book or take a lesson or make a talk on science until you first find out whether you are saying against Genesis”? It can unless that constitutional provision protects me. It can. Can it say to the astronomer, you cannot turn your telescope upon the infinite planets and suns and stars that fill space, lest you find that the earth is not the center of the universe and that there is not any firmament between us and the heaven? Can it? It could—except for the work of Thomas Jefferson, which has been woven into every state constitution in the Union, and has stayed there like a flaming sword to protect the rights of man against ignorance and bigotry, and when it is permitted to overwhelm them then we are taken in a sea of blood and ruin that all the miseries and tortures and carrion of the middle ages would be as nothing.... If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.

Mr. Dudley Field Malone: So that there shall be no misunderstanding and that no one shall be able to misinterpret or misrepresent our position we wish to state at the beginning of the case that the defense believes that there is a direct conflict between the theory of evolution and the theories of creation as set forth in the Book of Genesis.

Neither do we believe that the stories of creation as set forth in the Bible are reconcilable or scientifically correct.

Mr. Arthur Garfield Hays: Our whole case depends upon proving that evolution is a reasonable scientific theory.

The Prosecution

Mr. William Jennings Bryan, Jr. (in support of a motion to exclude expert testimony): It is, I think, apparent to all that we have now reached the heart of this case, upon your honor’s ruling, as to whether this expert testimony will be admitted largely determines the question of whether this trial from now on will be an orderly effort to try the case upon the issues, raised by the indictment and by the plea or whether it will degenerate into a joint debate upon the merits or demerits of someone’s views upon evolution.... To permit an expert to testify upon this issue would be to substitute trial by experts for trial by jury....

The Defense

Mr. Hays: Are we entitled to show what evolution is? We are entitled to show that, if for no other reason than to determine whether the title is germane to the act.

The Prosecution

Mr. William Jennings Bryan: An expert cannot be permitted to come in here and try to defeat the enforcement of a law by testifying that it isn’t a bad law and it isn’t—I mean a bad doctrine—no matter how these people phrase the doctrine—no matter how they eulogize it. This is not the place to prove that the law ought never to have been passed. The place to prove that, or teach that, was to the state legislature.... The people of this state passed this law, the people of the state knew what they were doing when they passed the law, and they knew the dangers of the doctrine—that they did not want it taught to their children, and my friends, it isn’t—your honor, it isn’t proper to bring experts in here and try to defeat the purpose of the people of this state by trying to show that this thing they denounce and outlaw is a beautiful thing that everybody ought to believe in.... It is this doctrine that gives us Nietzsche, the only great author who tried to carry this to its logical conclusion, and we have the testimony of my distinguished friend from Chicago in his speech in the Loeb and Leopold case that 50,000 volumes have been written about Nietzsche, and he is the greatest philosopher in the last hundred years, and have him pleading that because Leopold read Nietzsche and adopted Nietzsche’s philosophy of the super-man, that he is not responsible for the taking of human life. We have the doctrine—I should not characterize it as I should like to characterize it—the doctrine that the universities that had it taught, and the professors who taught it, are much more responsible for the crime that Leopold committed than Leopold himself. That is the doctrine, my friends, that they have tried to bring into existence, they commence in the high schools with their foundation of evolutionary theory, and we have the word of the distinguished lawyer that this is more read than any other in a hundred years, and the statement of that distinguished man that the teachings of Nietzsche made Leopold a murderer.... (Mr. Bryan reading from a book by Darrow) “I will guarantee that you can go to the University of Chicago today—into its big library and find over 1,000 volumes of Nietzsche, and I am sure I speak moderately. If this boy is to blame for this, where did he get it? Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? And there is no question in this case but what it is true. Then who is to blame? The university would be more to blame than he is. The scholars of the world would be more to blame than he is. The publishers of the world—and Nietzsche’s books are published by one of the biggest publishers in the world—are more to blame than he is. Your honor, it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”... Your honor, we first pointed out that we do not need any experts in science. Here is one plain fact, and the statute defines itself, and it tells the kind of evolution it does not want taught, and the evidence says that this is the kind of evolution that was taught, and no number of scientists could come in here, my friends, and override that statute or take from the jury its right to decide this question, so that all the experts they could bring would mean nothing. And when it comes to Bible experts, every member of the jury is as good an expert on the Bible as any man they could bring, or that we could bring.

The Defense

Mr. Malone: Are we to have our children know nothing about science except what the church says they shall know? I have never seen any harm in learning and understanding, in humility and open-mindedness, and I have never seen clearer the need of that learning than when I see the attitude of the prosecution, who attack and refuse to accept the information and intelligence, which expert witnesses will give them.

The Prosecution

Mr. Stewart: Now what could these scientists testify to? They could only say as an expert, qualified as an expert upon this subject, I have made a study of these things and from my standpoint as such an expert, I say that this does not deny the story of divine creation. That is what they would testify to, isn’t it? That is all they could testify about.

Now, then, I say under the correct construction of the act, that they cannot testify as to that. Why? Because in the wording of this act the legislature itself construed the instrument according to their intention.... What was the general purpose of the legislature here? It was to prevent teaching in the public schools of any county in Tennessee that theory which says that man is descended from a lower order of animals. That is the intent and nobody can dispute it under the shining sun of this day.

The Court

Now upon these issues as brought up it becomes the duty of the Court to determine the question of the admissibility of this expert testimony offered by the defendant.

It is not within the province of the Court under these issues to decide and determine which is true, the story of divine creation as taught in the Bible, or the story of the creation of man as taught by evolution.

If the state is correct in its insistence, it is immaterial, so far as the results of this case are concerned, as to which theory is true; because it is within the province of the legislative branch, and not the judicial branch of the government to pass upon the policy of a statute; and the policy of this statute having been passed upon by that department of the government, this court is not further concerned as to its policy; but is interested only in its proper interpretation and, if valid, its enforcement.... Therefore the court is content to sustain the motion of the attorney-general to exclude expert testimony.

The Prosecution

Mr. Stewart (during Mr. Darrow’s cross-examination of Mr. Bryan): I want to interpose another objection. What is the purpose of this examination?

Mr. Bryan: The purpose is to cast ridicule upon everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.

The Defense

Mr. Darrow: We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all.

Statements of Noted Scientists as Filed into Record by Defense Counsel

Charles H. Judd, Director of School of Education, University of Chicago: It will be impossible, in my judgment, in the state university, as well as in the normal schools, to teach adequately psychology or the science of education without making constant reference to all the facts of mental development which are included in the general doctrine of evolution.... Whatever may be the constitutional rights of legislatures to prescribe the general course of study of public schools it will, in my judgment, be a serious national disaster if the attempt is successful to determine the details to be taught in the schools through the vote of legislatures rather than as a result of scientific investigation.

Jacob G. Lipman, Dean of the College of Agriculture, State University of New Jersey: With these facts and interpretations of organic evolution left out, the agricultural colleges and experimental stations could not render effective service to our great agricultural industry.

Wilbur A. Nelson, State Geologist of Tennessee: It, therefore, appears that it would be impossible to study or teach geology in Tennessee or elsewhere, without using the theory of evolution.

Kirtley F. Mather, Chairman of the Department of Geology, Harvard University: Science has not even a guess as to the original source or sources of matter. It deals with immediate causes and effects.... Men of science have as their aim the discovery of facts. They seek with open eyes, willing to recognize it, as Huxley said, even if it “sears the eyeballs.” After they have discovered truth, and not till then, do they consider what its moral implications may be. Thus far, and presumably always, truth when found is also found to be right, in the moral sense of the word.... As Henry Ward Beecher said, forty years ago, “If to reject God’s revelation in the book is infidelity, what is it to reject God’s revelation of himself in the structure of the whole globe?”

Maynard M. Metcalf, Research Specialist in Zoology, Johns Hopkins University: Intelligent teaching of biology or intelligent approach to any biological science is impossible if the established fact of evolution is omitted.

Horatio Hackett Newman, Professor of Zoology, University of Chicago: Evolution has been tried and tested in every conceivable way for considerably over half a century. Vast numbers of biological facts have been examined in the light of this principle and without a single exception they have been entirely compatible with it.... The evolution principle is thus a great unifying and integrating scientific conception. Any conception that is so far-reaching, so consistent, and that has led to so much advance in the understanding of nature, is at least an extremely valuable idea and one not lightly to be cast aside in case it fails to agree with one’s prejudices.

Thus the two sides lined up as dialectical truth and empirical fact. The state legislature of Tennessee, acting in its sovereign capacity, had passed a measure which made it unlawful to teach that man is connatural with the animals through asserting that he is descended from a “lower order” of them. (There was some sparring over the meaning of the technical language of the act, but this was the general consensus.) The legal question was whether John T. Scopes had violated the measure. The philosophical question, which was the real focus of interest, was the right of a state to make this prescription.

We have referred to the kind of truth which can be dialectically established, and here we must develop further the dialectical nature of the state’s case. As long as it maintained this dialectical position, it did not have to go into the “factual” truth of evolution, despite the outcry from the other side. The following considerations, then, enter into this “dialectical” prosecution.

By definition the legislature is the supreme arbiter of education within the state. It is charged with the duty of promoting enlightenment and morality, and to these ends it may establish common schools, require attendance, and review curricula either by itself or through its agents. The state of Tennessee had exercised this kind of authority when it had forbidden the teaching of the Bible in the public schools. Now if the legislature could take a position that the publicly subsidized teaching of the Bible was socially undesirable, it could, from the same authority, take the same position with regard to a body of science. Some people might feel that the legislature was morally bound to encourage the propagation of the Bible, just as some of those participating in the trial seemed to think that it was morally bound to encourage the propagation of science. But here again the legislature is the highest tribunal, and no body of religious or scientific doctrine comes to it with a compulsive authority. In brief, both the Ten Commandments and the theory of evolution belonged in the class of things which it could elect or reject, depending on the systematic import of propositions underlying the philosophy of the state.

The policy of the anti-evolution law was the same type of policy which Darrow had by inference commended only a year earlier in the famous trial of Loeb and Leopold. This clash is perhaps the most direct in the Scopes case and deserves pointing out here. Darrow had served as defense counsel for the two brilliant university graduates who had conceived the idea of committing a murder as a kind of intellectual exploit, to prove that their powers of foresight and care could prevent detection. The essence of Darrow’s plea at their trial was that the two young men could not be held culpable—at least in the degree the state claimed—because of the influences to which they had been exposed. They had been readers of a system of philosophy of allegedly anti-social tendency, and they were not to be blamed if they translated that philosophy into a sanction of their deed. The effect of this plea obviously was to transfer guilt from the two young men to society as a whole, acting through its laws, its schools, its publications, etc.

Now the key thing to be observed in this plea was that Darrow was not asking the jury to inspect the philosophy of Nietzsche for the purpose either of passing upon its internal consistency or its contact with reality. He was asking precisely what Bryan was asking of the jury at Dayton, namely that they take a strictly dialectical position outside it, viewing it as a partial universe of discourse with consequences which could be adjudged good or bad. The point to be especially noted is that Darrow did not raise the question of whether the philosophy of Nietzsche expresses necessary truth, or whether, let us say, it is essential to an understanding of the world. He was satisfied to point out that the state had not been a sufficiently vigilant guardian of the forces molding the character of its youth.

But the prosecution at Dayton could use this line of argument without change. If the philosophy of Nietzsche were sufficient to instigate young men to criminal actions, it might be claimed with even greater force that the philosophy of evolution, which in the popular mind equated man with the animals, would do the same. The state’s dialectic here simply used one of Darrow’s earlier definitions to place the anti-evolution law in a favorable or benevolent category. In sum: to Darrow’s previous position that the doctrine of Nietzsche is capable of immoral influence, Bryan responded that the doctrine of evolution is likewise capable of immoral influence, and this of course was the dialectical countering of the defense’s position in the trial.

There remains yet a third dialectical maneuver for the prosecution. On the second day of the trial Attorney-General Stewart, in reviewing the duties of the legislature, posed the following problem: “Supposing then that there should come within the minds of the people a conflict between literature and science. Then what would the legislature do? Wouldn’t they have to interpret?... Wouldn’t they have to interpret their construction of this conflict which one should be recognized or higher or more in the public schools?”

This point was not exploited as fully as its importance might seem to warrant; but what the counsel was here declaring is that the legislature is necessarily the umpire in all disputes between partial universes. Therefore if literature and science should fall into a conflict, it would again be up to the legislature to assign the priority. It is not bound to recognize the claims of either of these exclusively because, as we saw earlier, it operates in a universe with reference to which these are partial bodies of discourse. The legislature is the disposer of partial universes. Accordingly when the Attorney-General took this stand, he came the nearest of any of the participants in the trial to clarifying the state’s position, and by this we mean to showing that for the state it was a matter of legal dialectic.

There is little evidence to indicate that the defense understood the kind of case it was up against, though naturally this is said in a philosophical rather than a legal sense. After the questions of law were settled, its argument assumed the substance of a plea for the truth of evolution, which subject was not within the scope of the indictment. We have, for example, the statement of Mr. Hays already cited that the whole case of the defense depended on proving that evolution is a “reasonable scientific theory.” Of those who spoke for the defense, Mr. Dudley Field Malone seems to have had the poorest conception of the nature of the contest. I must cite further from his plea because it shows most clearly the trap from which the defense was never able to extricate itself. On the fifth day of the trial Mr. Malone was chosen to reply to Mr. Bryan, and in the course of his speech he made the following revealing utterance: “Your honor, there is a difference between theological and scientific men. Theology deals with something that is established and revealed; it seeks to gather material which they claim should not be changed. It is the Word of God and that cannot be changed; it is literal, it is not to be interpreted. That is the theological mind. It deals with theology. The scientific mind is a modern thing, your honor. I am not sure Galileo was the one who brought relief to the scientific mind; because, theretofore, Aristotle and Plato had reached their conclusions and processes, by metaphysical reasoning, because they had no telescope and no microscope.” The part of this passage which gives his case away is the distinction made at the end. Mr. Malone was asserting that Aristotle and Plato got no further than they did because they lacked the telescope and the microscope. To a slight extent perhaps Aristotle was what we would today call a “research scientist,” but the conclusions and processes arrived at by the metaphysical reasoning of the two are dialectical, and the test of a dialectical position is logic and not ocular visibility. At the risk of making Mr. Malone a scapegoat we must say that this is an abysmal confusion of two different kinds of inquiry which the Greeks were well cognizant of. But the same confusion, if it did not produce this trial, certainly helped to draw it out to its length of eight days. It is the assumption that human laws stand in wait upon what the scientists see in their telescopes and microscopes. But harking back to Professor Adler: facts are never determinative of dialectic in the sense presumed by this counsel.

Exactly the same confusion appeared in a rhetorical plea for truth which Mr. Malone made shortly later in the same speech. Then he said: “There is never a duel with truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it and we do not fear all the truth that they can present as facts.” It is instantly apparent that this presents truth in an ambiguous sense. Malone begins with the simplistic assumption that there is a “standard” truth, a kind of universal, objective, operative truth which it is heinous to oppose. That might be well enough if the meaning were highly generic, but before he is through this short passage he has equated truth with facts—the identical confusion which we noted in his utterance about Plato and Aristotle. Now since the truth which dialectic arrives at is not a truth of facts, this peroration either becomes irrelevant, or it lends itself to the other side, where, minus the concluding phrase, it could serve as a eulogium of dialectical truth.

Such was the dilemma by which the defense was impaled from the beginning. To some extent it appears even in the expert testimony. On the day preceding this speech by Malone, Professor Maynard Metcalf had presented testimony in court regarding the theory of evolution (this was on the fourth day of the trial; Judge Raulston did not make his ruling excluding such testimony until the sixth day) in which he made some statements which could have been of curious interest to the prosecution. They are effectually summarized in the following excerpt: “Evolution and the theories of evolution are fundamentally different things. The fact of evolution is a thing that is perfectly and absolutely clear.... The series of evidences is so convincing that I think it would be entirely impossible for any normal human being who was conversant with the phenomena to have even for a moment the least doubt even for the fact of evolution, but he might have tremendous doubts as to the truth of any hypothesis....”

We first notice here a clear recognition of the kinds of truth distinguished by Adler, with the “fact” of evolution belonging to the first order and theories of evolution belonging to the second. The second, which is referred to by the term “hypothesis,” consists of facts in an elaboration. We note furthermore that this scientist has called them fundamentally different things—so different that one is entitled to have not merely doubts but “tremendous doubts” about the second. Now let us imagine the dialecticians of the opposite side approaching him with the following. You have said, Professor Metcalf, that the fact of evolution and the various theories of evolution are two quite different things. You have also said that the theories of evolution are so debatable or questionable that you can conceive of much difference of opinion about them. Now if there is an order of knowledge above this order of theories, which order you admit to be somewhat speculative, a further order of knowledge which is philosophical or evaluative, is it not likely that there would be in this realm still more alternative positions, still more room for doubt or difference of opinion? And if all this is so, would you expect people to assent to a proposition of this order in the same way you expect them to assent to, say, the proposition that a monkey has vertebrae? And if you do make these admissions, can you any longer maintain that people of opposite views on the teaching of evolution are simply defiers of the truth? This is how the argument might have progressed had some Greek Darwin thrown Athens into an uproar; but this argument was, after all, in an American court of law.

It should now be apparent from these analyses that the defense was never able to meet the state’s case on dialectical grounds. Even if it had boldly accepted the contest on this level, it is difficult to see how it could have won, for the dialectic must probably have followed this course: First Proposition, All teaching of evolution is harmful. Counter Proposition, No teaching of evolution is harmful. Resolution, Some teaching of evolution is harmful. Now the resolution was exactly the position taken by the law, which was that some teaching of evolution (i.e., the teaching of it in state-supported schools) was an anti-social measure. Logically speaking, the proposition that “Some teaching of evolution is harmful,” does not exclude the proposition that “Some teaching of evolution is not harmful,” but there was the fact that the law permitted some teaching of evolution (e.g., the teaching of it in schools not supported by the public funds). In this situation there seemed nothing for the defense to do but stick by the second proposition and plead for that proposition rhetorically. So science entered the juridical arena and argued for the value of science. In this argument the chief topic was consequence. There was Malone’s statement that without the theory of evolution Burbank would not have been able to produce his results. There was Lipman’s statement that without an understanding of the theory of evolution the agricultural colleges could not carry on their work. There were the statements of Judd and Nelson that large areas of education depended upon a knowledge of evolution. There was the argument brought out by Professor Mather of Harvard: “When men are offered their choice between science, with its confident and unanimous acceptance of the evolutionary principle, on the one hand, and religion, with its necessary appeal to things unseen and improvable, on the other, they are much more likely to abandon religion than to abandon science. If such a choice is forced upon us, the churches will lose many of their best educated young people, the very ones upon whom they must depend for leadership in coming years.”

We noted at the beginning of this chapter that rhetoric deals with subjects at the point where they touch upon actuality or prudential conduct. Here the defense looks at the policy of teaching evolution and points to beneficial results. The argument then becomes: these important benefits imply an important beneficial cause. This is why we can say that the pleaders for science were forced into the non-scientific role of the rhetorician.

The prosecution incidentally also had an argument from consequences, although it was never employed directly. When Bryan maintained that the philosophy of evolution might lead to the same results as the philosophy of Nietzsche had led with Loeb and Leopold, he was opening a subject which could have supplied such an argument, say in the form of a concrete instance of moral beliefs weakened by someone’s having been indoctrinated with evolution. But there was really no need: as we have sought to show all along, the state had an immense strategic advantage in the fact that laws belong to the category of dialectical determinations, and it clung firmly to this advantage.

An irascible exchange which Darrow had with the judge gives an idea of the frustration which the defense felt at this stage. There had been an argument about the propriety of a cross-examination.

The Court: Colonel [Darrow], what is the purpose of cross-examination?

Mr. Darrow: The purpose of cross-examination is to be used on trial.

The Court: Well, isn’t that an effort to ascertain the truth?

Mr. Darrow: No, it is an effort to show prejudice. Nothing else. Has there been any effort to ascertain the truth in this case? Why not bring in the jury and let us prove it?

The truth referred to by the judge was whether the action of Scopes fell within the definition of the law; the truth referred to by Darrow was the facts of evolution (not submitted to the jury as evidence); and “prejudice” was a crystallized opinion of the theory of evolution, expressed now as law.

If we have appeared here to assign too complete a forensic victory to the prosecution, let us return, by way of recapitulating the issues, to the relationship between positive science and dialectic. Many people, perhaps a majority in this country, have felt that the position of the State of Tennessee was absurd because they are unable to see how a logical position can be taken without reference to empirical situations. But it is just the nature of logic and dialectic to be a science without any content as it is the nature of biology or any positive science to be a science of empirical content.

We see the nature of this distinction when we realize that there is never an argument, in the true sense of the term, about facts. When facts are disputed, the argument must be suspended until the facts are settled. Not until then may it be resumed, for all true argument is about the meaning of established or admitted facts. And since this meaning is always expressed in propositions, we can say further that all argument is about the systematic import of propositions. While that remains so, the truth of the theory of evolution or of any scientific theory can never be settled in a court of law. The court could admit the facts into the record, but the process of legal determination would deal with the meaning of the facts, and it could not go beyond saying that the facts comport, or do not comport, with the meanings of other propositions. Thus its task is to determine their place in a system of discourse and if possible to effect a resolution in accordance with the movement of dialectic. It is necessary that logic in its position as ultimate arbiter preserve this indifference toward that actuality which is the touchstone of scientific fact.

It is plain that those who either expected or hoped that science would win a sweeping victory in the Tennessee courtroom were the same people who believe that science can take the place of speculative wisdom. The only consolation they had in the course of the trial was the embarrassment to which Darrow brought Bryan in questioning him about the Bible and the theory of evolution (during which Darrow did lead Bryan into some dialectical traps). But in strict consideration all of this was outside the bounds of the case because both the facts of evolution and the facts of the Bible were “items not in discourse,” to borrow a phrase employed by Professor Adler. That is to say, their correctness had to be determined by scientific means of investigation, if at all; but the relationship between the law and theories of man’s origin could be determined only by legal casuistry, in the non-pejorative sense of that phrase.

As we intimated at the beginning, a sufficient grasp of what the case was about would have resulted in there being no case, or in there being quite a different case. As the events turned out science received, in the popular estimation, a check in the trial but a moral victory, and this only led to more misunderstanding of the province of science in human affairs. The law of the State of Tennessee won a victory which was regarded as pyrrhic because it was generally felt to have made the law and the lawmakers look foolish. This also was a disservice to the common weal. Both of these results could have been prevented if it had been understood that science is one thing and law another. An understanding of that truth would seem to require some general dissemination throughout our educated classes of a Summa Dialectica. This means that the educated people of our country would have to be so trained that they could see the dialectical possibility of the opposites of the beliefs they possess. And that is a very large order for education in any age.

Chapter III
EDMUND BURKE AND THE ARGUMENT FROM CIRCUMSTANCE

We are now in position to affirm that the rhetorical study of an argument begins with a study of the sources. But since almost any extended argument will draw upon more than one source we must look, to answer the inquiry we are now starting, at the prevailing source, or the source which is most frequently called upon in the total persuasive effort. We shall say that this predominating source gives to the argument an aspect, and our present question is, what can be inferred from the aspect of any argument or body of arguments about the philosophy of its maker? All men argue alike when they argue validly because the modes of inference are formulas, from which deviation is error. Therefore we characterize inference only as valid or invalid. But the reasoner reveals his philosophical position by the source of argument which appears most often in his major premise because the major premise tells us how he is thinking about the world. In other words, the rhetorical content of the major premise which the speaker habitually uses is the key to his primary view of existence. We are of course excluding artful choices which have in view only ad hoc persuasions. Putting the matter now figuratively, we may say that no man escapes being branded by the premise that he regards as most efficacious in an argument. The general importance of this is that major premises, in addition to their logical function as part of a deductive argument, are expressive of values, and a characteristic major premise characterizes the user.

To see this principle in application, let us take three of the chief sources of argument recognized by the classical rhetoricians. We may look first at the source which is genus. All arguments made through genus are arguments based on the nature of the thing which is said to constitute the genus. What the argument from genus then says is that “generic” classes have a nature which can be predicated of their species. Thus man has a nature including mortality, which quality can therefore be predicated of the man Socrates and the man John Smith. The underlying postulate here, that things have a nature, is of course a disputable view of the world, for it involves the acceptance of a realm of essence. Yet anyone who uses such source of argument is committed to this wider assumption. Now it follows that those who habitually argue from genus are in their personal philosophy idealists. To them the idea of genus is a reflection of existence. We are saying, accordingly, that arguments which make predominant use of genus have an aspect through this source, and that the aspect may be employed to distinguish the philosophy of the author. It will be found, to cite a concrete example, that John Henry Newman regularly argues from genus; he begins with the nature of the thing and then makes the application. The question of what a university is like is answered by applying the idea of a university. The question of what man ought to study is answered by working out a conception of the nature of man. And we shall find in a succeeding essay that Abraham Lincoln, although he has become a patron for liberals and pragmatists, was a consistent user of the argument from genus. His refusal to hedge on the principle of slavery is referable to a fixed concept of the nature of man. This, then, will serve to characterize the argument from genus.

Another important source of argument is similitude. Whereas those who argue from genus argue from a fixed class, those who argue from similitude invoke essential (though not exhaustive) correspondences. If one were to say, for example, that whatever has the divine attribute of reason is likely to have also the divine attribute of immortality, one would be using similitude to establish a probability. Thinkers of the analogical sort use this argument chiefly. If required to characterize the outlook it implies, we should say that it expresses belief in a oneness of the world, which causes all correspondence to have probative value. Proponents of this view tend to look toward some final, transcendental unity, and as we might expect, this type of argument is used widely by poets and religionists.[26] John Bunyan used it constantly; so did Emerson.

A third type we shall mention, the type which provides our access to Burke, is the argument from circumstance. The argument from circumstance is, as the name suggests, the nearest of all arguments to purest expediency. This argument merely reads the circumstances—the “facts standing around”—and accepts them as coercive, or allows them to dictate the decision. If one should say, “The city must be surrendered because the besiegers are so numerous,” one would be arguing not from genus, or similitude, but from a present circumstance. The expression “In view of the situation, what else are you going to do?” constitutes a sort of proposition-form for this type of argument. Such argument savors of urgency rather than of perspicacity; and it seems to be preferred by those who are easily impressed by existing tangibles. Whereas the argument from consequence attempts a forecast of results, the argument from circumstance attempts only an estimate of current conditions or pressures. By thus making present circumstance the overbearing consideration, it keeps from sight even the nexus of cause and effect. It is the least philosophical of all the sources of argument, since theoretically it stops at the level of perception of fact.

Burke is widely respected as a conservative who was intelligent enough to provide solid philosophical foundations for his conservatism. It is perfectly true that many of his observations upon society have a conservative basis; but if one studies the kind of argument which Burke regularly employed when at grips with concrete policies, one discovers a strong addiction to the argument from circumstance. Now for reasons which will be set forth in detail later, the argument from circumstance is the argument philosophically appropriate to the liberal. Indeed, one can go much further and say that it is the argument fatal to conservatism. However much Burke eulogized tradition and fulminated against the French Revolution, he was, when judged by what we are calling aspect of argument, very far from being a conservative; and we suggest here that a man’s method of argument is a truer index in his beliefs than his explicit profession of principles. Here is a means whereby he is revealed in his work. Burke’s voluminous controversies give us ample opportunity to test him by this rule.

There is some point in beginning with Burke’s treatment of the existing Catholic question, an issue which drew forth one of his earliest political compositions and continued to engage his attention throughout his life. As early as 1765 he had become concerned with the extraordinary legal disabilities imposed upon Catholics in Ireland, and about this time he undertook a treatise entitled Tract on the Popery Laws. Despite the fact that in this treatise Burke professes belief in natural law, going so far as to assert that all human laws are but declaratory, the type of argument he uses chiefly is the secular argument from circumstance. After a review of the laws and penalties, he introduces his “capital consideration.”

The first and most capital consideration with regard to this, as to every object, is the extent of it. And here it is necessary to premise: this system of penalty and incapacity has for its object no small sect or obscure party, but a very numerous body of men—a body which comprehends at least two thirds of the whole nation: it amounts to 2,800,000 souls, a number sufficient for the materials constituent of a great people.[27]

He then gave his reason for placing the circumstance first.

This consideration of the magnitude of the object ought to attend us through the whole inquiry: if it does not always affect the reason, it is always decisive on the importance of the question. It not only makes itself a more leading point, but complicates itself with every other part of the matter, giving every error, minute in itself, a character and a significance from its application. It is therefore not to be wondered at, if we perpetually recur to it in the course of this essay.[28]

The Tract was planned in such a way as to continue this thought, while accompanying it with discussion of the impediment to national prosperity, and of “the impolicy of those laws, as they affect the national security.” This early effort established the tenor of his thinking on the subject.

While representing Bristol in Parliament, Burke alienated a part of his constituency by supporting Sir George Savile’s measure to ease the restraints upon Catholics. In the famous Speech to the Electors of Bristol he devoted a large portion of his time to a justification of that course, and here, it is true, he made principal use of the argument from genus (“justice”) and from consequence. The argument from circumstance is not forgotten, but is tucked away at the end to persuade the “bigoted enemies to liberty.” There, using again his criterion of the “magnitude of the object,” he said:

Gentlemen, it is possible you may not know that the people of that persuasion in Ireland amount to at least sixteen or seventeen hundred thousand souls. I do not at all exaggerate the number. A nation to be persecuted! Whilst we were masters of the sea, embodied with America and in alliance with half the powers of the continent, we might, perhaps, in that remote corner of Europe, afford to tyrannize with impunity. But there is a revolution in our affairs which makes it prudent for us to be just.[29]

During the last decade of his life, Burke wrote a series of letters upon the Catholic question and upon Irish affairs, in which, of course, this question figured largely. In 1792 came A Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, M.P., upon the propriety of admitting Catholics to the elective franchise. Here we find him taking a pragmatic view of liberality toward Catholics. He reasoned as follows regarding the restoration of the franchise:

If such means can with any probability be shown, from circumstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular constitution, than to weaken it; surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties, incapacities, and proscriptions continued from generation to generation.[30]

In this instance the consideration of magnitude took a more extended form:

How much more, certainly, ought they [the disqualifying laws] to give way, when, as in our case, they affect, not here and there, in some particular point or in their consequence, but universally, collectively and directly, the fundamental franchises of a people, equal to the whole inhabitants of several respectable kingdoms and states, equal to the subjects of the kings of Sardinia or of Denmark; equal to those of the United Netherlands, and more than are to be found in all the states of Switzerland. This way of proscribing men by whole nations, as it were, from all the benefits of the constitution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or church in the world.[31]

Greatly exercised over events in France, Burke came to think of Christianity as the one force with enough cohesion to check the spread of the Revolution. Then in 1795 he wrote the Letter to William Smith, Esq. Here he described Christianity as “the grand prejudice ... which holds all the other prejudices together”;[32] and such prejudices, as he visualized them, were essential to the fabric of society. He told his correspondent candidly: “My whole politics, at present, center in one point; and to this the merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable; that is, what will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism.”[33] In a second letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, written in the same year, he could say: “In the Catholic Question I considered only one point. Was it at the time, and in the circumstances, a measure which tended to promote the concord of the citizens.”[34]

Only once did Burke approach the question of religion through what may be properly termed an argument from definition. In the last year of his life he composed A Letter on the Affairs of Ireland, one passage of which considers religion not in its bearing upon some practical measure, but with reference to its essential nature.

Let every man be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner of civil privileges and advantages to a negative religion—such is the Protestant without a certain creed; and at the same time to deny those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one positive doctrine, which all of us, who profess religion authoritatively taught in England, hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe.[35]

It is not purely an argument from definition, but it contains such an argument, and so contrasts with his dominant position on a subject which engaged much of his thought and seems to have filled him with sincere feeling.

We shall examine him now on another major subject to engage his statesmanship, the rebellion of the North American Colonies against Great Britain. By common admission today, Burke’s masterpiece of forensic eloquence is the speech moving his resolutions for conciliation with that disaffected part of the Empire, delivered in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775. In admiring the felicities with which this great oration undoubtedly abounds, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is from beginning to end an argument from circumstance. It is not an argument about rights or definitions, as Burke explicitly says at two or three points; it is an argument about policy as dictated by circumstances. Its burden is a plea to conciliate the colonies because they are waxing great. No subtlety of interpretation is required to establish this truth, because we can substantially establish it in the express language of Burke himself.

To see the aspect of this argument, it is useful to begin by looking at the large alternatives which the orator enumerates for Parliament in the exigency. The first of these is to change the spirit of the Colonies by rendering it more submissive. Circumventing the theory of the relationship of ruler and ruled, Burke sets aside this alternative as impractical. He admits that an effort to bring about submission would be “radical in its principle” (i.e., would have a root in principle); but he sees too many obstacles in geography, ethnology, and other circumstances to warrant the trial.

The second alternative is to prosecute the Colonists as criminal. At this point, the “magnitude of the object” again enters his equation, and he would distinguish between the indictment of a single individual and the indictment of a whole people as things different in kind. The number and vigor of the Americans constitute an embarrassing circumstance. Therefore his thought issues in the oft-quoted statement “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”[36] This was said, it should be recalled, despite the fact that history is replete with proceedings against rebellious subjects.[37] But Burke had been an agent for the colony of New York; he had studied the geography and history of the Colonies with his usual industry; and we may suppose him to have had a much clearer idea than his colleagues in Parliament of their power to support a conflict.

It is understandable, by this view, that his third alternative should be “to comply with the American spirit as necessary.” He told his fellow Commoners plainly that his proposal had nothing to do with the legal right of taxation. “My consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question.”[38] This policy he later characterizes as “systematic indulgence.” The outcome of this disjunctive argument is then a measure to accommodate a circumstance. The circumstance is that America is a growing country, of awesome potentiality, whose strength, both actual and imminent, makes it advisable for the Mother Country to overlook abstract rights. In a peroration, the topic of abstract rights is assigned to those “vulgar and mechanical politicians,” who are “not fit to turn a wheel in the machine” of Empire.[39]

With this conclusion in mind, it will be instructive to see how the orator prepared the way for his proposal. The entire first part of his discourse may be described as a depiction of the circumstance which is to be his source of argument. After a circumspect beginning, in which he calls attention to the signs of rebellion and derides the notion of “paper government,” he devotes a long and brilliant passage to simple characterization of the Colonies and their inhabitants. The unavoidable effect of this passage is to impress upon his hearers the size and resources of this portion of the Empire. First he takes up the rapidly growing population, then the extensive trade, then the spirit of enterprise, and finally the personal character of the Colonists themselves. Outstanding even in this colorful passage is his account of the New England whaling industry.

Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hard industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle; and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.[40]

It is the spectacle of this enterprise which induces Burke to “pardon something to the spirit of liberty.”

The long recital is closed with an appeal which may be fitly regarded as the locus classicus of the argument from circumstance. For with this impressive review of the fierce spirit of the colonists before his audience, Burke declares: “The question is, not whether the spirit deserves praise or blame, but—what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?”[41] The question then is not what is right or wrong, or what accords with our idea of justice or our scheme of duty; it is, how can we meet this circumstance? “I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity.”[42] The circumstance becomes the cue of the policy. We must remind ourselves that our concern here is not to pass upon the merits of a particular controversy, but to note the term which Burke evidently considered most efficacious in moving his hearers. “Political reason,” he says, elsewhere, “is a computing principle.”[43] Where does political reason in this instance leave him? It leaves him inevitably in the middle, keeping the Colonies, but not as taxable parts of the Empire, allowing them to pay their own charge by voluntary grants. In Burke’s characteristic view, the theoretic relationship has been altered by the medium until the thirteen (by his count fourteen) colonies of British North America are left halfway between colonial and national status. The position of the Tories meant that either the Colonies would be colonies or they would terminate their relationship with the Empire. Burke’s case was that by concession to circumstance they could be retained in some form, and this would be a victory for policy. Philosophers of starker principle, like Tom Paine, held that a compromise of the Burkean type would have been unacceptable in the long run even to the Americans, and the subsequent crystallization of American nationality seems to support this view. But Burke thought he saw a way to preserve an institution by making way for a large corporeal fact.

It must be confessed that Burke’s interest in the affairs of India, and more specifically in the conduct of the East India Company, is not reconcilable in quite the same way with the thesis of this chapter. Certainly there is nothing in mean motives or contracted views to explain why he should have labored over a period of fourteen years to benefit a people with whom he had no contact and from whom he could expect no direct token of appreciation. But it must be emphasized that the subject of this essay is methods, and even in this famous case Burke found some opportunity to utilize his favorite source.

In 1783, years before the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he made a long speech in Parliament attacking Fox’s East India Bill. He was by then deeply impressed by the wrongs done the Indians by British adventurers, yet it will be observed that his habitus reveals itself in the following passages. He said of the East India Company:

I do not presume to condemn those who argue a priori against the propriety of leaving such extensive political power in the hands of a company of merchants. I know much is, and much more may be, said against such a system. But, with my particular ideas and sentiments, I cannot go that way to work. I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be.[44]

Then shortly he continued:

To justify us in taking the administration of their affairs out of the hands of the East India Company, as my principles, I must see several conditions. 1st, the object affected by the abuse must be great and important. 2nd, the abuse affecting the great object ought to be a great abuse. 3rd, it ought to be habitual and not accidental. 4th, it ought to be utterly incurable in the body as it now stands constituted.[45]

It is pertinent to observe that Burke’s first condition here is exactly the first condition raised with reference to the Irish Catholics and with reference to the American Colonies. It is further characteristic of his method that the passages cited above are followed immediately by a description of the extent and wealth and civilization of India, just as the plea for approaching the Colonies with reconciliation was followed by a vivid advertisement of their extent and wealth and enterprise. The argument is for justice, but it is conditioned upon a circumstance.

When Burke undertook the prosecution of Hastings in 1788, these considerations seemed far from his mind. The splendid opening charge contains arguments strictly from genus, despite the renunciation of such arguments which we see above. He attacked the charter of the East India Company by showing that it violated the idea of a charter.[46] He affirmed the natural rights of man, and held that they had been criminally denied in India.[47] He scorned the notion of geographical morality. These sound like the utterances of a man committed to abstract right. Lord Morley has some observations on Burke which may contain the explanation. His study of Burke’s career led him to feel that “direct moral or philanthropic apostleship was not his function.”[48] Of his interest in India, he remarked: “It was reverence rather than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke’s breast against the rapacity of English adventurers in India, and the imperial crimes of Hastings.”[49] If it is true that Burke acted out of reverence rather than out of sensibility or philanthropy, what was the reverence of? It was, likely, for storied India, for an ancient and opulent civilization which had brought religion and the arts to a high point of development while his ancestors were yet “in the woods.” There is just enough of deference for the established and going concern, for panoply, for that which has prestige, to make us feel that Burke was again impressed—with an intended consequence which was noble, of course; but it is only fair to record this component of the situation.

The noble and philosophic conservatism next translated itself into a violent opposition to the French Revolution, which was threatening to bring down a still greater structure of rights and dignities, though in this instance in the name of reform and emancipation.

The French Revolution was the touchstone of Burke. Those who have regarded his position on this event as a reversal, or a sign of fatigue and senescence, have not sufficiently analyzed his methods and his sources. Burke would have had to become a new man to take any other stand than he did on the French Revolution. It was an event perfectly suited to mark off those who argue from circumstance, for it was one of the most radical revolutions on record, and it was the work of a people fond of logical rigor and clear demonstration.

Why Burke, who had championed the Irish Catholics, the American colonists, and the Indians should have championed on this occasion the nobility and the propertied classes of Europe is easy to explain. For him Europe, with all its settlements and usages, was the circumstance; and the Revolution was the challenge to it. From first to last Burke saw the grand upheaval as a contest between inherited condition and speculative insight. The circumstance said that Europe should go on; the Revolution said that it should cease and begin anew.[50] Burke’s position was not selfish; it was prudential within the philosophy we have seen him to hold.

Actually his Reflections on the Revolution in France divides itself into two parts. The first is an attempt, made with a zeal which seems almost excessive, to prove that the British government was the product of slow accretion of precedent, that it is for that reason a beneficent and stable government, and that the British have renounced, through their choice of methods in the past, any theoretical right to change their government by revolution. The second part is a miscellany of remarks on the proceedings in France, in which many shrewd observations of human nature are mingled with eloquent appeals on behalf of the ancien régime.

Burke appears terrified by the thought that the ultimate sources and sanctions of government should be brought out into broad daylight for the inspection of everyone, and the first effort was to clothe the British government with a kind of concealment against this sort of inspection, which could, of course, result in the testing of that government by what might have been or might yet be. The second effort was to show that France, instead of embarking on a career of progress through her daring revolution, “had abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.” It will be observed that in both of these, a presumed well-being is the source of his argument. Therefore we have the familiar recourse to concrete situation.

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen, pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France upon her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiring what the nature of the government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation on its freedom?[51]

In his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) he said:

What a number of faults have led to this multitude of misfortunes, and almost all from this one source—that of considering certain general maxims, without attending to circumstances, to times, to places, to conjectures, and to actors! If we do not attend scrupulously to all of these, the medicine of today becomes the poison of tomorrow.[52]

This was the gist of such advice as Burke had for the French. That they should build on what they had instead of attempting to found de novo, that they should adapt necessary changes to existing conditions, and above all that they should not sacrifice the sources of dignity and continuity in the state—these made up a sort of gospel of precedent and gradualism which he preached to the deaf ears across the Channel. We behold him here in his characteristic political position, but forced to dig a little deeper, to give his theorems a more general application, and, it is hardly unjust to say, to make what really constitutes a denial of philosophy take on some semblance of philosophy. Yet Burke was certainly never at a greater height rhetorically in defending a reigning circumstance. Let us listen to him for a moment on the virtues of old Europe.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, the subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which, without confounding ranks, has produced a noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the imagination ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exposed as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashions.[53]

With the writings on French affairs, Burke’s argument from circumstance came full flower.

These citations are enough to show a partiality toward argument of this aspect. But a rehearsal of his general observations on politics and administration will show it in even clearer light. Burke had an obsessive dislike of metaphysics and the methods of the metaphysician. There is scarcely a peroration or passage of appeal in his works which does not contain a gibe, direct or indirect, at this subject. In the Speech On American Taxation he said, “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them.”[54] This science he regarded as wholly incompatible with politics, yet capable of deluding a certain type of politician with its niceties and exactitudes. Whenever Burke introduced the subject of metaphysics, he was in effect arguing from contraries; that is to say, he was asserting that what is metaphysically true is politically false or unfeasible. For him, metaphysical clarity was at the opposite pole from political prudence. As he observed in the Reflections, “The pretended rights of these theories are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.”[55] In the first letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, he ridiculed “the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men, and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between more and less.”[56] It will be noted that this last is a philosophical justification for his regular practice of weighing a principle by the scale of magnitude of situation. The “more and less” thus becomes determinative of the good. “Metaphysics cannot live without definition, but prudence is cautious how she defines,”[57] he said in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. And again in the Reflections, “These metaphysic rights, entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium are by the laws of nature refracted from a straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of man undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.”[58] Finally, there is his clear confession, “Whenever I speak against a theory, I mean always a weak, erroneous, fallacious, unfounded theory, and one of the ways of discovering that it is a false theory is by comparing it with practice.” This is the philosophical explanation of the source in circumstance of Burke’s characteristic argument.

In a brilliant passage on the American character, he had observed that the Americans were in the habit of judging the pressure of a grievance by the badness of the principle rather than vice versa. Burke’s own habit, we now see, was fairly consistently the reverse: he judged the badness of the principle by the pressure of the grievance; and hence we are compelled to suppose that he believed politics ought to be decided empirically and not dialectically. Yet a consequence of this position is that whoever says he is going to give equal consideration to circumstance and to ideals (or principles) almost inevitably finds himself following circumstances while preserving a mere decorous respect for ideals.

Burke’s doctrine of precedent, which constitutes a central part of his political thought, is directly related with the above position. If one is unwilling to define political aims with reference to philosophic absolutes, one tries to find guidance in precedent. We have now seen that a principal topic of the Reflections is a defense of custom against insight. Burke tried with all his eloquence to show that the “manly” freedom of the English was something inherited from ancestors, like a valuable piece of property, increased or otherwise modified slightly to meet the needs of the present generation, and then reverently passed on. He did not want to know the precise origin of the title to it, nor did he want philosophical definition of it. In fact, the statement of Burke which so angered Thomas Paine—that Englishmen were ready to take up arms to prove that they had no right to change their government—however brash or paradoxical seeming, was quite in keeping with such conviction. Since he scorned that freedom which did not have the stamp of generations of approval upon it, he attempted to show that freedom too was a matter of precedent.

Yet this is an evasion rather than an answer to the real question which is lying in wait for Burke’s political philosophy. It is essential to see that government either moves with something in view or it does not, and to say that people may be governed merely by following precedent begs the question. What line do the precedents mark out for us? How may we know that this particular act is in conformity with the body of precedents unless we can abstract the essence of the precedents? And if one extracts the essence of a body of precedents, does not one have a “speculative idea”? However one turns, one cannot evade the truth that there is no practice without theory, and no government without some science of government. Burke’s statement that a man’s situation is the preceptor of his duty cannot be taken seriously unless one can isolate the precept.

This dilemma grows out of Burke’s own reluctance to speculate about the origin and ultimate end of government. “There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments,” he declared in his second day’s speech at the trial of Warren Hastings.[59] To the abstract doctrines of the French Revolution, he responded with a “philosophic analogy,” by which governments are made to come into being with something like the indistinct remoteness of the animal organism. This political organism is a “mysterious incorporation,” never wholly young or middle-aged or old, but partly each at every period, and capable, like the animal organism, of regenerating itself through renewal of tissue. It is therefore modified only through the slow forces that produce evolution. But to the question of what brings on the changes in society, Burke was never able to give an answer. He had faced the problem briefly in the Tract on the Popery Laws, where he wrote: “Is, then, no improvement to be brought into society? Undoubtedly, but not by compulsion—but by encouragement, but by countenance, favor, privileges, which are powerful and are lawful instruments.”[60] These, however, are the passive forces which admit change, not the active ones which initiate it. The prime mover is still to seek. If such social changes are brought about by immanent evolutionary forces, they are hardly voluntary; if on the other hand they are voluntary, they must be identifiable with some point in time and with some agency of initiation. It quickly becomes obvious that if one is to talk about the beginnings of things, about the nisus of growth or of accumulation of precedents, and about final ends, one must shift from empirical to speculative ground. Burke’s attachment to what was de facto prevented him from doing this in political theory and made him a pleader from circumstance at many crucial points in his speeches. One can scarcely do better than quote the judgment of Sir James Prior in his summation of Burke’s career: “His aim therefore in our domestic policy, was to preserve all our institutions in the main as they stood for the simple reason that under them the nation had become great, and prosperous, and happy.”[61] This is but a generalized translation of the position “If it exists, there is something to be said in its favor,” which we have determined as the aspect of the great orator’s case.

That position is, moreover, the essential position of Whiggism as a political philosophy. It turns out to be, on examination, a position which is defined by other positions because it will not conceive ultimate goals, and it will not display on occasion a sovereign contempt for circumstances as radical parties of both right and left are capable of doing. The other parties take their bearing from some philosophy of man and society; the Whigs take their bearings from the other parties. Whatever a party of left or right proposes, they propose (or oppose) in tempered measure. Its politics is then cautionary, instinctive, trusting more to safety and to present success than to imagination and dramatic boldness of principle. It is, to make the estimate candid, a politics without vision and consequently without the capacity to survive.

“The political parties which I call great,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “are those which cling to principles rather than to their consequences, to general and not to special cases, to ideas and not to men.”[62] Manifestly the Whig Party is contrary to this on each point. The Whigs do not argue from principles (i.e., genera and definitions); they are awed not merely by consequences but also by circumstances; and as for the general and the special, we have now heard Burke testify on a dozen occasions to his disregard of the former and his veneration of the latter. There is indeed ground for saying that Burke was more Whig than the British Whigs of his own day themselves, because at the one time when the British Whig Party took a turn in the direction of radical principle, Burke found himself out of sympathy with it and, before long, was excluded from it. This occurred in 1791, when the electrifying influence of the French Revolution produced among the liberals of the age a strong trend toward the philosophic left. It was this trend which drew from Burke the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, with its final scornful paragraph in which he refused to take his principles “from a French die.” This writing was largely taken up with a defense of his recently published Reflections on the Revolution in France, and it is here relevant to note how Burke defines his doctrine as a middle course. “The opinions maintained in that book,” he said, “never can lead to an extreme, because their foundation is laid in an opposition to extremes.”[63] “These doctrines do of themselves gravitate to a middle point, or to some point near a middle.”[64] “The author of that book is supposed to have passed from extreme to extreme; but he has always actually kept himself in a medium.”[65]

Actually the course of events which caused this separation was the same as that which led to the ultimate extinction of the Whig point of view in British political life. In the early twentieth century, when a world conflict involving the Empire demanded of parties a profound basis in principle, the heirs of the Whig party passed from the scene, leaving two coherent parties, one of the right and one of the left. That is part of our evidence for saying that a party which bases itself upon circumstance cannot outlast that circumstance very long; that its claim to make smaller mistakes (and to have smaller triumphs) than the extreme parties will not win it enduring allegiance; and that when the necessity arises, as it always does at some time, to look at the foundations of the commonwealth, Burke’s wish will be disregarded, and only deeply founded theories will be held worthy. A party does not become great by feasting on the leavings of other parties, and Whiggism’s bid for even temporary success is often rejected. A party must have its own principle of movement and must not be content to serve as a brake on the movements of others. Thus there is indication that Whiggism is a recipe for political failure, but before affirming this as a conclusion, let us extend our examination further to see how other parties have fared with circumstance as the decisive argument.

The American Whig Party showed all the defects of this position in an arena where such defects were bound to be more promptly fatal. It is just to say that this party never had a set of principles. Lineal descendants of the old Federalists, the American Whigs were simply the party of opposition to that militant democracy which received its most aggressive leadership from Andrew Jackson. It was, generally speaking, the party of the “best people”; that is to say, the people who showed the greatest respect for industry and integrity, the people in whose eyes Jackson was “that wicked man and vulgar hero.” Yet because it had no philosophical position, it was bound to take its position from that of the other party, as we have seen that Whiggism is doomed to do. During most of its short life it was conspicuously a party of “outs” arrayed against “ins.”

It revealed the characteristic impotence in two obvious ways. First, it pinned its hopes for victory on brilliant personalities rather than on dialectically secured positions. Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, who between them represented the best statesmanship of the generation, were among its leaders, but none of them ever reached the White House. The beau ideal of the party was Clay, whose title “the Great Compromiser” seems to mark him as the archetypal Whig. Finally it discovered a politically “practical” candidate in William Henry Harrison, soldier and Indian fighter, and through a campaign of noise and irrelevancies, put him in the Presidency. But this success was short, and before long the Whigs were back battling under their native handicaps.

Second, frustrated by its series of reverses, it decided that what the patient needed was more of the disease. Whereas at the beginning it had been only relatively pragmatic in program and had preserved dignity in method, it now resolved to become completely pragmatic in program and as pragmatic as its rivals the Democrats in method. Of the latter step, the “coonskin and hard-cider” campaign on behalf of Harrison was the proof. We may cite as special evidence the advice given to Harrison’s campaign manager by Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia. “Let him [the candidate] say not a single word about his principles or his creed—let him say nothing, promise nothing. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden.”[66] E. Malcolm Carroll in his Origins of the Whig Party has thus summed up the policy of the Whig leaders after their round with Jackson: “The most active of the Whig politicians and editors after 1836, men like Weed, Greeley, Ewing of Ohio, Thaddeus Stevens, and Richard Houghton of Boston, preferred success to a consistent position and, therefore, influenced the party to make its campaign in the form of appeal to popular emotion and, for this purpose, to copy the methods of the Democratic Party.”[67] This verdict is supported by Paul Murray in his study of Whig operations in Georgia: “The compelling aim of the party was to get control of the existing machinery of government, to maintain that control, and, in some cases, to change the form of government the better to serve the dominant interest of the group.”[68] Murray found that the Whigs of Georgia “naturally had a respect for the past that approached at times the unreasonable reverence of Edmund Burke for eighteenth century political institutions.”[69]

But a party whose only program is an endorsement of the status quo is destined to go to pieces whenever the course of events brings a principle strongly to the fore. The American Union was moving toward a civil conflict in which ideological differences, as deep as any that have appeared in modern revolutions, were to divide men. As always occurs in such crises, the compromisers are regarded as unreliable by both sides and are soon ejected from the scene. It now seems impossible that the Whig Party, with its political history, could have survived the fifties. But the interesting fact from the standpoint of theoretical discussion is that the Democratic Party, because it was a radically based party, was able to take over and defend certain of the defensible earlier Whig positions. Murray points out the paradoxical fact that the Democratic Party “purloined the leadership of conservative property interests in Georgia and the South.”[70] It is no less paradoxical that it should have purloined the defense of the states’ rights doctrine thirty years after Jackson had threatened to hang disunionists.

The paradox can be resolved only by seeing that the Whig position was one of self-stultification; and this is why a rising young political leader in Illinois of Whig affiliation left the party to lead a re-conceived Republican Party. The evidence of Lincoln’s life greatly favors the supposition that he was a conservative. But he saw that conservatism to be politically effective cannot be Whiggism, that it cannot perpetually argue from circumstance. He saw that to be politically effective conservatism must have something more than a temperamental love of quietude or a relish for success. It must have some ideal objective. He found objectives in the moral idea of freedom and the political idea of union.

The political party which Abraham Lincoln carried to victory in 1860 was a party with these moral objectives. The Whigs had disintegrated from their own lack of principle, and the Republicans emerged with a program capable of rallying men to effort and sacrifice—which are in the long run psychologically more compelling than the stasis of security. But after the war and the death of the party’s unique leader, all moral idealism speedily fell away.[71] Of the passion of revenge there was more than enough, so that some of the victor’s measures look like the measures of a radical party. But the elevation of Grant to the presidency and the party’s conduct during and after the Gilded Age show clearly the declining interest in reform. Before the end of the century the Republican Party had been reduced in its source of appeal to the Whig argument from circumstance (or in the case of the tariff to a wholly dishonest argument from consequences). For thirty or forty years its case came to little more than this: we are the richest nation on earth with the most widely distributed prosperity; therefore this party advocates the status quo. The argument, whether embodied in the phrase “the full dinner pail” or “two cars in every garage” has the same source. Murray’s judgment of the Whig party in Georgia a hundred years ago: “Many facts in the history of the party might impel one to say that its members regarded the promotion of prosperity as the supreme aim of government,”[72] can be applied without the slightest change to the Republican Party of the 1920’s. But when the circumstance of this status quo disappeared about 1930, the party’s source of argument disappeared too, and no other has been found since. It became the party of frustration and hatred, and like the Whig Party earlier, it clung to personalities in the hope that they would be sufficient to carry it to victory. First there was the grass roots Middle Westerner Alf Landon; then the glamorous new convert to internationalism Wendell Willkie; then the gang-buster and Empire State governor Thomas Dewey. Finally, to make the parallel complete, there came the military hero General Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower can be called the William Henry Harrison of the Republican Party. He is “against” what the Democrats are doing, and he is admired by the “best” people. All this is well suited to take minds off real issues through an outpouring of national vanity and the enjoyment of sensation.

The Republican charge against the incumbent administration has been consistently the charge of “bungling,” while those Republicans who have based their dissent on something more profound and clear-sighted have generally drawn the suspicion and disapproval of the party’s supposedly practical leaders. Of this the outstanding proof is the defeat of the leadership of Taft. To look at the whole matter in an historical frame of reference, there has been so violent a swing toward the left that the Democrats today occupy the position once occupied by the Socialists; and the Republicans, having to take their bearings from this, now occupy the center position, which is historically reserved for liberals. Their series of defeats comes from a failure to see that there is an intellectually defensible position on the right. They persist with the argument from circumstance, which never wins any major issues, and sometimes, as we have noted, they are left without the circumstance.

I shall suggest that this story has more than an academic interest for an age which has seen parliamentary government exposed to insults, some open and vicious, some concealed and insidious. There are in existence many technological factors which themselves constitute an argument from circumstance for one-party political rule. Indeed, if the trend of circumstances were our master term, we should almost certainly have to favor the one-party efficiency system lately flourishing in Europe. The centralization of power, the technification of means of communication, the extreme peril of political divisiveness in the face of modern weapons of war, all combine to put the question, “What is the function of a party of opposition in this streamlined world anyhow?” Its proper function is to talk, but talking, unless it concerns some opposition of principles, is but the wearisome contention of “ins” and “outs.” Democracy is a dialectical process, and unless society can produce a group sufficiently indifferent to success to oppose the ruling group on principle rather than according to opportunity for success, the idea of opposition becomes discredited. A party which can argue only from success has no rhetorical topic against the party presently enjoying success.

The proper aim of a political party is to persuade, and to persuade it must have a rhetoric. As far as mere methods go, there is nothing to object to in the argument from circumstance, for undeniably it has a power to move. Yet it has this power through a widely shared human weakness, which turns out on examination to be shortsightedness. This shortsightedness leads a party to positions where it has no policy, or only the policy of opposing an incumbent. When all the criteria are brought to bear, then, this is an inferior source of argument, which reflects adversely upon any habitual user and generally punishes with failure. Since, as we have seen, it is grounded in the nature of a situation rather than in the nature of things, its opposition will not be a dialectically opposed opposition, any more than was Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution. And here, in substance, I would say, is the great reason why Burke should not be taken as prophet by the political conservatives. True, he has left many wonderful materials which they should assimilate. His insights into human nature are quite solid propositions to build with, and his eloquence is a lesson for all time in the effective power of energy and imagery. Yet these are the auxiliary rhetorical appeals. For the rhetorical appeal on which it will stake its life, a cause must have some primary source of argument which will not be embarrassed by abstractions or even by absolutes—the general ideas mentioned by Tocqueville. Burke was magnificent at embellishment, but of clear rational principle he had a mortal distrust. It could almost be said that he raised “muddling through” to the height of a science, though in actuality it can never be a science. In the most critical undertaking of all, the choice of one’s source of argument, it would be blindness to take him as mentor. To find what Burke lacked, we now turn to the American Abraham Lincoln, who despite an imperfect education, discovered that political arguments must ultimately be based on genus or definition.

Chapter IV
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE ARGUMENT FROM DEFINITION

Although most readers of Lincoln sense the prevailing aspect of his arguments, there has been no thoughtful treatment of this interesting subject. Albert Beveridge merely alludes to it in his observation that “In trials in circuit courts Lincoln depended but little on precedents; he argued largely from first principles.”[73] Nicolay and Hay, in describing Lincoln’s speech before the Republican Banquet in Chicago, December 10, 1856, report as follows: “Though these fragments of addresses give us only an imperfect reflection of the style of Mr. Lincoln’s oratory during this period, they nevertheless show its essential characteristics, a pervading clearness of analysis, and that strong tendency toward axiomatic definition which gives so many of his sentences their convincing force and durable value.”[74] W. H. Herndon, who had the opportunity of closest personal observation, was perhaps the most analytical of all when he wrote: “Not only were nature, man, and principle suggestive to Mr. Lincoln; not only had he accurate and exact perceptions, but he was causative; his mind apparently with an automatic movement, ran back behind facts, principles, and all things to their origin and first cause—to the point where forces act at once as effect and cause.”[75] He observed further in connection with Lincoln’s practice before the bar: “All opponents dreaded his originality, his condensation, definition, and force of expression....”[76]

Our feeling that he is a father of the nation even more convincingly than Washington, and that his words are words of wisdom when compared with those of the more intellectual Jefferson and the more academic Wilson strengthen the supposition that he argued from some very fundamental source. And when we find opinion on the point harmonious, despite the wide variety of description his character has undergone, we have enough initial confirmation to go forward with the study—a study which is important not alone as showing the man in clearer light but also as showing upon what terms conservatism is possible.

It may be useful to review briefly the argument from definition. The argument from definition, in the sense we shall employ here, includes all arguments from the nature of the thing. Whether the genus is an already recognized convention, or whether it is defined at the moment by the orator, or whether it is left to be inferred from the aggregate of its species, the argument has a single postulate. The postulate is that there exist classes which are determinate and therefore predicable. In the ancient proposition of the schoolroom, “Socrates is mortal,” the class of mortal beings is invoked as a predicable. Whatever is a member of the class will accordingly have the class attributes. This might seem a very easy admission to gain, but it is not so from those who believe that genera are only figments of the imagination and have no self-subsistence. Such persons hold, in the extreme application of their doctrine, that all deduction is unwarranted assumption; or that attributes cannot be transferred by imputation from genus to species. The issue here is very deep, going back to the immemorial quarrel over universals, and we shall not here explore it further than to say that the argument from definition or genus involves a philosophy of being, which has divided and probably will continue to divide mankind. There are those who seem to feel that genera are imprisoning bonds which serve only to hold the mind in confinement. To others, such genera appear the very organon of truth. Without going into that question here, it seems safe to assert that those who believe in the validity of the argument from genus are idealists, roughly, if not very philosophically, defined. The evidence that Lincoln held such belief is overwhelming; it characterizes his thinking from an early age; and the greatest of his utterances (excepting the Gettysburg Address, which is based upon similitude) are chiefly arguments from definition.

In most of the questions which concerned him from the time he was a struggling young lawyer until the time when he was charged with the guidance of the nation, Lincoln saw opportunity to argue from the nature of man. In fact, not since the Federalist papers of James Madison had there been in American political life such candid recourse to this term. I shall treat his use of it under the two heads of argument from a concept of human nature and argument from a definition of man.

Lincoln came early to the conclusion that human nature is a fixed and knowable thing. Many of his early judgments of policy are based on a theory of what the human being qua human being will do in a given situation. Whether he had arrived at this concept through inductive study—for which he had varied opportunity—or through intuition is, of course, not the question here; our interest is in the reasoning which the concept made possible. It appears a fact that Lincoln trusted in a uniform predictability of human nature.

In 1838, when he was only twenty-nine years old, he was invited to address the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield on the topic “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” In this instance, the young orator read the danger to perpetuation in the inherent evil of human nature. His argument was that the importance of a nation or the sacredness of a political dogma could not withstand the hunger of men for personal distinction. Now the founders of the Union had won distinction through that very role, and so satisfied themselves. But oncoming men of the same breed would be looking for similar opportunity for distinction, and possibly would not find it in tasks of peaceful construction. It seemed to him quite possible that in the future bold natures would appear who would seek to gain distinction by pulling down what their predecessors had erected. To a man of this nature it matters little whether distinction is won “at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.”[77] The fact remains that “Distinction will be his paramount object,” and “nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”[78] In this way Lincoln held personal ambition to be distinctive of human nature, and he was willing to predict it of his fellow citizens, should their political institutions endure “fifty times” as long as they had.

Another excellent example of the use of this source appears in a speech which Lincoln made during the Van Buren administration. Agitation over the National Bank question was still lively, and a bill had been put forward which would have required the depositing of Federal funds in five regional subtreasuries, rather than in a National Bank, until they were needed for use. At a political discussion held in the Illinois House of Representatives, Lincoln made a long speech against the proposal in which he drew extensively from the topic of the nature of human nature. His reasoning was that if public funds are placed in the custody of subtreasurers, the duty and the personal interest of the custodians may conflict. “And who that knows anything of human nature doubts that in many instances interest will prevail over duty, and that the subtreasurer will prefer opulent knavery in a foreign land to honest poverty at home.”[79] If on the other hand the funds were placed with a National Bank, which would have the privilege of using the funds, upon payment of interest, until they are needed, the duty and interest of the custodian would coincide. The Bank plan was preferable because we always find the best performance where duty and self-interest thus run together.[80] Here we see him basing his case again on the infallible tendency of human nature to be itself.

A few years later Lincoln was called upon to address the Washingtonian Temperance Society, which was an organization of reformed drink addicts. This speech is strikingly independent in approach, and as such is prophetic of the manner he was to adopt in wrestling with the great problems of union and slavery. Instead of following the usual line of the temperance advocate, with its tone of superiority and condemnation, he attacked all such approaches as not suited to the nature of man. He impressed upon his hearers the fact that their problem was the problem of human nature, “which is God’s decree and can never be reversed.” He then went on to say that people with a weakness for drink are not inferior specimens of the race but have heads and hearts that “will bear advantageous comparison with those of any other class.” The appeal to drink addicts was to be addressed to men, and it could not take the form of denunciation “because it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to anything; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his own business.” When one seeks to change the conduct of a being of this nature, “persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion should ever be adopted.” He then summed up his point: “Such is man and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interests.”[81]

One further instance of this argument may be cited. About 1850 Lincoln compiled notes for an address to young men on the subject of the profession of law. Here again we find a refreshingly candid approach, looking without pretense at the creature man. One piece of advice which Lincoln urged upon young lawyers was that they never take their whole fee in advance. To do so would place too great a strain upon human nature, which would then lack the needful spur to industry. “When fully paid beforehand, you are more than a common mortal if you can feel the same interest in the case, as if something was still in prospect for you, as well as for your client.”[82] As in the case of the subtreasury bill, Lincoln saw the yoking of duty and self-interest as a necessity of our nature.

These and other passages which could be produced indicate that he viewed human nature as a constant, by which one could determine policy without much fear of surprise. Everything peripheral Lincoln referred to this center. His arguments consequently were the most fundamental seen since a group of realists framed the American government with such visible regard for human passion and weakness. Lincoln’s theory of human nature was completely unsentimental; it was the creation of one who had taken many buffetings and who, from early bitterness and later indifference, never affiliated with any religious denomination. But it furnished the means of wisdom and prophecy.

With this habit of reasoning established, Lincoln was ideally equipped to deal with the great issue of slavery. The American civil conflict of the last century, when all its superficial excitements have been stripped aside, appears another debate about the nature of man. Yet while other political leaders were looking to the law, to American history, and to this or that political contingency, Lincoln looked—as it was his habit already to do—to the center; that is, to the definition of man. Was the negro a man or was he not? It can be shown that his answer to this question never varied, despite willingness to recognize some temporary and perhaps even some permanent minority on the part of the African race. The answer was a clear “Yes,” and he used it on many occasions during the fifties to impale his opponents.

The South was peculiarly vulnerable to this argument, for if we look at its position, not through the terms of legal and religious argument, often ingeniously worked out, but through its actual treatment of the negro, that position is seen to be equivocal. To illustrate: in the Southern case he was not a man as far as the “inalienable rights” go, and the Dred Scott decision was to class him as a chattel. Yet on the contrary the negro was very much a man when it came to such matters as understanding orders, performing work, and, as the presence of the mulatto testified, helping to procreate the human species. All of the arguments that the pro-slavery group was able to muster broke against the stubborn fact, which Lincoln persistently thrust in their way, that the negro was somehow and in some degree a man.

For our first examination of this argument, we turn to the justly celebrated speech at Peoria, October 16, 1854. Lincoln had actually begun to lose interest in politics when the passage of the highly controversial Kansas-Nebraska Bill in May, 1854, reawakened him. It was as if his moral nature had received a fresh shock from the tendencies present in this bill; and he began in that year the battle which he waged with remarkable consistency of position until he won the presidency of the Union six years later. The Speech at Peoria can be regarded as the opening gun of this campaign.

The speech itself is a rich study in logic and rhetoric, wherein one finds the now mature Lincoln showing his gift for discovering the essentials of a question. After promising the audience to confine himself to the “naked merits” of the issue and to be “no less than national in all the positions” he took, he turned at once to the topic of domestic slavery. Here arguments from the genus “man” follow one after another. Lincoln uses them to confront the Southern people with their dilemma.

Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent to the extension of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to your taking your slave. Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and Negroes. But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the Negro, I wish to ask whether you of the South, yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much?[83]

If the Southern people regard the Negro only as an animal, how do they explain their attitude toward the slave dealer?

You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little Negroes, but not with the slave dealer’s children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with men you meet, but with the slave dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cotton, or tobacco?[84]

Moreover, if the Negro is merely property, and is incapable of any sort of classification, what category is there to accommodate the free Negroes?

And yet again. There are in the United States and Territories, including the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks. At five hundred dollars per head, they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars. How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this? All these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves; and they would be slaves now but for something which has operated on their white owners, inducing them at vast pecuniary sacrifice to liberate them. What is that something? Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it is your sense of justice and human sympathy continually telling you that the poor Negro has some natural right to himself—that those who deny it and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death.[85]

The argument is clinched with a passage which puts the Negro’s case in the most explicit terms one can well conceive of. “Man” and “self-government,” Lincoln argues, cannot be defined without respect to one another.

The doctrine of self-government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends upon whether a Negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, in that case he who is a man may as a matter of self-government do just what he pleases with him.

But if the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal,” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.[86]

Lincoln knew the type of argument he had to oppose, and he correctly gauged its force. It was the argument from circumstance, which he treated as such argument requires to be treated. “Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right’ back upon its existing legal rights and its argument of ‘necessity.’”[87] He did not deny the “necessity”; he regarded it as something that could be taken care of in course of time.

After the formation of the Republican Party, he often utilized his source in definition to point out the salient difference between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats were playing up circumstance (the “necessity” alluded to in the above quotation) and to consequence (the saving of the Union through the placating of all sections) while the Republicans stood, at first a little forlornly, upon principle. As he put it during a speech at Springfield in 1857:

The Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the Negro is a man, that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage “a sacred right of self-government.”[88]

In the long contest with Douglas and the party of “popular sovereignty,” Lincoln’s principal charge was that his opponents, by straddling issues and through deviousness, were breaking down the essential definition of man. Repeatedly he referred to “this gradual and steady debauching of public opinion.” He made this charge because those who advocated local option in the matter of slavery were working unremittingly to change the Negro “from the rank of a man to that of a brute.” “They are taking him down,” he declared, “and placing him, when spoken of, among reptiles and crocodiles, as Judge Douglas himself expresses it.

“Is not this change wrought in your minds a very important change? Public opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the public mind to the extent I have already stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it.

“Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on, layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the Negro everywhere as with a brute.”[89]

We feel that the morality of intellectual integrity lay behind such resistance to the breaking down of genera. Lincoln realized that the price of honesty, as well as of success in the long run, is to stay out of the excluded middle.

In sum, we see that Lincoln could never be dislodged from his position that there is one genus of human beings; and early in his career as lawyer he had learned that it is better to base an argument upon one incontrovertible point than to try to make an impressive case through a whole array of points. Through the years he clung tenaciously to this concept of genus, from which he could draw the proposition that what is fundamentally true of the family will be true also of the branches of the family.[90] Therefore since the Declaration of Independence had interdicted slavery for man, slavery was interdicted for the negro in principle. Here is a good place to point out that whereas for Burke circumstance was often a deciding factor, for Lincoln it was never more than a retarding factor. He marked the right to equality affirmed by the signers of the Declaration of Independence: “They meant simply to declare the right, so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances would permit.”[91] And he recognized the stubborn fact of the institution of American slavery. But he did not argue any degree of rightness from the fact. The strategy of his whole anti-slavery campaign was that slavery should be restricted to the states in which it then existed and in this way “put in course of ultimate extinction”—a phrase which he found expressive enough to use on several occasions.

There is quite possibly concealed here another argument from definition, expressible in the proposition that which cannot grow must perish. To fix limits for an institution with the understanding that it shall never exceed these is in effect to pass sentence of death. The slavery party seems to have apprehended early that if slavery could not wax, it would wane, and hence their support of the Mexican War and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Lincoln’s inflexible defense of the terms of the old Northwest Ordinance served notice that he represented the true opposition. In this way his definitive stand drew clear lines for the approaching conflict.

To gain now a clearer view of Lincoln’s mastery of this rhetoric, it will be useful to see how he used various arguments from definition within the scope of a single speech, and for this purpose we may choose the First Inaugural Address, surely from the standpoint of topical organization one of the most notable American state papers. The long political contest, in which he had displayed acumen along with tenacity, had ended in victory, and this was the juncture at which he had to lay down his policy for the American Union. For some men it would have been an occasion for description mainly; but Lincoln seems to have taken the advice he had given many years before to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield: “Passion has helped us but can do so no more.... Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense....”[92] Without being cold, the speech is severely logical, and much of the tone is contributed by the type of argument preferred.

Of the fourteen distinguishable arguments in this address, eight are arguments from definition or genus. Of the six remaining, two are from consequences, two from circumstances, one from contraries, and one from similitude. The proportion tells its own story. Now let us see how the eight are employed:

1. Argument from the nature of all government. All governments have a fundamental duty of self-preservation. “Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.”[93] This means of course that whatever is recognized as a government has the obligation to defend itself from without and from within, and whatever menaces the government must be treated as a hostile force. This argument was offered to meet the contention of the secessionists that the Constitution nowhere authorized the Federal government to take forcible measures against the withdrawing states. Here Lincoln fell back upon the broader genus “all government.”

2. Argument from the nature of contract. Here Lincoln met the argument that the association of the states is “in the nature of a contract merely.” His answer was that the rescinding of a contract requires the assent of all parties to it. When one party alone ceases to observe it, the contract is merely violated, and violation affects the material interests of all parties. By this interpretation of the law of contract, the Southern states could not leave the Union without a general consent.

3. Argument from the nature of the American Union. Here Lincoln began with the proposition that the American Union is older than the Constitution. Now since the Constitution was formed “to make a more perfect union,” it must have had in view the “vital element of perpetuity,” since the omission of this element would have left a less perfect union than before. The intent of the Constitution was that “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.” Therefore the American Union, as an instrument of government, had in its legal nature protection against this kind of disintegration.

4. Argument from the nature of the chief magistrate’s office. Having thus defined the Union, Lincoln next looked at the duties which its nature imposed upon the chief magistrate. He defined it as “simple duty” on the chief magistrate’s part to see that the laws of this unbroken union “be faithfully executed in all the states.” Obviously the argument was to justify active measures in defense of the Union. As Lincoln conceived the definition, it was not the duty of the chief magistrate to preside over the disintegration of the Union, but to carry on the executive office just as if no possibility of disintegration threatened.

Thus far, it will be observed, the speech is a series of deductions, each one deriving from the preceding definition.

5. Argument from the nature of majority rule. This argument, with its fine axiomatic statements, was used by Lincoln to indicate how the government should proceed in cases not expressly envisaged by the Constitution. Popular government demands acquiescence by minorities in all such cases. “If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government will cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government is acquiescence on one side or the other.

“If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minority.”[94] The difficulty of the Confederacy with states’ rights within its own house was to attest to the soundness of this argument.

6. Argument from the nature of the sovereignty of the people. Here Lincoln conceded the right of the whole people to change its government by constitutional reform or by revolutionary action. But he saw this right vested in the people as a whole, and he insisted that any change be carried out by the modes prescribed. The institutions of the country were finally the creations of the sovereign will of the people. But until a will on this issue was properly expressed, the government had a commission to endure as before.

7. Second argument from the nature of the office of chief magistrate. This argument followed the preceding because Lincoln had to make it clear that whereas the people, as the source of sovereign power, had the right to alter or abolish their government, the chief magistrate, as an elected servant, had no such right. He was chosen to conduct the government then in existence. “His duty is to administer the present government as it came into his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by him, to his successor.”[95]

8. Second argument from the nature of the sovereignty of the people. In this Lincoln reminds his audience that the American government does not give its officials much power to do mischief, and that it provides a return of power to the people at short intervals. In effect, the argument defines the American type of government and a tyranny as incompatible from the fact that the governors are up for review by the people at regular periods.

It can hardly be overlooked that this concentration upon definition produces a strongly legalistic speech, if we may conceive law as a process of defining actions. Every important policy of which explanation is made is referred to some widely accepted American political theory. It has been said that Lincoln’s advantage over his opponent Jefferson Davis lay in a flexible-minded pragmatism capable of dealing with issues on their own terms, unhampered by metaphysical abstractions. There may be an element of truth in this if reference is made to the more confined and superficial matters—to procedural and administrative detail. But one would go far to find a speech more respectful toward the established principles of American government—to defined and agreed upon things—than the First Inaugural Address.

Although no other speech by Lincoln exhibits so high a proportion of arguments from definition, the First Message to Congress (July 4, 1861) makes a noteworthy use of this source. The withdrawal of still other states from the Union, the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter, and ensuing military events compelled Lincoln to develop more fully his anti-secessionist doctrine. This he did in a passage remarkable for its treatment of the age-old problem of freedom and authority. What had to be made determinate, as he saw it, was the nature of free government.

And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question of whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”[96]

Then looking at the doctrine of secession as a question of the whole and its parts, he went on to say:

This relative matter of national power and State rights, as a principle, is no other than the principle of generality and locality. Whatever concerns the whole should be confined to the whole—to the General Government; while whatever concerns only the State should be left exclusively to the State. This is all there is of original principle about it. Whether the National Constitution in defining boundaries between the two has applied the principle with exact accuracy is not to be questioned. We are all bound by that defining without question.[97]

One further argument, occurring in a later speech, deserves special attention because of the clear way in which it reveals Lincoln’s method. When he delivered his Second Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, he devoted himself primarily to the subject of compensated emancipation of the slaves. This was a critical moment of the war for the people of the border states, who were not fully committed either way, and who were sensitive on the subject of slavery. Lincoln hoped to gain the great political and military advantage of their adherence. The way in which he approaches the subject should be of the highest interest to students of rhetoric, for the opening part of the speech is virtually a copybook exercise in definition. There he faces the question of what constitutes a nation. “A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws.” Here we see in scholarly order the genus particularized by the differentiae. Next he enters into a critical discussion of the differentiae. The notion may strike us as curious, but Lincoln proceeds to cite the territory as the enduring part. “The territory is the only part which is of a certain durability. ‘One generation passeth away and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever.’ It is of the first importance to duly consider and estimate this ever-enduring part.”[98] Now, Lincoln goes on to say, our present strife arises “not from our permanent part, not from the land we inhabit, not from our national homestead.” It is rather the case that “Our strife pertains to ourselves—to the passing generations of men; and it can without convulsion be hushed forever with the passing of one generation.”[99] The present generation will soon disappear, and our laws can be modified by our will. Therefore he offers a plan whereby all owners will be indemnified and all slaves will be free by the year 1900.

Seen in another way, what Lincoln here does is define “nation” and then divide the differentiae into the permanent and the transitory; finally he accommodates his measure both to the permanent part (a territory to be wholly free after 1900) and the transitory part (present men and institutions, which are to be “paid off”).

It is the utterance of an American political leader; yet it is veritably Scholastic in its method and in the clearness of its lines of reasoning. It is, at the same time, a fine illustration of pressing toward the ideal goal while respecting, but not being deflected by, circumstances.

It seems pertinent to say after the foregoing that one consequence of Lincoln’s love of definition was a war-time policy toward slavery which looked to some like temporizing. We have encountered in an earlier speech his view that the Negro could not be classified merely as property. Yet it must be remembered that in the eyes of the law Negro slaves were property; and Lincoln was, after all, a lawyer. Morally he believed them not to be property, but legally they were property; and the necessity of walking a line between the moral imperative and the law will explain some of his actions which seem not to agree with the popular conception of the Great Emancipator. The first serious clash came in the late summer of 1861, when General Fremont, operating in Missouri, issued a proclamation freeing all slaves there belonging to citizens in rebellion against the United States. Lincoln first rebuked General Fremont and then countermanded his order. To O. H. Browning, of Quincy, Illinois, who had written him in support of Fremont’s action, he responded as follows:

You speak of it as the only means of saving the government. On the contrary, it is itself the surrender of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the Government of the United States—any government of constitution and laws—wherein a general or a president may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?[100]

This was the doctrine of the legal aspect of slavery which was to be amplified in the Second Annual Message to Congress:

Doubtless some of those who are to pay, and not to receive, will object. Yet the measure is both just and economical. In a certain sense the liberation of the slaves is the destruction of property—property acquired by descent or by purchase, the same as any other property.... If, then, for a common object this property is to be sacrificed, is it not just that it be done at a common charge?[101]

It is a truism that as a war progresses, the basis of the war changes, and our civil conflict was no exception. It appears to have become increasingly clear to Lincoln that slavery was not only the fomenting cause but also the chief factor of support of the secessionist movement, and finally he came to the conclusion that the “destruction” of this form of property was an indispensable military proceeding. Even here though—and contrary to the general knowledge of Americans today—definitions were carefully made. The final document was not a proclamation to emancipate slaves, but a proclamation to confiscate the property of citizens in rebellion “as a fit and necessary measure for suppressing said rebellion.” Its terms did not emancipate all slaves, and as a matter of fact slavery was legal in the District of Columbia until some time after Lincoln’s death.

In view of Lincoln’s frequent reliance upon the argument from definition, it becomes a matter of interest to inquire whether he appears to have realized that many of his problems were problems of definition. One can of course employ a type of argument without being aware of much more than its ad hoc success, but we should expect a reflective mind like Lincoln’s to ponder at times the abstract nature of his method. Furthermore, the extraordinary accuracy with which he used words is evidence pointing in the same direction. Sensitivity on the score of definitions is tantamount to sensitivity on the score of names, and we find the following in the First Message to Congress:

It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the present movement at the South be called “secession” or “rebellion.” The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they knew they could never raise their reason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law.[102]

Lincoln must at times have viewed his whole career as a battle against the “miners and sappers” of those names which expressed the national ideals. His chief charge against Douglas and the equivocal upholders of “squatter sovereignty” was that they were trying to circumvent definitions, and during the war period he had to meet the same sort of attempts. Lincoln’s most explicit statement by far on the problem appears in a short talk made at one of the “Sanitary Fairs” it was his practice to attend. Speaking this time at Baltimore in the spring of 1864, he gave one of those timeless little lessons which have made such an impression on men’s minds.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases, with himself, and with the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.[103]

So the difficulty appeared in his time, and it should hardly be necessary to point out that no period of modern history has been more in need of this little homily on the subject of definition than the first half of the twentieth century.

The relationship between words and essences did then occur to Lincoln as a problem, and we can show how he was influenced in one highly important particular by his attention to this relationship.

Fairly early in his struggle against Douglas and others whom he conceived to be the foes of the Union, Lincoln became convinced that the perdurability of laws and other institutions is bound up with the acceptance of the principle of contradiction. Or, if that seems an unduly abstract way of putting the matter, let us say that he came to repudiate, as firmly as anyone in practical politics may do, those people who try by relativistic interpretations and other sophistries to evade the force of some basic principles. The heart of Lincoln’s statesmanship, indeed, lay in his perception that on some matters one has to say “Yes” or “No,” that one has to accept an alternative to the total exclusion of the other, and that any weakness in being thus bold is a betrayal. Let us examine some of the stages by which this conviction grew upon him.

It seems not generally appreciated that this position comprises the essence of the celebrated “House Divided” speech, delivered before the Republican State Convention at Springfield, June 16, 1858. There he said: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”[104] How manifest it is that Lincoln’s position was not one of “tolerance,” as that word is vulgarly understood today. It was a definite insistence upon right, with no regard for latitude and longitude in moral questions. For Lincoln such questions could neither be relativistically decided nor held in abeyance. There was no middle ground. In the light of American political tradition the stand is curiously absolute, but it is there—and it is genuinely expressive of Lincoln’s matured view.

Douglas had made the fatal mistake of looking for a position in the excluded middle. He had been trying to get slavery admitted into the territories by feigning that the institution was morally indifferent. His platform declaration had been that he did not care “whether it is voted up or voted down” in the territories. That statement made a fine opening for Lincoln, which he used as follows in his reply at Alton:

Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do a wrong.[105]

In a speech at Cincinnati the following year, he used a figure from the Bible to express his opposition to compromise. “The good old maxims of the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable, to human affairs, and in this, as in other things, we may say here that he who is not for us is against us; he who gathereth not with us scattereth.”[106] In the Address at Cooper Union Institute, February 27, 1860, Lincoln took long enough to describe the methodology of this dodge by Douglas and his supporters. It was, as we have indicated, an attempt to squeeze into the excluded middle. “Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of ‘don’t care’ on a question about which all true men do care....”[107] Finally, and most eloquently of all, there is the brief passage from his “Meditation on the Divine Will,” composed sometime in 1862. “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.”[108] God too is a rational being and will not be found embracing both sides of a contradictory. Where mutual negation exists, God must be found on one side, and Lincoln hopes, though he does not here claim, that God is in the Union’s corner of this square of opposition.

The fact that Lincoln’s thought became increasingly logical under the pressure of events is proof of great depths in the man.

Now as we take a general view of Lincoln’s habit of defining in its relation to his political thought, we see that it gave him one quality in which he is unrivalled by any other American leader—the quality of perspective. The connection of the two is a necessary one. To define is to assume perspective; that is the method of definition. Since nothing can be defined until it is placed in a category and distinguished from its near relatives, it is obvious that definition involves the taking of a general view. Definition must see the thing in relation to other things, as that relation is expressible through substance, magnitude, kind, cause, effect, and other particularities. It is merely different expression to say that this is a view which transcends: perspective, detachment, and capacity to transcend are all requisites of him who would define, and we know that Lincoln evidenced these qualities quite early in life,[109] and that he employed them with consummate success when the future of the nation depended on his judgment.

Let us remember that Lincoln was a leader in the most bitter partisan trial in our history; yet within short decades after his death he had achieved sanctuary. His name is now immune against partisan rancor, and he has long ceased to be a mere sectional hero. The lesson of these facts is that greatness is found out and appreciated just as littleness is found out and scorned, and Lincoln proved his greatness through his habit of transcending and defining his objects. The American scene of his time invites the colloquial adjective “messy”—with human slavery dividing men geographically and spiritually, with a fluid frontier, and with the problems of labor and capital and of immigration already beginning to exert their pressures—but Lincoln looked at these things in perspective and refused to look at them in any other way.

For an early example of this characteristic vision of his, we may go back to the speech delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838. The opening is significant. “In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.”[110] So Lincoln takes as his point of perspective all time, of which the Christian era is but a portion; and the entire earth, of which the United States can be viewed as a specially favored part. This habit of viewing things from an Olympian height never left him. We might cite also the opening of the Speech at Peoria, and that of the Speech at the Cooper Union Institute; but let us pass on twenty-five years and re-read the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address. “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Again tremendous perspective, suggesting almost that Lincoln was looking at the little act from some ultimate point in space and time. “Fourscore and seven years ago” carries the listener back to the beginning of the nation. “This continent” again takes the whole world into purview. “Our fathers” is an auxiliary suggestion of the continuum of time. The phrase following defines American political philosophy in the most general terms possible. The entire opening sentence, with its sustained detachment, sounds like an account of the action to be rendered at Judgment Day. It is not Abe Lincoln who is speaking the utterance, but the voice of mankind, as it were, to whom the American Civil War is but the passing vexation of a generation. And as for the “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” it takes two to make a struggle, and is there anything to indicate that the men in gray are excluded? There is nothing explicit, and therefore we may say that Lincoln looked as far ahead as he looked behind in commemorating the event of Gettysburg.

This habit of perspective led Lincoln at times to take an extraordinarily objective view of his own actions—more frequently perhaps as he neared the end of his career. It was as if he projected a view in which history was the duration, the world the stage, and himself a transitory actor upon it. Of all his utterances the Second Inaugural is in this way the most objective and remote. Its tone even seems that of an actor about to quit the stage. His self-effacement goes to the extent of impersonal constructions, so that in places Lincoln appears to be talking about another person. “At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” “At this second appearing”! Is there any way of gathering, except from our knowledge of the total situation, who is thus appearing? Then after a generalized review of the military situation, he declares: “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” Why “is ventured” rather than “I venture”? Lincoln had taught himself to view the war as one of God’s processes worked out through human agents, and the impersonality of tone of this last and most deeply meditative address may arise from that habit. Only once, in the modest qualifying phrase “I trust,” does the pronoun “I” appear; and the final classic paragraph is spoken in the name of “us.” There have been few men whose processes of mind so well deserve the epithet sub specie aeternitatis as Lincoln’s.

It goes without further demonstration that Lincoln transcended the passions of the war. How easy it is for a leader whose political and personal prestige are at stake to be carried along with the tide of hatred of a people at war, we have, unhappily, seen many times. No other victor in a civil conflict has conducted himself with more humanity, and this not in some fine gesture after victory was secured—although there was that too—but during the struggle, while the issue was still in doubt and maximum strain was placed upon the feelings. Without losing sight of his ultimate goal, he treated everyone with personal kindness, including people who went out of their way in attempts to wound him. And probably it was his habit of looking at things through objective definitions which kept him from confusing being logically right with being personally right. In the “Meditation on the Divine Will” he wrote, “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party....”[111] That could be written only by one who has attained the highest level of self-discipline. It explains too why he should write, in his letter to Cuthbert Bullitt: “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”[112] Lastly, there is the extraordinary confession of common guilt in the Second Inaugural Address, which, if it had been honored by the government he led, would have constituted a step without precedent in history in the achievement of reconciliation after war. It is supposable, Lincoln said, that God has given “to both North and South this terrible war.” Hardly seventy-five years later we were to see nations falling into the ancient habit of claiming exclusive right in their quarrels and even of demanding unconditional surrender. As late as February, 1865, Lincoln stood ready to negotiate, and his offer, far from requiring “unconditional surrender,” required but one condition—return of the seceded states to the Union.

There is, when we reflect upon the matter, a certain morality in clarity of thought, and the man who had learned to define with Euclid and who had kept his opponents in argument out of the excluded middle, could not be pushed into a settlement which satisfied only passion. The settlement had to be objectively right. Between his world view and his mode of argument and his response to great occasions there is a relationship so close that to speak of any one apart is to leave the exposition incomplete.

With the full career in view, there seems no reason to differ with Herndon’s judgment that Lincoln displayed a high order of “conservative statesmanship.”[113] It is true that Lincoln has been placed in almost every position, from right to left, on the political arc. Our most radical parties have put forward programs in his name; and Professor J. G. Randall has written an unconvincing book on “Lincoln the Liberal Statesman.” Such variety of estimate underlines the necessity of looking for some more satisfactory criterion by which to place the man politically. It will not do to look simply at the specific measures he has supported. If these were the standard, George Washington would have to be regarded as a great progressive; Imperial Germany would have to be regarded as liberal, or even as radical, by the token of its social reforms. It seems right to assume that a much surer index to a man’s political philosophy is his characteristic way of thinking, inevitably expressed in the type of argument he prefers. In reality, the type of argument a man chooses gives us the profoundest look we get at his principle of integration. By this method Burke, who was partial to the argument from circumstance, must be described as a liberal, whose blast against the French Revolution was, even in his own words, an attack from center against an extreme. Those who argue from consequence tend to go all out for action; they are the “radicals.” Those who prefer the argument from definition, as Lincoln did, are conservatives in the legitimate sense of the word. It is no accident that Lincoln became the founder of the greatest American conservative party, even if that party was debauched soon after his career ended. He did so because his method was that of the conservative.

The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approximation. Or, to put this in another way, he sees it as a set of definitions which are struggling to get themselves defined in the real world. As Lincoln remarked of the Framers of the Declaration of Independence: “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”[114] This paradigm acts both as an inspiration to action and as a constraint upon over-action, since there is always a possibility of going beyond the schemata into an excess. Lincoln opposed both slavery and the Abolitionists (the Abolitionists constituted a kind of “action” party); yet he was not a middle-of-the-roader. Indeed, for one who grew up a Whig, he is astonishingly free from tendency to assume that “the truth lies somewhere in between.” The truth lay where intellect and logic found it, and he was not abashed by clearness of outline.