THE BIBLIOTHECA SACRA, NO. XLI. AND AMERICAN BIBLICAL REPOSITORY, NO. XCIII. JANUARY, 1854. ARTICLE I. RHETORIC DETERMINED AND APPLIED.1 By Laurens P. Hickok, D. D., Union College, Schenectady, N. Ÿ. AN orator has ceased speaking. The audience are just recovering themselves from the spell in which for hours they have been bound, and are now slowly and thoughtfully passing away from the place of concourse. Every countenance expresses the power which the speaker has had over the emotions of the soul, for the whole retiring audience carry away the impress given by his eloquence. Here, then, is just the point for the philosophic observer coolly to take in the whole scene, and determine that which is the radical peculiarity in it. Within a few hours, at the most, all this effect has been produced. This mass of mind came together various and isolate; it has gone away assimilated and fused into one. Every mind knows that its whole transformation during this period has been by the power of eloquence, and yet probably few of that audience can say precisely what that wonderful power is. It is not many things, but one thing; not a composite, but a simple. Like the force which unites nature, it is one, though everywhere diffused; like the life of the body, it ener 1 This Article was originally delivered as an Oration before the Porter Rhetorical Society of Andover Theological Seminary, Sept. 6, 1853. gizes in every part and yet is everywhere a unit. What is it? How shall we attain it and express it? The theme which we propose in this Article is: RHETORIC DETERMINED AND APPLIED; and the first part of the design demands a direct answer to these inquiries. It must be determined, What is that simple force which is the whole life of eloquence? The way to the answer lies through a careful analysis, and we have no choice but to attempt leading you by that path, even though it shall prove somewhat arduous and dry. There has manifestly been the presence of pure logic. Every judgment has had its logical form, and has been attained according to a necessary and universal law which must regulate all thinking. No mind can connect its conceptions into propositions in an arbitrary manner. All intelligence has its conditioning law, and mind must think, if it think at all, according to fixed processes of concluding in judgments. It cannot conceive of phenomena but in spaces and times; it cannot combine qualities but in their substances, nor connect events but in their causes. Thinking is what it is, and not feeling nor willing, not walking nor eating, in virtue of the necessary forms which determine it. Quite irrespective of the thought itself, as a judgment formed, there must be the antecedent pure form which conditioned it in its connections and conclusions. But all thinking is not in one order. Conceptions are connected in various ways and come out to their own peculiar conclusions. We may call these judgments analytic and synthetic, and distinguish the different connections of the predicates and subjects in their copulas as categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive; but no matter what the thought, there is a determinate number of pure forms, in one of which it must come out as a judgment, if the mind makes any conclusion at all about it. Such pure forms as conditioning all thought, and thus themselves prior to the thought, give occasion for a pure logic, which must be necessary for all thinking. But has this pure logie done the work in this wonderful transformation? Has any form of thinking been the soul of this cloquence? Manifestly not. For when we look carefully at the logic, we see that it has had a master. It has been used. power is not in it; there has been a power over it, making it to do another's bidding. One form of thinking fits a particular end rather than another, and the logic we find has all along been The used with the nicest adaptation. The logician can go over the whole ground, and take up every pure form of thought, and put it at once into its own category in logical science, and may thus give in detail the entire logical construction precisely according to the logical facts. But this determination of logical fact will, by no means, determine the rhetorical reason. The mere logician cannot say why this form of a judgment was put here and another there. And yet any one can see that the logic has been used. Make any change in the form of thinking in its place, and the eloquence of that place at once vanishes. The logic is not the eloquence, it has been only the servant of eloquence. A higher power has had dominion over it. There has also been pure grammar. Every thought has had its own verbal expression, and every judgment its grammatical construction, according to previous necessary rules of speech. Thought cannot make its arbitrary modes of expression; language is its dress, and it must be put on in a determinate manner. From the inner nature of thought, it must clothe itself in speech after necessary and universal forms. Thought is a purely spiritual essence. In whatever logical form, it still has no significancy but in the hidden consciousness of the thinker. That it may be of any outer signification, it must take on a body and reveal itself in some external expression. But this mode of expression is determined for it in the logical form of the thinking itself. A hypothetical judgment cannot express itself categorically, nor a categorical judgment express itself disjunctively. No matter what the symbol for the thought, its connections of agent and object, time and number, relative and antecedent, etc. must necessarily and universally determine its mode of expression, and thus all language which expresses thought must have the same necessary rules. No peculiarities of any language can take it out of the universal laws for all language. There is an occasion for a pure universal grammar. But has this grammatical arrangement of speech done this marvellous work? Again, and for the same reason, we say, manifestly not. The whole grammatical expression has itself been controlled. The fixed rules of universal grammar have all along been observed, but all those modifications, which elegance, force, clearness and facility of apprehension admit, have been freely used. A power back of the grammarian has been perpetually at work, making its selection of terms, arrangement of sen |