George Campbell: Rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment (Suny Series in Rhetoric in the Modern Era)

George Campbell

SUNY series, Rhetoric in the Modern Era Arthur E. Walzer and Edward Schiappa, Editors

The goal of the series “Rhetoric in the Modern Era” is to prompt and sponsor book-length treatments of important rhetorical theorists and of philosophers and literary theorists who make substantial contributions to our understanding of language and rhetoric. In some cases, a book in this series is the first booklength treatment of the figure; in others, a book in the series is the first to examine a philosopher or theorist from the perspective of rhetorical theory. The intended audience for books in the series are nonspecialists—graduate students coming to the study of a theorist for the first time and professors broadly interested in the rhetorical tradition. The series books are comprehensive introductions—comprehensive in the sense that they provide brief biographies, descriptions of the intellectual milieu, and discussions of the major scholarship on the figure as context for a detailed examination of the figure’s contribution to rhetorical theory or history. We envision these as the first books on their subject, not the last. While books in the series may exceed these modest aims, their focus is on achieving them. A complete list of books in the series can be found at the end of this volume.

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George Campbell Rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment

ARTHUR E. WALZER

STATE UNIVERSI T Y OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Jennifer Giovani Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walzer, Arthur E., 1944– George Campbell : rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment / Arthur E. Walzer. p. cm. — (SUNY series, rhetoric in the modern age [sic]) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5577-7 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5578-5 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Campbell, George, 1719–1796. Philosophy of rhetoric. 2. Rhetoric. 3. English language—Rhetoric. I. Title. II. SUNY series, rhetoric in the modern era. PN173.C33 W35 2002 808—dc21 2002075788 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 George Campbell: Minister, Theologian, Professor, and Philosopher of Rhetoric

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2 Intellectual Milieu: Foundations and Influences

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3 Faculties and Types of Discourse Philosophy of Rhetoric, Preface, Introduction, and Chapters I, II, III

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4 How Rhetoric “Holds” Logic: Logic, Reasoning, and Evidence Philosophy of Rhetoric, Book I, Chapters IV, V, VI

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5 Imagination, “Resemblance,” and Vivacity

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6 Securing Belief by Engaging the Passions: The Seven Circumstances and Sympathy Philosophy of Rhetoric, Chapters VII, VIII, IX

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7 Correct Usage: Reputable, National, Present A Reading of Book II

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8 Style and Book III: Vivacity and Animation as Stylistic Qualities

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9 Campbell’s “Other” Work: Dissertation on Miracles, Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence, the Sermons

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10 Review of the Scholarship and Conclusions

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Appendix. Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence in Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence: An Abstract

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Notes

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I thank the University of Minnesota for a three-month leave, which allowed me to visit Scotland, and I thank the University of Aberdeen and their staff for the welcoming access to their manuscript collections while I was there. My colleagues at the University of Minnesota are always a source of support. Alan Gross, who is more willing to read the works of others than any one else I know, read this book in manuscript and offered perceptive suggestions. Richard Graff, who has already taught me much about the rhetorical tradition, made corrections and offered advice on some chapters. Bill Marchand and Tom Scanlan, great friends for thirty years, are constant sources of ideas. Billie Wahlstrom deserves special thanks for being a department head who never questioned the relevancy of historical work. I would like to single out David Beard among the many graduate students at Minnesota who have helped me. Tom Clayton, of the English Department at Minnesota and my dissertation adviser thirty years ago, is a model as a scholar; he was also tireless in his efforts to improve my writing, which, whatever its quality, is at least better for his efforts. Two of the State University of New York Press readers, Lewie Ulman of Ohio State University and Glen McClish of San Diego State University, offered helpful criticisms and excellent suggestions. Glen also reread sections of the revised manuscript with great care and, again, made important suggestions which I adopted. Director of State University of New York Press, Priscilla Ross and her assistant, Oli Baker, were supportive and efficient throughout the research and writing of this manuscript. No one should hold either the reviewers at SUNY Press or my colleagues responsible for any of my misunderstanding or errors. I thank my mother, Eileen Walzer, a diligent reader and writer, for her unwavering support and love. I thank my daughter, Emma, for being just the kid I wanted. To my wife, Ginny, who shares everything with me, I owe everything.

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Introduction

George Campbell is a good fit in this series—a series of introductory books on important figures in the history of modern rhetoric. His Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR) is amply represented in our anthologies and justly praised in our surveys as the most important rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment. Yet, this is the first book-length study of Campbell to be published. Furthermore there is little scholarly discussion of Campbell today, and it is difficult to motivate graduate students to undertake the challenge of coming to terms with the Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR). No doubt the postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment (and Campbell was a consummate modernist thinker) contributes to this lack of interest. But there are other reasons as well—reasons for which Campbell himself must accept some of the responsibility. First, POR is a frustrating read. Campbell writes with point and edge in his Dissertation on Miracles, with admirable simplicity in his Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence, and with clarity and interest in Lectures on Ecclesiastical History. But the Philosophy of Rhetoric suffers from an often turgid, sometimes pompous style. First, key points are expressed obscurely or elliptically, lost in prose that lectures us on what seems obvious. Second, the text manifests a reluctance, born of Campbell’s intellectual conservatism, to dramatize what is original and important about the theory advanced. The result is that the unity and originality of Campbell’s theory is obscured in his work. These expository problems motivate my general approach in this book. My goal is to make Campbell clearer. In my opinion, the unity of the Philosophy of Rhetoric comes into focus when Campbell’s intentions are made more consistently present to the reader, for he wrote with both tradition and modernity very much on his mind. The rhetorical tradition, as defined by the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and especially Quintilian, and modern empiricist philosophy, as set forth by John Locke, Thomas Reid, and especially David Hume, are the textual voices that resonate in POR. In identifying these works as crucial to understanding Campbell’s theory, I have not unearthed a hidden hermeneutic key, for Campbell signals his intentions to his readers in his

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Introduction

introduction. There, he writes that the classical rhetoricians had set forth the basic tenets of the art of rhetoric, leaving for his more scientific, philosophic age the challenge of explaining in theoretical terms the basis for ancient dicta. My approach then is informed by what I take to be the intentions manifest in the Philosophy of Rhetoric. I present this book as an historical reconstruction of an important rhetorical text, that is, a work that, in Edward Schiappa’s definition, attempts to reconstruct an important text as much as possible “in the words and mindset” of the original author (1990, 193–94), as distinguished from a modern appropriation, which would interpret an author in the interpreter’s philosophical framework. Whether intended as historical reconstruction or modern appropriation, previous scholarship on Campbell has also emphasized the influence of eighteenth-century empiricist philosophy on the Philosophy of Rhetoric. More than twenty-five years ago, Vincent Bevilacqua and Dennis R. Bormann taught us to see Campbell with reference to the Scottish Enlightenment, and composition scholars have more recently emphasized how Campbell’s empiricist philosophy shaped the nature of his influence on nineteenth-century writing instruction. The valuable historical research of H. Lewis Ulman and, recently, Jeffrey Mark Suderman has examined in detail Campbell’s Scottish relations. My book is especially indebted to the work of Lloyd F. Bitzer, the foremost Campbell scholar. In short, in viewing Campbell from the perspective of eighteenth-century philosophy, I can claim only the good sense to have followed in the path that these scholars have created, though the greater length that a book offers allows me to provide a sustained close reading of Campbell’s text in relationship to the work of his empiricist teachers. While scholars have attended to the eighteenth-century influences on Campbell’s work, Campbell’s debt to the ancient rhetoricians has received less attention. Campbell learned a great deal from the rhetorical tradition and is very much a product of it. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory is the most comprehensive embodiment of classical rhetoric ever written, and Campbell apparently regarded this work with a respect that bordered on reverence. Although the Philosophy of Rhetoric is often presented as paradigmatic of a “new” rhetoric, Campbell did not intend to challenge Quintilian. Quite the contrary: he sees his work as confirmation of Quintilian’s view, believing that the psychological insights of eighteenth-century empiricism would only deepen our appreciation for the classical rhetorical tradition. Campbell’s allegiance to classical rhetoric has not, in my view, been emphasized enough in previous scholarship. Furthermore, understanding the Philosophy of Rhetoric as a merging of ancient and modern perspectives can resolve many of the most impassioned disagreements that have characterized work on Campbell to this point. I wanted to organize this book in a way that would be helpful to students working their way through the Philosophy of Rhetoric and have, for that reason, created a sequence of chapters that, as much as possible, tracks the parts of

Introduction

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POR. My first two chapters set forth the background for the reading of POR that forms the heart of this book. Chapter 1 reviews Campbell’s life and career. Chapter 2 discusses the major Enlightenment influences on Campbell’s theory. With the possible exception of his study of classical rhetoric while he first flirted with a law career and subsequently prepared for the ministry, the most significant influence on Campbell’s views on rhetoric resulted from his involvement with the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. With the other members of this society, Campbell explored the implications of the work of Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume for various arts and sciences—in Campbell’s case, for rhetoric. And he came in direct contact with the work of Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid, both members of the Society whose views also influenced his understanding of how the mind comes to belief. Chapters 3 focuses on the preface, introduction, and POR’s first three chapters. In these chapters POR’s intentions become clear. Campbell would deepen our theoretical understanding of classical rhetoric. He will draw on the empiricist philosophy to provide an account of belief and on faculty psychology to establish the relationship of that account to the motives of audiences and the purposes of rhetoric. Chapter 4 examines Campbell’s presentation of discourse addressed to the understanding, taking up his theory of evidence and reasoning. In calling for a “natural logic”—a description of how the mind understands—Campbell in effect establishes psychology as more relevant than epistemology for rhetoric. Chapter 5 discusses Campbell’s analysis of the imagination. For Campbell, appeals to the imagination play a most important role in belief, for one of the ways that an idea is made present to the mind in a way analogous to that of a primary sense impression is through imaginative appeal. This description of rhetorical efficacy, which I call Campbell’s “resemblance theory” of rhetoric, comes gradually to Campbell, as he reflects on classical notions of vividness from the perspective of Hume’s notions of vivacity and the lively idea. Chapter 6 considers Campbell’s analysis of the passions. Here again, Campbell deepens cassical notions of amplification (through his concept of the seven “circumstances”) and of êthos through his analysis of sympathy. Chapter 7 analyzes Book II of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—Campbell’s philosophy of language and his prescriptions on usage. Campbell responds to what he perceives as the needs of his contemporaries in Scotland by arguing for a standard of usage that would prefer national usage over local, present usage over past, and the habits of reputable authors over common use. He is delighted to find support in Quintilian for much that he recommends. Chapter 8 considers Campbell’s views on style, including his analysis of vivacity in Book III. Here again, we see Campbell building on Quintilian’s analysis but deepening the classical account by providing theoretical explanations in empiricist terms. Chapter 9 deals with Campbell’s “other work,” especially the two works that most contribute to an understanding of POR—his Dissertation on Miracles and his Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence (which is summarized in appendix 1). The concluding chapter offers

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a review of the major scholarly work on Campbell and also my own conclusions. A reader might prefer to start with the review of the literature in the conclusion. I’m grateful to anyone who reads the book in any order. My argument is, then, that the Philosophy of Rhetoric should be read as an attempt to provide a modern (eighteenth-century) theory that accounts for classical rhetoric. In Campbell’s view, moderns had nothing to contribute to rhetoric as an art (or tekhnê). The Ancients had perfected the tekhnê tradition. The eighteenth century, however, not only could provide a more complete theory of rhetoric than the Ancients had, but also could provide a better description in causal terms for why traditional advice worked. Investigations of the foundational principles underlying many of the arts and sciences during the Enlightenment put Campbell and his contemporaries (they felt) in a position to provide a superior theoretical explanation for rhetoric than the Ancients had. The theory would be a psychological theory, based on a science of human nature, and, therefore, deeper and broader than a social theory that would necessarily be specific to a particular culture. It would examine rhetoric from the perspective of reception, not as an art of composing in the manner of classical rhetoric. Explorations into the mental operations that constituted the mind’s response to stimuli that philosophers, including Locke and Hume, had carried out provided a universal theory of response that could be the basis for an explanation in causal terms of rhetorical efficacy. At the same time, such an approach to rhetoric could contribute to an understanding of the mind’s operations. Campbell intended that the empiricist account of mental operations would confirm the Ancient’s advice, and he is pleased to cite Quintilian as confirmation. But the theory he produced is more innovative than the one predicted by this approach. For one, the importance of the imagination in Hume’s psychology did more than merely explain the Ancient’s version of rhetorical efficacy; it changed it, at least in emphasis. As a result, in Campbell’s theory appeals to the imagination and the passions become more important—play a more fundamental role in belief—than Campbell anticipated or wanted to admit. Logical appeal and the enthymeme become less important, both because of the syllogism’s and enthymeme’s necessary link to culturally specific beliefs (doxa) and also because for Campbell demonstration seems artificial in the sense that it is belated (more a method of verification or illustration) in comparison to induction, which resembles the way we ordinarily come to belief by inferring general conclusions from particular experiences. What I call Campbell’s “resemblance” theory of rhetoric disdains artifice in that sense. From his reading of Hume primarily, Campbell became convinced that rhetorical discourse that listeners or readers experience as they do ordinary sense impressions is more likely to be believed. Rhetorical efficacy is then measured in terms of the degree to which the orator can present discourse that has a presence in minds of listeners that resembles the presence of a primary (nonlinguistic) sense impression. Campbell offers, then, a fresh analysis of concerns fundamental to rhetorical theory since Aristotle.

ONE

George Campbell Minister, Theologian, Professor, and Philosopher of Rhetoric

George Campbell was a minister, a theologian, and a professor of divinity, who had a scholarly interest in contemporary developments in philosophy. He was interested in rhetoric largely because he thought rhetoric could help him and his students become better preachers; he subsequently became a philosopher of rhetoric because he saw that contemporary developments in philosophy had implications for rhetoric. Jeffrey Suderman, whose dissertation “Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell (1719–1796)” is the best source we have for knowledge on Campbell’s life and career, maintains that Campbell’s current reputation as an important rhetorical theorist who happened to be a minister is exactly backwards: if Campbell is to be judged as he thought of himself and as his contemporaries saw him, he was first a divine (1–6).1 This is true. As Suderman also shows, however, as a theologian Campbell was undistinguished, his views interesting but typical of his period (1996, 392–93). By contrast, the Philosophy of Rhetoric is the most important theory of rhetoric written in Britain during the eighteenth century. While this chapter is indebted to Suderman’s work, its intentions are different from his. This chapter emphasizes Campbell’s interest in rhetoric throughout his life as a prelude to a study of the Philosophy of Rhetoric.

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

Throughout his life George Campbell’s was closely connected to the city Aberdeen, to Marischal College (currently part of the University Aberdeen), and to the Scottish Presbyterian Church, the national Church Scotland. His father, Colin Campbell, was educated for the ministry

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Marischal College and at Leiden in the Netherlands and ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, in 1703 (Suderman 1996, 14). Four years after Colin Campbell’s ordination, the Act of Union was approved by the Scottish and English Parliaments, dissolving the Scottish Parliament and creating a common Parliament that would meet in Westminister. Scotland, with a population of about one-fifth of England’s but a national revenue of only one-fortieth of England’s, hoped to prosper by the union (Mackie 1963, 206). But the decision to dissolve their national Parliament was not popular in Scotland in 1707 and is controversial to this day. Colin Campbell, however, remained loyal to the union and to Westminister (Suderman, 15)— a politics that his son George also embraced throughout his life. Colin Campbell married Margaret Walker, the daughter of a merchant and provost of Aberdeen (Suderman, 16). The couple had six children. George, born December 25, 1719, was the fifth and the second son. In 1728, when George was nine years old, Colin Campbell died. George Campbell attended Aberdeen Grammar School from 1729–1734. The school was known for its emphasis on the Classics, and the curriculum stressed Latin, including a reading of classical rhetoric and logic (Wood 1993, 59). At the age of fifteen, in 1734, George began his studies at Marischal College, in the New Town, one of two colleges in Aberdeen, the other being the older King’s College (King’s was established in 1494, Marischal in 1593), which was in Old Town. A sense of the curriculum at Marischal when Campbell entered in 1734 can be inferred from a debate surrounding an effort to standardize the curriculum at the six universities in Scotland. According to Paul B. Wood, the Marischal curriculum was similar to that proposed as a common curriculum for all Scottish universities and was probably as follows: during the first year: philology, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and arithmetic; during the second: logic and geometry; during the third: general physiology, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics; during the fourth year: metaphysics, special physiology, and astronomy. One of the changes in the proposed curriculum was a call for oratory to be taught at all universities during the second year. Faculty in both King’s and Marischal took exception to this requirement. Faculty at Marischal maintained that oratory was already a part of its curriculum, that students were taught principles of rhetoric each year (Wood, 3), probably as part of the theses that were required of students. Faculty at King’s College responded to the proposal by questioning the meaning of “oratory.” “‘If the meaning be Rhetorick, that is the office of the regent of humanity [and hence taught in first year or second year]; or if it be the declaiming of harrangues, that’s done by the students in all four classes here, in our private as well as publick schooles’” (Fasti Aberdonenses, qtd. in Wood, 3). After graduating from Marischal with an M.A. in 1738, Campbell intended to enter the legal profession and therefore became an apprentice to

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George Turnbull in Edinburgh. In preparation for his career in law, Campbell read classical rhetoric during this time. But he changed his plans and decided to become a clergyman and returned to Aberdeen to enter Marischal College to study divinity. His interest in rhetoric continued, however. Rhetoric was among the central concerns of the Theological Club, which Campbell formed with other students in 1742. Members collaborated to create a manuscript on preaching that later formed the basis for Campbell’s lectures to his divinity students on this topic (published after his death as Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence). In one of these lectures, Campbell recalled for his students his experience with the Theology Club and its interest in rhetoric: When I was myself a student of divinity in this place [Marischal College], there were about seven or eight of us fellow students, who, as we lived mostly in the town, formed ourselves into a society, the great object of which was our mutual improvement, both in the knowledge of the theory of theology, and also in whatever might be conducive to qualify us for the practical part or duties of the pastoral function. . . . Amongst other things discussed in this small society, one was, an inquiry into the nature of sermons and other discourses proper for the pulpit, the different kinds into which they might fitly be distributed, and the rules of composition that suited each. On this subject, we had several conversations. When these were over, I had the task assigned me to make out a short sketch or abstract of the whole. This, I the more readily undertook, as it had been, for some time before, a favourite study of mine, having, when qualifying myself for another business [legal profession], given some attention to the forensic oratory of the ancients, and having afterwards remarked both the analogies and differences between it and the christian eloquence. Of this abstract, every one who chose it took a copy; and as we had no object but general usefulness, every one was at liberty to communicate it to whom he pleased. I have a copy of this still in my possession, and as in the main I am at present of the same sentiments, I shall freely use it in the lectures I am to give on this subject. (1810, 212–14)

From Campbell’s reminiscence on his earlier experience, we learn that Campbell’s earliest systematic reflection on rhetoric was in the context of comparing ancient forensic rhetoric with modern “christian eloquence.” Even as he read or reread ancient rhetoric while contemplating a career in the law, he was comparing the ancient forums with the pulpit. And here when he first undertook to write on rhetoric, it is with the expressed intention of preparing for the practical duties of the ministry. Campbell’s undefensive acceptance of some of the problematic aspects of rhetoric in the Philosophy of Rhetoric (its appeal to the emotions, for example), an acceptance that is surprising given the contemporary criticisms of John Locke and others, can be explained by his sense that rhetoric was essential to faith formation and the Christian life. Campbell completed his studies in divinity at Marischal and was licensed as a preacher of the gospel in June 1746. Licensure required that Campbell

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pass a series of tests, including preparing a sermon on a prescribed text, explicating a text in Greek and Hebrew, presenting a thesis on the early church, and answering questions on Church history (Suderman, 26). Campbell “gained fame” as a preacher (Keith 1800, xi), as he waited the opportunity of a permanent position. That opportunity materialized when the position at Banchory Ternan opened. According to the Presbyterian patronage system, a minister was chosen for a parish by the parish patron. Sir Alexander Burnett, fourth baronet of Leys, the patron of Banchory Ternan, chose Campbell as the minister of the parish, and Campbell was subsequently ordained in June 1748. While at this parish, Campbell married Grace Farquharson in 1755 (Suderman, 28). He also began work on the Philosophy of Rhetoric at Banchory Ternan (Keith, xiii). After nine years at Banchory Ternan, Campbell returned to Aberdeen to take up the position of minister of the city. In 1759, Campbell was also appointed principal of Marischal College, an important administrative position that involved recruiting and disciplining students, conferring degrees, and overseeing faculty affairs.

THE ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

While serving as minister of the city and principal of Marischal, Campbell help found the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in 1758—a decision crucial to his intellectual growth. As his earlier participation in the Theology Club indicates, Campbell was attracted to collaboration. In recommending the benefits of such societies to his divinity students, Campbell remarked: “I can assure you from my own experience, that when there is a proper choice of persons, an entire confidence in one another, and a real disposition to be mutually useful, it is one of the most powerful means of improvement that I know” (Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence 1810, 213). The six original members included: Thomas Reid, John Stewart, Robert Traill, David Skene, John Gregory, as well as Campbell—a mix of philosophers, physicians, and divines. The nine elected members were John Farquhar, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Gordon, John Ross, James Beattie, Gregory Skene, William Ogilvie, James Dunbar, William Trail. This is an impressive cast. Today we recognize the work of these men— most notably Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into Human Mind (1764), Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1780), James Beattie’s An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1777), John Gregory’s A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (1765), James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780), and George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, all of which grew out of papers read to the Society—as constituting the Northern branch of the Scottish Enlightenment (Ulman, Minutes, 1990, 12).

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The questions the Society entertained at its twice-monthly meetings reflected the several pursuits of its members, who were professionally interested in natural science and medicine, as well as philosophy, theology, and language. Campbell, who had wide-ranging interests himself, seemed to use the Society to reflect on the “philosophy of mind” in its relationship both to rhetoric and to theology. The Society provided good company for Campbell’s psychological reflections (as well as his reflections on rhetoric—the subject of the next chapter). Thomas Reid and Alexander Gerard (among others) were philosophically minded divines. 2 Campbell’s theological explorations were often motivated by an attempt to make the new psychology and the new natural philosophy safe for Christians— to show that there need be no contradiction between the new science and the ancient religion. In Suderman’s cautious terms, Campbell’s positions in theological matters “bore a striking resemblance to the apologetic works of those English divines known as Latitudinarians” (1996, 111). In theological matters, Latitudinarians identified a relatively few doctrines as binding and urged toleration of diverse views on a larger number of controversial issues. Typically, Latitudinarians would acknowledge the difficulties inherent in biblical hermeneutics. Recognizing that interpretations of many biblical passages could vary and that moving from biblical interpretation to recommended practice was even more problematic, Latitudinarians tried to limit doctrinaire positions to what they regarded as the most important questions. On disputed matters, they recommended weighing the evidence and distinguishing degrees of certainty. They affirmed that a standard of probability was often the highest achievable and sufficient in any case. On these disputed, nonessential questions and practices, they advocated tolerance. In matters of Church governance, Latitudinarians taught that the contemporary church was not bound by the structure of the early church, that contemporary churches could have titles and structures appropriate to modern conditions (Reventlow 1985, 230–45). Campbell shared some of these views and brought the Latitudinarian moderate temper to bear on theological questions; throughout his life, he expressed impatience with doctrinal debates. But Campbell never identified himself as a Latitudinarian and, indeed, in one sermon, specifically dissociates himself from “our freethinkers, our speculative and philosophical latitudinarians,” who are too dismissive of the “principles” and “rites of religion” and have, therefore, a pernicious effect on public morals, and are “real enemies to their country,” as well as to Christianity (“The Happy Influence of Religion on Civil Society” 1797, 111–12). The philosopher whose influence was greatest on Campbell and other members of the Society was not a member—or at least was not officially so. By 1758, David Hume was the most famous and most notorious thinker in Great Britain, and his philosophy directly threatened the reconciliation of Enlightenment ideas and religious orthodoxy that some in the Society were intent on developing. But for the Aberdeenians, Hume was not only a threat,

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he was a brilliant fellow Scotsman, and they were equally drawn to and repelled by his work. Rarely in intellectual history has resistance to a philosopher’s ideas been the stimulus of so much work of such a high quality as that which the membership of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society produced in response to Hume. Indeed, Hume should be thought of as a member in absentia of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. This possibility is captured in a note that Thomas Reid, in Aberdeen, sent to Hume, in Edinburgh: Your friendly adversaries Drs Campbell and Gerard, as well as Dr. Gregory, return their compliments to you respectfully. A little philosophical society here, of which all three are members, is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable than that of St. Athanasius; and since we cannot have you upon the bench, you are brought oftener than any other man to the bar, accused and defended with great zeal, but without bitterness. If you write no more in morals, politics, or metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects. (Ulman, Minutes, 56–57)

The first fruit of Campbell’s encounter with Hume was the Dissertation on Miracles, the work for which Campbell was most remembered during his lifetime. Campbell’s work, first delivered as a sermon in 1760 and then published in a revised form in 1762, is a somewhat belated response to Hume’s essay “On Miracles,” which was published as section 10 in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748. Hume advanced the view that no matter how seemingly reliable testimony to a miracle is, no matter how consistent the accounts of witnesses are, no matter how coherent a witness’s report, it is almost always more reasonable to believe that a witness is deceived or deceiving than to believe that a uniform law of nature had been violated. In his Dissertation on Miracles, which is discussed in chapter 9 of this study, Campbell presents a significant philosophical challenge to Hume’s case. According to R. M. Burns, Campbell’s Dissertation was the “most highly regarded of contemporary refutations” (1981, 148), almost certainly because Campbell raised the issue to a general philosophical issue—the epistemological question of the validity testimony. The Monthly Review commended Campbell for “treating his subject in a more regular and methodical manner than those who had gone before him” (Monthly Review, 499). Campbell’s Dissertation on Miracles was republished many times and enjoyed a considerable reputation on the continent, as well in Britain. As Suderman notes, after the publication of the Dissertation on Miracles, Campbell’s “reputation as a writer and Christian apologist was firmly established” (1996, 46). Throughout his life, Campbell’s name was associated more with this work than it was with any of his other, and Campbell was known primarily as a divine who had successfully met the challenge to faith mounted by the esteemed and notorious David Hume.

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PUBLICATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC

Between the first meetings of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in 1758 and Campbell’s appointment as Professor of Divinity at Marischal in 1772, Campbell presented eighteen discourses to the Society, at least fourteen of which were on eloquence.3 By 1775, Campbell had shaped and, probably, supplemented these discourses to create the “series of Essays closely connected with one another” that constitute the Philosophy of Rhetoric. He enlisted William Rose, who had reviewed the Dissertation on Miracles positively for the Monthly Review, to serve as his representative with the prestigious printing house of William Strahan (Suderman 1996, 56). From Adam Smith, Strahan received this assessment of POR: “There is good sense, and learning, and philosophy in Campbell’s Book. But it is so unfashioned that I am afraid you will not be a great gainer by it” (Smith, qtd. in Suderman, 57). William Enfield, whose review of POR in the Monthly Review extends over two issues and eighteen pages, acknowledged the philosophical character of Campbell’s approach. According to H. Lewis Ulman (in an essay that reviews the reviews of POR) most reviewers acknowledged the significance of Campbell’s modern approach—to identify the philosophical foundations of the ancient art. But for the most part the reviewers do not single out those features of Campbell’s theory that are of interest to us: they neither probe its basis in empiricism, nor comment on the way Campbell’s work synthesizes modern and ancient perspectives. Rather, the reviews focus on Book II, which is largely concerned with questions of language (Ulman, “Discerning Readers,” 82–84). For example, at the outset of his review, Enfield notes that Campbell’s attention to questions of usage and grammar mark one of his contributions: “His plan is much more extensive than the title he has chosen seems to promise, and leads him to the philosophical investigation, not merely of the principles of rhetoric in the usual acceptation of the term, but of good writing in general” (Monthly Review, 287). Enfield devotes most of Part II of his review to a consideration of Book II, in which Campbell considers what we today would refer to as questions of usage, an emphasis that Ulman notes is characteristic of reviewers. Also many of the reviewers, including Enfield, regard the Philosophy of Rhetoric as a work in progress and look forward to a subsequent volume that will complete the examination of the stylistic virtues (elegance, animation, and music, as well as vivacity and perspicuity) that Campbell mentions but does not analyze. But, though the reviewers pay proportionately less attention to those parts of Book I that have been of interest to us, the reviews are quite positive, praising Campbell as an “astute critic and a careful, insightful, and essentially modern philosopher . . .” (Ulman 1990, 89). A review, never written, is the one we most wish we had—that of David Hume, who was reading the recently published book of one of his “friendly adversaries,” while on his death bed. James Boswell describes the scene:

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George Campbell On Sunday forenoon the 7 of July 1776, being too late for church, I went to see Mr. David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just adying. I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. . . . He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. He had before him Dr. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end. (Boswell 1970, 11)

Would that we could know what Hume’s response was to the only rhetorical theory that attempted to meld Hume’s rhetoric-friendly epistemology with the classical tradition! PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY

Campbell became a professor of divinity at Marischal in 1770, after Alexander Gerard left the position to assume the more prestigious professorship in divinity at King’s College. As Professor of Divinity, Campbell gave lectures that were intended to prepare students for the ministry—to meet both the intellectual and practical demands of the profession. To prepare them intellectually, Campbell lectured on church history in the twenty-eight lectures published as Lectures on Ecclesiastical History and on interpreting the Bible in the ten lectures of Lectures on Systematic Theology. To prepare his students for their ministerial duties, Campbell lectured on the pastoral character (nine lectures) and on preaching, published as twelve lectures in Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence. Campbell offered his lectures on a four-year rotation so that students attended sixteen lectures a year (some were repeated as introductions to the study of divinity), which enabled each class to hear all the lectures in a four-year matriculation (Suderman 1996, 99). These lectures are discussed in Chapter 9. Campbell’s last years saw the publication of what he regarded as the great enterprise of his life—his translations of the four Gospels. Campbell began this work while a minister at Banchory Ternan in the late 1740s and 1750s and worked on it intermittently until it was published in 1789. The work, which is far more than a translation, is in two volumes, totaling fifteen hundred pages. It is impressive in its erudition, as Campbell draws on his knowledge, not only of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but also on French, Italian, and German. In the course of the twelve “dissertations” that constitute Book I, Campbell identifies the challenges that face the translator of ancient texts, illustrates these with numerous examples, and offers his resolution to philological and hermeneutic problems. For example, he discusses how cultural context affects meaning, the difficulty translating moral and spiritual concepts, and the resultant confusion in current translations of key words, such as “kingdom of God,” “Good News,” “Messiah,” “devil,” and “hell.” He also

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offers his criticism of a number of existing translations. His translation, with fulsome notes, comprises the second volume. The reception of the Four Gospels must have disappointed Campbell. Although Campbell’s scholarship was praised, the translation itself was not. Here is the judgment of the sympathetic writer in the Monthly Review: That, in some parts, his version is more correct than that which is read in our churches, must be acknowledged without hesitation; and we are happy to observe that his notes are marked by the same diligence of research, the same candid statement of contrary opinions, and the same manly but modest defence of his own sentiments, which we saw and admired in the Dissertations [of volume I]. We are compelled, however, to add, that the instances of partial improvement of the old version [of the Gospels] are comparatively few; that its simplicity and its energy have been frequently injured without any change, or at least any material change of sense. Colloquial and even vulgar expressions are sometimes substituted for others less dignified yet sufficiently plain; while, on the other hand, many passages are obscured by words derived from the Latin, and unintelligible to a great part of a common congregation: nor can we suppress our opinion that, to readers of learning and taste, the general effect of this translation will appear very inferior to that of our common version. (1790, 411–12)

Campbell died on April 6, 1796, about a year after his retirement from Marischal. He lies in St. Nicolas churchyard in a grave located south and west of the church, towards the Union Street entrance, near the tomb of a James Chalmers. But, the inscription on his grave is not legible (Suderman 1996, 90; note 32). Campbell was eulogized by his successor as Principal at Marischal, William Laurence Brown. For Brown (as also for most of Campbell’s contemporaries), Campbell’s most significant achievement was his Dissertation on Miracles: “At an early period, he entered the lists as a champion for christianity (sic) against one of its acutest opponents. He not only triumphantly refuted his arguments, but even conciliated his respect by the handsome and dexterous manner in which his defence was conducted. While he refuted the infidel, he spared the man, and exhibited the uncommon spectacle of a polemical writer possessing all the moderation of a christian” (1796, 23). Brown also singles out Campbell’s translation of the Gospels (with a eulogist’s charity) as the “fruit of copious erudition, unwearied application, and of clear and comprehensive judgment” (23–24). The only reference to the Philosophy of Rhetoric specifically must be inferred from Brown’s praise of Campbell’s contribution to “philosophy and the fine arts” and of Campbell as a man in whom the “polite scholar was eminently joined with the deep and liberal divine” (24). Finally, we need concede nothing to the conventional exaggeration expected in panegyric to accede to Brown’s judgment that, of George Campbell, “To be useful to mankind appears to have been the ruling passion of his mind” (25).

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TWO

Intellectual Milieu Foundations and Influences

There is some debate among historians over when they should date the beginning and the end of the Scottish Enlightenment. There is even more debate about its causes—how indigenous they were or how much the result of greater contact with France and England. But there is no arguing that by the last quarter of the eighteenth century some remarkable Scots had made Scotland “the teachers of Europe.”1 There were many stars in this Scottish galaxy, and if some shone longer than others, all shone in their day. David Hume, arguably Britain’s greatest philosopher, and Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, changed the world. Francis Hutcheson, known as the originator of “Scottish philosophy” and the teacher of Hume and Smith, can make a good claim to setting the intellectual currents in motion. Adam Ferguson, the founder of modern sociology, William Robertson, the founder of historiography, and John Millar, whose analysis of the relationship between law and social change was groundbreaking, have also made lasting contributions to the analysis of societal development (Daiches 1986, 1). Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Hugh Blair were lesser stars in a Edinburgh galaxy that included Hume and Smith. Thomas Reid, Alexander Gerard, James Beattie, and George Campbell comprised the most distinguished of an impressive northern group in Aberdeen. As heirs to the work of Sir Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, Scottish intellectuals had confidence that they were part of a generation that would make great progress in applying a scientific method to the human sciences. At least in Britain, Francis Bacon was the first proponent of the scientific method. In the Novum Organum, Bacon maintained that a sound method was the most important requirement for progress in the sciences—more important even than genius. Newton, of course, was the great inspiration of the age. He proved that humans could discover and express axiomatically the

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laws of nature, leaving the way open for his Scottish successors to discover, with the right method, the laws governing human behavior and the change in human institutions—or, for that matter, the laws governing psychology and rhetoric. And in the Essay on Human Understanding, John Locke had begun to identify the foundations on which to build the disciplines of psychology, epistemology, and rhetoric. As equal heirs to this renaissance in learning, the Scots felt with others the excitement and opportunity to rethink all the disciplines and to establish them on firmer, more scientific foundations. In so far as these Scottish intellectuals shared a common perspective, they did so in large part because of social habits that brought them together for lively discussion of what progress in learning means and on what grounds it might be achieved. The principal sites for these discussions were the numerous clubs founded in the eighteenth century in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Clubs had bylaws, held regular meetings at which members presented papers, and, since they typically met in a tavern or restaurant, attended to the body and the spirit, as well as the mind. Some of the clubs were more dedicated to developing the spirit and body more than the mind. At least according to the bylaws, what members of the Boar Club had in common was their willingness to meet in what they agreed to call a sty and to grunt. And members of the Pious Club shared a common passion for pies (Daiches 1986, 37–38). As for the Dirty Club (Daiches, 38) and the Grotesque Club (McElroy 1969, 21), it may be better not to ask. But most clubs had a more serious purpose, were, earnestly, dedicated to “improvement,” which in this context generally meant increasing progress in a particular field by applying the spirit of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. Increased crop yields through the application of the scientific method concerned the agricultural clubs and progress in treating disease inspired clubs comprised of physicians. Many clubs were less specialized. Members were from a wide range of disciplines, and meetings addressed a range of concerns—philosophy, language, agriculture, and medicine, for example—sharing in common only the commitment of improvement through the application of science (McElroy, 9). Certainly, the most important club in Aberdeen was the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen, known also as the Wise Club, founded in 1758. George Campbell was among the six original members that also included Thomas Reid, John Stewart, Robert Traill, David Skene, and John Gregory. Campbell was one of the most active members, delivering eighteen discourses (at least fourteen on rhetoric) between 1758 and 1771 and attending the twice-monthly meetings regularly (Ulman, Minutes, 25–26). Campbell’s participation in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was the most profound influence on his intellectual development because the Society put him in contact with scholars working to create a “science of the mind” by building on the work of Bacon, Locke and David Hume.2 The founding purpose of the Wise Club as set forth in its bylaws suggests the interests of its members and the intellectual climate that influenced them.

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The Subject of the Discourses and Questions shall be Philosophical, all Grammatical [sic] Historical and Philological Discussions being conceived to be forreign to the Design of this Society. And Philosophical Matters are understood to comprehend, Every Principle of Science which may be deduced by Just and Lawfull Induction from the Phenomena either of the human Mind or of the material World; All obser[v]ations & Experiments that may furnish Materials for such Induction; The Examination of False Schemes of Philosophy & false Methods of Philosophizing; The subserviency of Philosophy to Arts, the Principles they borrow from it and the Means of carrying them to their Perfection. If any Dispute should arise whether a Subject of a Discourse or a Question proposed falls within the Meaning and Intendment of this Article it shall be determined by a Majority of the Members present. (Ulman, Minutes, 78)

The statement invokes Novum Organum and, indirectly, Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum (in its shorter English form, The Advancement of Learning). In the Novum Organum, Bacon set forth his “new organon” or method which he expected would supersede the old Aristotelian organon—Aristotle’s methodological tools of logic. Bacon’s goal was to reform scientific method so that true descriptions of nature could be arrived at, and he repeatedly argued that “works” (the experiments of the experimental method) should replace “words” (Aristotelian syllogizing) as the basis of method. The statement’s call for “Just and Lawful Induction” also expresses this preference for Baconian experimentalism over Aristotelian demonstration. In seeming to exclude grammatical, historical, and philological concerns, the statement means to legislate an approach to a subject, not to exclude the study of language or history: Campbell’s presentations before the Society obviously were concerned with language, as were some of the other presentations (by John Farquhar, for instance). The intention of the seeming prohibition is not to limit the subjects but promote a method; indeed, the statement is probably expansionary—to include any topic that can be treated “philosophically,” that is, consistently with the Baconian and Newtonian effort to discover and then work from basic laws of nature, including investigations not only of phenomena from the material world but also introspections concerning the human mind. As we shall see in the next chapter, Campbell’s expressed purpose is to produce a “philosophy” of rhetoric that shares the reciprocal relationship with the science of the human mind expressed in the statement’s call for both a subservience of philosophy or theory to the arts or to practice and an art that borrows principles from that theory. The statement’s insistence that science should rest on a philosophy either of “the human Mind or the material World” signals what was perhaps the members’ central focus—to develop a philosophy of mind, which would become the basis for the development of the human sciences (Ulman, 57). As the next chapter will show, consistent with this statement, Campbell maintains

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that a theory of rhetoric should be based on the science of the mind. Campbell’s application of the science of mind to the development of a theory of rhetoric was probably also inspired by Bacon. In De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bacon organizes all spheres of human learning around the mental faculties. He considers, for example, work done in history under Memory, the state and contribution of poetry under Imagination, progress in philosophy, theology, biology, psychology, and political science under Reason. Bacon placed rhetoric as an intellectual art of tradition or communication under the science of the mind within reason, thus linking rhetoric directly with psychology. Moreover, his famous definition of rhetoric underscores its relationship to the science of the mind generally and to the faculties particularly. “Rhetoric is subservient to the imagination, as Logic is to the understanding; and the duty and office of Rhetoric . . . is no other than to apply and recommend the dictates of reason to imagination, in order to excite the appetite and will” (IX, 131). Bacon’s specific analysis of rhetoric within De Augmentis would have suggested to Campbell that a theory of rhetoric could be organized on a psychological model and that psychology could benefit from rhetoric, which is concerned in Bacon and traditionally with the effect of language on belief. In developing his theory of rhetoric, Campbell does not, however, proceed according to a Baconian inductive program, that is, by forming hypotheses through the examination of specific examples of how the mind responds to discourse. Instead, Campbell embraces philosophical empiricism—the empiricism that John Locke, “this great man” (POR 262), set forth in the Essay on Human Understanding. Locke’s empiricism is the heir to Bacon’s experimentalism but the motives of their philosophies differ. Bacon aimed to improve the procedures of science, and he advocated systematic experimentation as a way to discipline the formation of hypotheses. As did Bacon, Locke begins his Essay on Human Understanding seemingly claiming to make contributions to method and to epistemology. The goal of the Essay is to determine the limits of what the human mind can know. Again as Bacon did in identifying his idols of the mind, Locke begins by “clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge” (“Epistle to the Reader” I: 14). This clearing is preparatory to inquiring into the origin, “certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent” (Locke’s “Introduction” I: 26). To this point, Locke’s program would appear to be epistemological—an inquiry into the grounds of knowledge and the basis for its validity. But Locke approaches the question of knowledge, not by way of defining validity, as Aristotle’s old organon did, nor by defining proper method, as Bacon’s new organon did. Rather, Locke begins by describing the mind’s operations—how the mind forms ideas from sense data. The point is this: though Locke begins with the purpose of providing a normative epistemology, he, in fact, offers a descriptive psychology.3 From where do all

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our thoughts originate, Locke asks? “To this I answer in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself ” (Essay, Bk. II. i: par. 3). This sentence presents the challenge that Locke poses to himself in the Essay: he will dare to show the reader how the most complex of human thoughts could originate in a simple sense impression. The Essay has the feel of an intellectual game: no matter how abstract the idea, Locke will show the reader how it originates in experience. Such a goal requires detailed discussion of the mental machinery by which we come to belief. Locke’s description of mental operations begins with his division of ideas into simple ideas of sensation and reflection and complex ideas, which combine simple ideas. This taxonomy of ideas is based, in part, on the different speed of the mental operations (whether the mind forms the idea instantaneously or deliberately) and the degree of the mind’s awareness of its operations (whether voluntarily or involuntarily). The specific distinctions and terminology Locke uses are not important to us, since in the sixty years between the publication of the Essay and Campbell’s sustained reflection on empiricism in the meetings of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, the terms were constantly changing in the work inspired by Locke’s Essay. But the fact that ideas are distinguished by their phenomenological qualities—by the way the mind processes them (instantaneously or deliberately; involuntarily or consciously)—has implications for a theory of rhetoric that would, as Campbell’s, derive rhetorical principles from a science of the mind. David Hume, the most prominent member in absentia of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, built on Locke’s account of mental operations in the Essay on Human Understanding. Hume basically accepts Lockean mechanics of mental operations but he draws very different implications from this analysis—far more skeptical implications. This skepticism was seen as a challenge by Campbell and his colleagues of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, who became Hume’s most dedicated and most critical readers in Britain. Campbell and his colleagues poured over Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature and his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding with fascination and fear.4 Campbell and some others in the Society wanted to accept the basic approach to mental operations that Locke-Hume took but to reject Hume’s skeptical conclusions as a threat to the progress of knowledge and the preservation of faith. In the tradition of Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, Hume stakes out a foundationalist program in the Treatise of Human Nature. All the sciences and arts, he writes, “are in some measure dependent on the science of Man” (Treatise of Human Nature, introduction, 42). Given this dependence, it is possible to predict great progress in learning if we “were thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of the human understanding, and cou’d (sic) explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings” (42). Locke has taught us that the contents of the mind may be

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traced to experience. But how does our mind form those beliefs that it regards as knowledge from experience? The investigator needs to approach this task of creating a science of human nature as Newton approached the task of identifying nature’s laws in his physics. Indeed, Hume casts himself as the Newton of the science of the mind, who would identify the “laws and forces” that influence mental operations. But may we not hope, that philosophy, cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations? Astronomers had long contented themselves with proving, from the phaenomena, the true motions, order, and magnitude of the heavenly bodies: till a philosopher [Newton], at last, arose, who seems, from the happiest reasoning, to have also determined the laws and forces, by which the revolutions of the planets are governed and directed. . . . And there is no reason to despair of equal success in our enquiries concerning the mental powers and economy, if prosecuted with equal capacity and caution. (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. 1: 17)

Hume offers a descriptive psychology in the tradition of Locke, but the importance of the phenomenological quality of stimuli—the way the mind experiences them—is even greater in his description than in Locke’s. According to Hume, the mind is constituted of two types of perceptions: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the result of primary experience. Ideas are faint copies of impressions. They are the product of memory when we recall an absent impression or imagination when we construct an idea based on impressions. As faint copies, ideas do not carry the force of impressions: All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only, those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion. (Treatise I. i. i: 49)

It is not only that impressions have a greater impact on the understanding than ideas, but that belief depends on impact. According to Hume, we believe those ideas that we experience as impressions, including not only sensations but passions and emotions, or ideas presented in such a way that they resemble impressions. Thus, the difference between belief or non-belief rests on

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how we experience something, not on some test of logic: “Wherein consists the difference betwixt incredulity and belief?” Hume asks (I. iii. vii. 143). It is evident, Hume goes on to state, “that belief consists not in the nature and order of our ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind . . . (I. iii. vii. 146). To describe ideas that resemble sense impressions, Hume employs terms most familiar to rhetoricians. Ideas that resemble impressions are “lively,” are more “vivid”: Belief “is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady, conception of an object [or relationship], than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. . . . [I]t is evident that belief consists not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind” (Enquiry V. ii: 48–49).5 This is surely a most rhetoricfriendly account of belief, for making ideas vivid and lively is traditionally one of rhetoric’s offices. Hume is aware of rhetoric’s legitimate claims: Nothing is more capable of infusing any passion into the mind [and a passion is an impression for Hume], than eloquence, by which the objects are represented in their strongest and most lively colours. We may of ourselves acknowledge, that such an object is valuable, and such another odious; but ‘till the orator excites the imagination, and gives force to these ideas, they may have but a feeble influence either on the will or the affections. (Treatise II. vi: 473)

As the Newton of mental operations, Hume also would need to explain not only how an idea derives its influence, but also how complex ideas are formed. How do we come to believe that one thing causes another? Hume’s theory of how the mind forms ideas is a theory of the imagination. Ideas are combined by the imagination, and while the imagination is free to combine ideas willy-nilly, it generally follows three “principles of association”: “As all simple ideas,” Hume writes, “may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render, it in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places” (Treatise I. i. iv: 58). The “uniting principle” that guides the imagination functions not coercively but as a “gentle force”; that is, the imagination functions not in necessary ways but in ways that are generally predictable. The imagination tends to associate ideas on one or a combination of these three principles: Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause and Effect (Treatise I. iv. iv: 58); that is, the imagination associates ideas that resemble each other, are near to each other temporally or proximately, and that follow one another in an apparent relationship of cause and effect. Hume’s principle of the association of ideas has implications for a theory of rhetoric derived from the science of the mind. It would, for example, have implications for a theory of arrangement: the orator might order ideas to conform to

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the way mind “naturally” processes them. Useful as it may be to the theoretician of rhetoric, the principles of association do not seem particularly radical, but in fact the implications are. Hume maintains that our knowledge or belief of all relationships rests on these principles—are the product of the imagination, a faculty that combines ideas according to its own laws or none. Even the relationship between cause and effect—and establishing causes is at the heart of science—are known, at least initially, through the imagination that infers from a seemingly constant conjunction a causal relationship: I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition that admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation [cause/effect] is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori but arises entirely from experience, when we find that particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water, that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. (Enquiry, sect. VI. i: 30)

On the empiricist account, Adam’s descendants have come to understand cause through a seeming constant conjunction between two events—that is, through experience, through custom, habit—from which, by the association of ideas, a causal relationship is inferred. Custom, habit, imagination: these are the bane of philosophy, but they are the very basis of rhetorical knowledge. Hume also posits the association of the passions as a parallel to the association of ideas. The passions are impressions and Hume maintains that impressions too associate with each other in ways that are subject to analysis, as are the forces that regulate the natural world: The second property I shall observe in the human mind is a like association of impressions. All resembling impressions are connected together, and no sooner one arises than the rest immediately follow. Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be compleated. In like manner our temper when elevated with joy naturally throws itself into love, generosity, pity, courage and pride and the other resembling affections. ‘Tis difficult for the mind, when actuated by any passion, to confine itself to that passion alone, without any change or variation. Human nature is too inconstant to admit of any regularity. Changeableness is essential to it. And to what can it so naturally change as to affections or emotions, which are suitable to the temper, and agree with that set of passions, which then prevail? ‘Tis evident then, there is an attraction or association among impressions, as well as among ideas; tho’ with this remarkable difference, that ideas are associated by resemblance, contiguity, and causation; impressions only by resemblance.

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In the third place, ‘tis observable of these two kinds of association, that they very much assist and forward each other, and that the transition is more easily made where they both concur in the same object. (Treatise II. i. iv: 335)

For orators, knowing the sequence of related emotions could guide rhetorical choice in their efforts to build up or moderate the vectors of emotional response. Finally, Hume has a theory of the communication of emotion from one person (a speaker, for example) to others (an audience, for example). Emotions are transferred through sympathy, as one person comes to identify with the response of another: “No quality of human nature is more remarkable . . . than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from . . . our own,” Hume writes (Treatise II. i. xi: 367). At first, we experience what another person feels as an idea—and therefore faintly. But as we increasingly identify with the other through sympathy that idea becomes emotionally freighted. A passion is an impression for Hume, so that sympathy is a vehicle for converting an idea into an impression: “When any affection is infus’d by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection” (II. i. xi: 367–68). Note that the emotions are first known through the “external signs in the countenance and conversation.” Thus, implicit in Hume’s analysis is an explanation for the transfer of emotion from speaker to listener through a speaker’s person and action. Moreover, the passions play a central role in Hume’s psychology. They are the basis for all motivation. For Hume, the prospect of pleasure or pain creates an emotional response that determines preference and ultimately values. Reason plays only the limited role of judging the means to the ends that the passions choose; reason cannot, according to Hume, even retard a passion, which is subject to restraint only by another passion: “We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Treatise II. iii. iii. 462). We cannot determine a hierarchy of values through reason: “‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” (Treatise II. iii. 463). With imagination playing the crucial role in inferring from experience and therefore in shaping belief and with the passions as the basis for desire and value choice, reason is dramatically dethroned in Hume’s psychology. From one perspective, this radical reevaluation of reason would not shock Campbell: after all, he would have placed Revelation above reason as the basis for value, and faith above reason as the arbiter of beliefs. But within the Judeo-Christian and

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classical synthesis that Campbell accepted, reason, Revelation, and faith could not only be reconciled, but ideally were consonant one with the other. Hume made reason irrelevant and, of course, was even more dismissive of Revelation—as his critique of belief in the miracles made clear. Attractive as Hume’s analysis was to Campbell, the rhetorician, the implications were disturbing to Campbell, the Divine. It was this attraction and repulsion to Hume’s work that made it the focus of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, especially of the most philosophical thinker among the members, Thomas Reid. Campbell ultimately accepts much of Reid’s critique. Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) is an attempt to counter the implications of Hume’s system. At the outset of the Inquiry, Reid reflects on the way Hume had exposed the skeptical direction of seventeenth-century philosophy: Des Cartes no sooner began to dig in this mine, than skepticism was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to shut it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the difficulty of keeping out this enemy still to increase; but they laboured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on the work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an expedient: by giving up the material world, which he thought might be spared without loss, and even with advantage, he hoped, by an impregnable partition, to secure the world of spirits. But, alas! the Treatise of Human Nature wantonly sapped the foundation of this partition, and drowned all in one universal deluge [of skepticism]. (Inquiry 1970, 18)

Reid saw Hume’s Treatise as historians of philosophy have come to present it: as a work that rigorously and coherently traced the implications of Lockean empiricism to inevitable skeptical conclusions. On Locke’s description of our mental operations in the Essay, the mind forms ideas based on sense impressions; these ideas and the mind’s reflections on them constitute the contents of the mind; the mind has no direct contact with reality.6 This epistemology does not lead to skeptical conclusions in the Essay on Human Understanding because, according to Locke, an idea based on sense impressions “has all the conformity it can have, or ought to have” to the objects themselves. This “conformity between our simple ideas and the existence of things, is sufficient for real knowledge” (Essay IV. iv: 230). But this conclusion seems more grounded in Locke’s optimistic temper than anything that Locke demonstrates in the Essay. When Hume exposed the shaky foundations of knowledge claims that rest on Lockean empiricism, Reid, who had earlier accepted Locke’s account, became alarmed: “I thought it unreasonable upon the authority of philosophy to admit an hypothesis which in my opinion overturns all philosophy, all religion, all intuition, all commonsense” (qtd. in Fraser 1898, 63). In his Inquiry, Reid offers his version of a philosophy of mind, a view that transforms Locke’s “theory of ideas” and contests Hume’s skepticism. Reid

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maintains that the mind does have direct contact with sense data, and he offers an account of cognition to support his claim. Locke’s analysis separates our ideas of sensation from our idea that the object of the sensation exists. On Locke’s description, the mind first has an idea of dog given through the senses; then the mind separately and belatedly (even if also virtually instantaneously) affirms the reality of the idea. Reid maintains that the sensation itself carries with it the notion of existence: we see and believe or, rather, know, at once—know, not simply that something prompted the sensation, which Locke grants, but that the something is what our sensations present. Reid writes as follows: We have shown, on the contrary, that every operation of the senses, in its very nature, implies judgment or belief, as well as simple apprehension. Thus, when I feel the pain of the gout in my toe, I have not only a notion of pain, but a belief of its existence, and a belief of some disorder in my toe which occasions it; and this belief is not produced by comparing ideas, and perceiving their agreements and disagreements; it is included in the very nature of the sensation. . . . Such original and natural judgments are therefore a part of that furniture which nature hath given to the human understanding. They are the inspiration of the Almighty no less than our notions of simple apprehensions. (Inquiry, 268)

For Reid, it is an empirical fact that experiencing and judging are one, and this fact is the basis for the first principle of the cognitive process as he understands it, the first principle of what Reid calls “common sense”: that the senses give the mind access to reality, not to an idea of reality. As a first principle, this axiom is unprovable but as self-evident as a mathematical equation: I conclude further, that it is no less a part of the human constitution, to believe the present existence of our sensations, and to believe the past existence of what we remember, than it is to believe that twice two make four. The evidence of sense, the evidence of memory, and the evidence of the necessary relations of things, are all distinct and original kinds of evidence, equally grounded on our constitution: none of them depends upon, or can be resolved into another. To reason against any of these kinds of evidence, is absurd; nay to reason for them, is absurd. They are first principles; and such fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense. (Inquiry, 30)

On this description, the reliability of our senses is self-evident: we never doubted that our senses were reliable; our belief in them is prior to our being taught (“original”); belief in them is grounded in our humanness, our “constitution.” Reid maintains that these criteria meet the traditional logician’s test of self-evidence—not necessarily that to doubt them is a contradiction in terms but that to doubt them is absurd (1970, 32), is, in fact, madness (40).

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That our senses provide us with a reliable knowledge of reality; that the thoughts and feelings of which we are conscious are our thoughts; that what we remember happened; that we have a degree of freedom of will; that the laws of nature are uniform over time and place: these propositions that, Reid claims, seem to be a part of the framework by which humans think and reason and that no one except a philosopher ever doubted are “the common sense of mankind.”7 Campbell accepts Reid’s ontology and Hume’s psychology. For Campbell at least some of Reid’s common sense principles must be accepted as such.8 They are essential to orators’ establishing the truth of what they communicate. But he also would accept Hume’s empiricist psychology. For example, from Campbell’s viewpoint, an orator might argue that we would know that a river on a flood plain will overflow its banks by Reid’s “common sense” principle of the uniformity of nature’s laws, not merely believe it because the imagination has imputed causality to a temporal sequence. But Hume’s erroneous, skeptical analysis would not invalidate the application of Hume’s psychology to rhetoric. The orator could heighten that belief of occurrence of a flood through a vivid presentation and persuade an audience of a causal relationship by citing past instances in which flood followed rain. Hume’s psychological principles would hold as warrant and explanation for rhetoric, even if Reid is correct on the ultimately more important question of the ground of our knowledge. The orator tests the truth by Reid and can persuade by Hume. This is Campbell’s view. The Enlightenment’s analysis of mental operations was not exhausted by the work of Locke, Hume, and Reid. Their work offered an account of the relationship of ideas to the sensory world, the formation of complex ideas, and the influence phenomenological qualities of an idea have on belief. The period’s concerns with mental operations also included analysis of the nature of response. In processing ideas—whatever their origin or truth—we are also more or less aware of the mind at work. Readers working through a chain of syllogisms to secure belief are very conscious of their mental process; readers absorbed in a novel might also be coming to a belief but are likely to be much less aware that they are reaching conclusions. Does the speed, the degree of volition and awareness by which we process ideas influence belief? This question has implications for a theory of rhetorical efficacy based on a psychology. The concern with the nature of reception has its origin in French aesthetic theory of the late seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Among the influential French theorist is Jean-Baptiste Dubos, whom Campbell cites at several points in POR. In Dubos, we can see the movement of aesthetic theory away from a focus on the artifact itself to a reflection on the reader’s response to the work—a shift in perspective that changed the understanding of mimesis. In the work of neoclassical critics such as Nicolas Boileau, the test of whether an art work or poem imitated nature was whether it met criteria of

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universality and reason: for example, did the work reflect what was permanent about human character? But for Dubos, the focus of critical theory shifts from the work itself to an analysis of response. Unconscious and immediate response was thought of as “natural,” because it was seemingly less influenced by a conscious judgment shaped by education and because it imitated the way we respond to ordinary (non-artistic) sense impressions. Nature continued to mean “universal,” but it was now associated with the nature of universal, human response, not the nature of external reality (Cassirer 1955, 275–330). In an important book, The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents, Barbara Warnick has traced the influence of French aesthetic theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth century on belletristic rhetoric. Warnick points out that Campbell cites fifteen French theorists in the Philosophy of Rhetoric. Certainly, the influence of Dubos is direct and significant in Campbell’s chapter on tragic response. Moreover, the indirect influence of the French theory through Hume and others is even more significant. But although Campbell shared with belletristic theory an interest in the nature of response, he showed no interest in developing the receptive competence (taste) of students, which followed with the new attention to reception. Campbell’s interest in rhetoric was generally within the context of oratory, not criticism: he was first attracted to rhetoric as an art useful to lawyers and ministers. His sole concern with criticism is limited to questions of appropriateness and usage, not as a critic of literature or the other arts. He is, therefore, a peripheral figure to the tradition that Warnick traces. Nevertheless, for Campbell a theory of rhetoric is a theory of reception, and he would bring to his reading of these “response” critics his interests in providing an account of how we process discourse. Although Campbell was an interested reader of the French theory that Warnick analyzes, the aesthetic theorist who most influenced Campbell was not in France but much closer to home—Campbell’s colleague in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Alexander Gerard. With works by Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, William Hogarth and Edmund Burke, Gerard’s Essay on Taste is part of a British century-long examination of aesthetic response as it relates, especially, to literature and rhetoric. Gerard’s Essay takes up some of the standard issues relating to the question of taste: the qualities in objects that elicit aesthetic response (novelty, grandeur or sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue); the importance of taste in, for example, the refinement of character; whether, given the great diversity of opinion about aesthetic matters, there is a standard for good taste and if so what the basis for it is. But what Campbell drew from Gerard’s work is his detailed analysis of the Lockean mental operations that constitute different types of response to aesthetic stimuli. Understanding the anatomy of response is important to a theory of rhetoric that is grounded in reception, as Campbell’s is.

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Gerard’s most detailed analysis of response occurs in a chapter entitled “How Far Taste depends on the Imagination” in Part III of the Essay. The chapter introduces a vocabulary relating to reception that Campbell adopts in POR: internal senses, reflex senses, and reflex view, for example. The vocabulary refers to types of response. The purpose of Gerard’s analysis is to justify referring to the imagination’s response to aesthetic and moral stimuli as “internal senses” on analogy with the external senses. Gerard first describes what characterizes the response of the external senses: The obvious phaenomena of a sense are these. It is a power which supplies us with such simple perceptions, as cannot be conveyed by any other channel to those who are destitute of that sense. It is a power which receives its perception immediately, as soon as its object is exhibited, previous to any reasoning concerning the qualities of the object, or the causes of the perception. It is a power which exerts itself independent of volition; so that, while we remain in proper circumstances, we cannot, by any act of the will, prevent our receiving certain sensations, nor alter them at pleasure; nor can we, by any means, procure these sensations, as long as we are not in the proper situation for receiving them by their peculiar organ. These are the circumstances which characterize a sense. Sight, for instance, conveys simple perceptions which a blind man cannot possibly receive. A man who opens his eyes at noon, immediately perceives light; no efforts of the will can prevent his perceiving it, while his eyes are open; and no volition could make him perceive it at midnight. These characters evidently belong to all the external senses. . . . (An Essay on Taste, 145–46)

Gerard maintains that we are justified in referring to our response to aesthetic stimuli as an internal sense because such response is similarly universal, immediate, and involuntary. What characterizes the response of the external senses “likewise belong to the powers of taste: harmony, for example, is a simple perception, which no man who has not a musical ear can receive, and which ever one who has an ear immediately and necessarily receives on hearing a good tune. The powers of taste are therefore to be reckoned senses” (146; my emphasis). Our response to aesthetic stimuli are simple, involuntary, and immediate. Gerard subsequently distinguishes his analysis from some unidentified others’ work, probably from the analysis of Francis Hutcheson, who first made the analogy between aesthetic and moral response to sensory response and identified our response to beauty and to goodness as internal senses. Gerard essentially agrees with Hutcheson but he maintains, in contrast to Hutcheson, that the internal sense builds on the external sense: the pleasure we receive from beauty follows sight. Because the response of an internal sense depends on a prior response of an external sense, the internal senses are “derived and compounded,” not “ultimate and original” (1780, reprint 1963, 145; also 91). Internal senses are, therefore, sometimes referred to as “subsequent” or “reflex” senses, Gerard has noted earlier (footnote, p. 2). But they are senses nonethe-

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less: “we may continue to term them senses since it does not contradict any phenomena, on account of which this name was originally bestowed upon them” (147); that is, they are universal, immediate, and involuntary. Equally important as the relatively minor differences between external and internal senses is the significant difference between a sensory response (whether internal or external) and a reasoned response of judgment. “The powers of the mind” can “be reduced into classes, according to their real differences,” a fact of “real moment,” notes Gerard (footnote, p. 145). The pleasure that constitutes our response to beautiful forms, is “prior to our analyzing them or discovering by reason that they have these qualities [uniformity, variety, and proportion]” (footnote, p. 147). The workings of reason contrast with those of the internal sense: It is scarce necessary to observe, that our ascribing the sentiments of taste to mental processes is totally different from asserting that they are deductions of reason. We do not prove, that certain objects are grand by arguments, but we perceive them to be grand in consequence of the natural constitution of our mind, which disposes us, without reflection, to be pleased with largeness and simplicity. Reasoning may, however, be employed in exhibiting an object to the mind; and yet the perception it has, when the object is once exhibited, may properly belong to a sense. Thus, reasoning may be necessary to ascertain the circumstances, and determine the motive, of an action; but it is the moral sense that perceives it to be either virtuous or vicious, after reason has discovered its motive and its circumstances. (footnote, p. 148)

The distinctions Gerard makes here are important because they stand behind important principles of Campbell’s theory. A reasoned response is voluntary, deliberate, and delayed in contrast to a sensory response, whether internal or external. This is true whether we are responding to virtue or beauty. The reasoned responses of judgment are necessary to determine the motive for a moral or immoral action or to determine the causes of our response to beauty, novelty or sublimity. But the response of the internal or reflex sense seems privileged: it follows from the “natural constitution of our mind.” Moreover, the fact that the response of internal sense is involuntary and immediate makes it especially effective in moving the audience emotionally. If listeners or readers become conscious of the orator’s art, the response loses the immediacy of a sense impressions and awakens the critical faculties, which become suspicious of artful prose as designed for effect. The orator must manage such responses and Gerard’s analysis (via Campbell) can help. Other forces internal to rhetoric as an emerging and changing discipline also influenced the conception of rhetoric in POR. The Act of Union that merged the Scottish and English parliaments led to an increased prosperity in Scotland and thus more opportunity for enjoying the polite arts. But union

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with England also brought an increased self-consciousness among Scottish intellectuals: were they prepared to be full participants in British cultural life? Were they refined enough? Some of this insecurity manifests in a feeling of linguistic inferiority; Scots needed to learn English—that is, London English. As Richard Sher notes, quoting Alexander Carlyle, “the problem was that ‘to every man bred in Scotland, the English language was in some respects a foreign tongue’” (1985, 108). The defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 furthered these developments. The ascendancy of a moderate Presbyterian party, now referred to as the “moderate literati” (Sher, 8), brought increased respect for the polite arts or belles lettres as a way to develop moral and aesthetic sensibilities. Rhetoric could play a role in addressing this perceived need, though it would need to change from its classical model to do so. It would need to focus on defining and inculcating correct English, on writing all types of prose (not only on oratory), and on reading literature as a way to develop discriminating taste. This prescription was met by Adam Smith, who presented lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres in 1748–49. The lectures Smith gave in Edinburgh do not survive; nor do the notes of any in attendance. But student notes from lectures Smith later gave in Glasgow do survive. If these later lectures are indicative of the lectures Smith gave in 1748, then he addressed directly the felt need for more polite learning and less oratory. His lectures feature prose writings of various types, on reading literature as a way to develop taste, and on propriety and restraint in style. Smith’s lectures were public lectures, however, not part of the Edinburgh curriculum. Students apparently preferred that rhetoric be part of the curriculum. One indication of this was the formation in Edinburgh in 1759 of the “Belles Lettres Society,” a student club devoted to “’mutual improvement of speech, literature, and knowledge’” (Bator 1982, 46). But within Edinburgh University rhetoric was taught only as part of the course in logic or moral philosophy. There were no chairs of rhetoric or required courses in rhetoric until Hugh Blair, who had attended Smith’s lectures, was named “Professor of Rhetorick” in 1760; two years later he was named the first “Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres” (Bator, 58). The increased prominence of rhetoric was probably one incentive for Campbell to lecture on the topic before the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen, and belletristic rhetoric could serve as precedent to expand the scope of rhetoric and to emphasize correct usage.

CONCLUSIONS

The basis for the theory of human nature that underscores Campbell’s theory of rhetoric is, then, the analysis of “mental operations” that followed from the Enlightenment’s attempt to establish a foundation on which to build the

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“human sciences.” Within empiricist philosophy, this effort produced a comprehensive explanation of the reception of sensory stimuli—linguistic and nonlinguistic. Within this empiricist psychology, what characterizes the way the mind processes sense impressions becomes paradigmatic of the cognitive process, for the sense impression is both the origin of ideas and the basis for their validity. We believe more firmly those ideas that have the vivacity of a present sense impression, and we believe more readily those ideas that we process as he would a sense impression—immediately and involuntarily, that is, “naturally.” Campbell’s rhetorical theory is based on these empiricist discoveries. A theory that could account for the origin of simple ideas, the creation of complex ideas, the relative strength of different beliefs, and how our awareness of mental operations influenced belief would have obvious relevance to rhetoric. A rhetorical theory based on empiricism would derive its definition of rhetorical efficacy from the empiricist conclusions about the cognitive process. Because the sense impression is the basis for the origin and validity of belief, a rhetorical theory based on this psychology would emphasize that rhetoric is the art capable of making discourse resemble a sense impression. Rhetoric can bring the reader to experience an idea with the vivacity and the automaticity of a sense impression; it can cause the reader to respond to discourse as the reader responds to a nonlinguistic sense impression. Throughout the following chapters, I have, then, identified Campbell’s theory as a “resemblance” theory of rhetoric because at times Campbell uses the word “resemblance” as descriptive of his mimetic theory: discourse presented so that the mind processes it in a way that “resembles” the way the mind processes a present, nonlinguistic sense impression is efficacious. Campbell’s conception of rhetoric draws on the new empiricist philosophy, which he recognizes can serve as a theoretical foundation for what Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian taught. It also builds on the broader conception of rhetoric, including an interest in aesthetic response, that emerged in the wake of Scotland’s effort to enter fully into the British cultural scene.

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THREE

Faculties and Types of Discourse Philosophy of Rhetoric, Preface, Introduction, and Chapters I, II, III

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps because it is a productive art as distinguished from a theoretical one, rhetoric seems always to adapt to the intellectual currents of its environment rather than to shape or influence them. In George Campbell’s time, the intellectual environment for rhetoric would seem on many counts to have been decidedly hostile. Some of the most influential voices of the seventeenth century had spoken against rhetoric: the Royal Society, René Descartes, and John Locke, to mention only the most famous. The Renaissance love of language had reduced rhetoric (at least in many rhetoric texts) to style, which often meant, in Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence or John Hoskins’ Directions for Speech and Style, for example, to taxonomies of figures of speech. The attacks of Thomas Sprat, Descartes, and Locke were designed to prevent a rhetoric understood as style and a style understood as highly figured from dominating the expert discourse of science and philosophy. In Book III of the Essay on Human Understanding, Locke gave his version of two familiar criticisms of rhetoric: that rhetoric perpetuated an artificial, self-indulgent, inefficient style, and that it traded in misleading readers by appealing to the emotions: But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats; and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct,

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George Campbell wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. . . . It is evident how much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation: and I doubt not but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality, in me to have said thus much against it. (Essay on Human Understanding III. x. xxxiv. 146)

For Locke, at least in the Essay, for all serious intents and purposes language should be thought of in strictly instrumental and utilitarian terms: “The ends of language in our discourse with others being chiefly these three: First, to make known one man’s thoughts or ideas to another; Secondly, to do it with as much ease and quickness as possible; and Thirdly, thereby to convey the knowledge of things” (III. x. xxiii. 142). A common strategy to ward off such attacks on rhetoric is to claim that the object of the critic’s attack is not the genuine art of rhetoric but a dismembered simulacrum. Aristotle, writing in the wake of Plato’s criticism of rhetoric, begins the Rhetoric by acknowledging that current handbook treatments of the art deserve the contempt they have inspired. This concession is preface to his claim that the conception of rhetoric that he will present is quite different. His genuine art of rhetoric is a counterpart to the dialectic so much beloved by rhetoric’s philosophical critics; the conception of rhetoric that Aristotle would present, with its foundation in the enthymeme and reason, would show it to be a genuine art, with a stake in truth (On Rhetoric Bk I, chapt. 1: 13554a–1354b). If he would reform rhetoric, Campbell in the Enlightenment faced a greater challenge than Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. The Enlightenment epistemological program was antithetical to a rhetorical culture. The Enlightenment would count as genuine knowledge only what is certain, while rhetoric acknowledges and celebrates competing views (in utramque partem in Cicero’s phrase) and seeks the best solution in contexts where probable knowledge is recognized as the highest attainable standard. The Enlightenment’s conception of genuine knowledge was universal and transcultural while rhetoric always emphasizes how local, even situational, elements influence perception and, therefore, what seems to be true. While the Enlightenment sought a timeless truth, the orator knows the importance of crafting his speech to take advantage of the moment (kairos). The Enlightenment sought foundational, axiomatic statements upon which practice could be reformed; rhetoric works the other way—basing its principles on successful practice.1 George Campbell understood that the movement from the rhetorical culture of Renaissance humanism to the scientific culture of Enlightenment rationalism was truly revolutionary. He was a student of both the new philosophy and of the rhetorical tradition. On Campbell’s analysis, the Enlight-

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enment’s interest in the “science of the mind” provided the prospect for a marriage that would benefit both the Enlightenment’s project to articulate foundational knowledge in the human sciences and the need rhetoric had as a discipline to cast itself as a human science. He would ground his theory of rhetoric in what the eighteenth century regarded as timeless, uniform mental operations—that is, he would write a “philosophy” or “science” of rhetoric. He would also reconceptualize rhetoric as an art by expanding its province from persuasive discourse to all discourse—scientific and poetic as well as persuasive.2 This chapter will offer a reading of the preface, the introduction, and chapters 1–3 of the Philosophy of Rhetoric, relating Campbell’s conception of rhetoric to Enlightenment philosophy. The overriding intention of Campbell’s preface and introduction is to establish that rhetoric can both inform the science of the mind (psychology) and itself benefit from the laws of that science. To this end, Campbell feels that he needs to establish that rhetoric is uniquely a comprehensive art that engages all the faculties of the mind.3 In the headnote to POR, Campbell brings Bacon’s authority to bear on his claim of a mutual relationship between scientific principles and their applications in the arts. The quotation is from Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum (the Latin, more scholarly version of what, in a shorter form, was published as the Advancement of Learning). In James Spedding’s translation, the quotation reads as follows: “Let men be assured that the solid and true arts of invention grow and increase as inventions themselves increase” (Works IX: 87). Bacon is maintaining that true method would change and improve as a result of the discoveries that follow from the method. In other words, the relationship between theory and experiment or practice is reciprocal and progress therefore continuous.4 In citing these lines in the headnote, Campbell both aligns himself with Bacon’s program and sets the ground for his claim that rhetoric has this reciprocity with the science of the mind: “It is his purpose in this Work, on the one hand, to exhibit . . . a tolerable sketch of the human mind; and, aided by the lights which the Poet and the Orator so amply furnish, to disclose its secret movements, tracing its principal channels of perception and action, as near as possible, to their source: and, on the other hand, from the science of human nature, to ascertain with greater precision, the radical principles of that art, whose object it is, by the use of language, to operate on the soul of the hearer, in the way of informing, convincing, pleasing, moving or persuading” (POR, lxvii). Rhetoric’s traditional concern with the relationship of speech to hearer is relevant to the study of how the mind responds to stimuli generally. A study or rhetoric can offer an account of belief that has wide application. Campbell will provide such an analysis. At the same time, the study of the empiricist account of how the mind responds to stimuli can inform a philosophy of rhetoric.

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The headnote and preface constitute a fitting prologue to the opening sections of Campbell’s introduction, which is a (somewhat labored) discussion of the relationship between theory (“science”) and practice (“art”). Bacon’s influence is present throughout the discussion. Bacon would ground the scientist agenda in real, practical problems; he feared pure theorizing not only as a waste of time but also as a positive danger. On the other hand, unsystematic experimenting or practice uninformed by principles would never produce genuine knowledge. He immortalized this dichotomy of excesses in his trope of the empiricist ants who “merely collect things and use them,” and the rationalist spiders who “spin webs out of themselves.” His ideal was the middle way of the bee who gathers material from nature but then transforms it “by a power of its own” (Bacon, Novum Organum, 105). Bacon’s critique is on Campbell’s mind in his discussion of rhetoric here. Rhetoric as a discipline has not benefited from the synergy that the relationship between theory and practice can create. Through the study of examples and through imitation, “some progress may be made in an art [such as rhetoric], without the knowledge of the principles from which [the art] sprung”5 (1994, lxix), as rules to guide practice are promulgated, but genuine progress requires the identification of general laws as well, and practitioners can rarely discover the principles underlying their practice; theoreticians are needed (lxx). The best method for theory creation, Campbell says, combines a study of practice and the abstract knowledge of theory: “Those who in medicine have scarcely risen to the discernment of any general principles, and have no other directory but the experiences gained in the first and lowest stage, or as it were at the foot of the mountain, are commonly distinguished by the name of empirics. . . . The character directly opposite to the empiric is the visionary, for it is not in theology only that there are visionaries. . . . The first founds upon facts, but the facts are few, and commonly in his reasonings, through his imperfect knowledge of the subject, misapplied. The second often argues very inconsequentially from principles, which, having no foundation in nature, may justly be denominated the illegitimate issue of his own imagination” (POR, lxx–xxi). We have empirics and visionaries, ants and spiders. Campbell will play the role in rhetoric of the genuine physician, the rhetorical bee. Having established that the relationship of theory to practice is generally reciprocal, Campbell still needs to show that rhetoric shares this relationship to the science of the mind. To this end, Campbell argues that eloquence is a comprehensive art, that it has a “mixed nature, wherein utility and beauty have almost equal influence” (lxxi). Both useful and elegant arts are “founded in experience” (1988, lxxi) and their progress, therefore, depends on the science of the mind. The “springs” that regulate the polite arts “must be sought in the nature of the human mind”; and it is also “in the human mind that we must investigate the source of some of the useful arts,” for logic “is founded in the doctrine of the understanding” and ethics “founded in that of the will.” This

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linking of subjects matters to powers of the mind “was the idea of Lord Verulam [Bacon], perhaps the most comprehensive genius in philosophy that has appeared in modern times” (lxxiii) But these are not the only arts which have their foundation in the science of human nature. “Grammar too, in its general principles, has a close connexion with the understanding, and the theory of the association of ideas” (lxxiii). Eloquence is both a polite and a useful art: But there is no art whatever that hath so close a connexion with all the faculties and powers of the mind, as eloquence, or the art of speaking, in the extensive sense in which I employ that term. For in the first place, that it ought to be ranked among the polite or fine arts, is manifest from this, that in all its exertions . . . it requires the aid of the imagination. Thereby it not only pleases, but, by pleasing commands attention, rouses the passions, and often at last subdues the most stubborn resolution. It is also a useful art. This is certainly the case if the power of speech be a useful faculty. . . . Further if the logical art and the ethical be useful, eloquence is useful, as it instructs us how these arts must be applied for the conviction and the persuasion of others. It is indeed the grand art of communication, not of ideas only, but of sentiments, passions, dispositions, and purposes. (Introduction,lxxiii)

Campbell concludes his introduction with a synoptic history of rhetoric and a claim about the place of his Philosophy of Rhetoric in it. He relates a history with four stages. Oratory began with untutored performances: “As speakers existed before grammarians, and reasoners before logicians, so doubtless there were orators before rhetoricians.” The next stage involved naming the elements and developing taxonomies. The third stage was predictive and pedagogical—attempting to identify the relationship between elements and types and success and to make these relationships the bases for instruction in rhetoric. The fourth and last stage would explain in psychological terms the causes for the successes observed in stage three: “By the fourth, we arrive at that knowledge of human nature, which, besides its other advantages, adds both weight and evidence to all precedent discoveries and rules” (POR, lxxiv). The Ancients had succeeded admirably in establishing the first three stages. As a beneficiary of the scientific revolution, Campbell was in a better position than the Ancients to create a theory of rhetoric. Cicero and Quintilian had perfected rhetoric as an art; Campbell would provide a theory based on scientific knowledge. In addition to providing a theory grounded in human nature to an art of rhetoric that, despite a distinguished history, lacked it, Campbell would also reform rhetoric by expanding it. In presenting rhetoric as both based on and contributing to a science of human nature, Campbell found a place for rhetoric in the Enlightenment program. But this was not sufficient reform. As we saw in chapter 1, Campbell’s initial motivation to reflect on rhetoric was in practical contexts, especially preaching. But surely his divinity students,

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fresh from reading Locke, would be suspicious of rhetoric, whether it seemed theoretically respectable or not. At least from the pulpit, shouldn’t a clear, simple, reasonable presentation of the Word without embellishment from a mendacious, artificial rhetoric be the minister’s ideal? Facing such a skeptical audience, Campbell offers an apology for a new conception of rhetoric: I am sensible however, that there are many pious Christians, who are startled at the name of eloquence when applied to the christian teacher. . . . And this turn of thinking I have always found to proceed from one or other of these two causes; either from a mistake of what is meant by eloquence, or from a misapprehension of some passages of holy writ in relation to the sacred function. . . . Were these people [critics such as Locke] then, who appear to differ from us, on the propriety of employing eloquence, to give an explication of the ideas they comprehend under the term eloquence or oratory, we should doubtless get from them some such account as this, a knack, or artifice by which the periods of a discourse are curiously and harmoniously strung together, decorated with many flowery images, the whole entirely calculated to set off the speaker’s art by pleasing the ear and amusing the fancy of the hearers, but by no means calculated either to inform their understandings or to engage their hearts. Perhaps those people will be surprised, when I tell them, that commonly no discourse whatever, not even the homeliest, have less of true eloquence, than such frothy harangues, as perfectly suit their definition. If this, then, is all they mean to inveigh against under the name eloquence, I will join issue with them with all my heart. . . . But if, on the contrary, nothing else is meant by eloquence . . . but that art or talent, whereby the speech is adapted to produce in the hearer the great end which the speaker has, or at least ought to have principally in view, it is impossible to doubt the utility of the study; unless people will be absurd enough to question, whether there be any difference between speaking to the purpose and speaking from the purpose, expressing one’s self intelligibly or unintelligibly, reasoning in a manner that is conclusive and satisfactory, or in such a way as can convince nobody, fixing the attention and moving the affections of an audience, or leaving them in a state perfectly listless and unconcerned. (Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence, 159–61)

As did Aristotle, who criticized existing handbooks and redefined rhetoric at the outset of his Rhetoric, Campbell here grants the criticism and then redefines eloquence. What the critics attack is not genuine eloquence. Even the homeliest discourse is more representative of genuine eloquence than the artificial, self-indulgent oratory that the critics equate with eloquence. Indeed, Campbell would heartily join the critics’ chorus in condemnation of this false art. The genuine art of eloquence is “that art or talent, whereby the speech is adapted to produce in the hearer the great end which the speaker has, or at least ought to have principally in view.” On Campbell’s definition, rhetoric is not a type of discourse or a style. Rhetoric teaches us to write and speak to a

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purpose—any purpose. Rhetoric is then a virtually inclusive language art; all types of discourse is its purview—even the most serious type, preaching. Campbell’s definition of eloquence in the Philosophy of Rhetoric is virtually identical to the one here, in Pulpit Eloquence. In POR, Campbell states: “The word eloquence in its greatest latitude denotes, ‘That art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end’” (1988, 1). Campbell’s definition in POR almost certainly had its origin in his reflections on rhetoric in the context of his interest in preaching. Though the first chapter of POR was presented to members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in 1758 (Ulman, Minutes, table A-4), and Campbell created his lectures for his divinity students only after he became Professor of Divinity at Marischal in 1771, the definition was, nevertheless, almost certainly the result of his reflection on rhetoric in the context of preaching. A virtually identical definition of eloquence shows up in Alexander Gerard’s Pastoral Care: As eloquence, considered in its largest extent, is the art of speaking so as to attain the end which a man pursues; so from the variety of the ends which may be attained by speaking, the most natural division of eloquence may be deduced. Now a man can scarcely be supposed to aim at any end, but one or other of these; to instruct, to convince, to please, to move, or to persuade. A man who aims at instructing or convincing, addresses himself, though in different ways, to the understanding; he who aims at pleasing, addresses himself to the imagination; he who wants to move, to the passions; and he who wants to persuade, to the will. (1799, 241)

This passage is not evidence of the priority of either man in establishing a taxonomy of discourse based on targeted faculties.6 Indeed, it is more likely that the definition and the divisions were the result of a collaboration between Campbell and Gerard in the Theology Club, which Campbell formed with others in 1742, and of which Gerard was a member (Keith, ix). In Pulpit Eloquence Campbell, reflecting on his participation in the Theology Club, notes that he was assigned the task of making an abstract of the club’s proceedings and that each member was given a copy of this abstract with permission for free use—an abstract that was the basis for some of his lectures in Pulpit Eloquence (1810, 212–13). Thus, it is safe to infer that Campbell’s definition of rhetoric and his broad view of the art had its origin in his effort to respond to criticisms such as Locke’s and to think about rhetoric in the context of the pulpit.7 The Campbell-Gerard definition of rhetoric is the basis for Campbell’s division of types of rhetoric in the first chapter of POR. Its taxonomy based on neural, rather than social, locations for rhetorical discourse complements Campbell’s emphasis on the science of human nature and mental operations of the preface. Discourse intended to elucidate a subject targets the reader’s understanding; discourse that would excite admiration of a subject is directed

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to the imagination; if an orator wants to move the reader emotionally, aim at the passions; to persuade, engage the will—as table 3.1 shows. Though the general inspiration for linking faculties with discourse types was The Advancement of Learning (see chap. 2), the particular faculties that Campbell identifies are not exactly Bacon’s. The faculties listed here—understanding, imagination, passions, and will8—are the same as those listed by Hume in the Enquiry, though the list is fairly common. As a theory of rhetoric based on mental operations—specifically, based on the responses characteristic of each of the faculties—POR must provide an account of the “tendencies” of each of the faculties. And since each type of discourse both comes under the direction of one of the faculties and appeals to more than one of the faculties, POR must also present a description of how discourse can appeal to more than one faculty, while still maintaining a controlling purpose. Viewing the faculties as centers of reception, Campbell provides a description of the predilections of each in chapters I and VII. The understanding responds to knowledge, to order, to truth; the imagination is attracted to novelty, sublimity, vivacity, and beauty (73); the passions seek activity—either pleasurable or painful—and therefore are attracted to “lively and glowing ideas” (78). Campbell not only describes what typically appeals to each of the faculties, but also what the implications of these tendencies are for discourse—for example, detailed descriptions please the imagination; ordered proofs satisfy the understanding; and tropes and figures rouse the passions. What appeals to one faculty, however, often repels another. An appeal to the passions “never fails to disturb the operation of the intellectual faculty” (2) and images that “astonish by the loftiness” (4) interfere with the momentum that the passions seek to promote. But successful persuasion must appeal to the passions at the same time as it appeals to the understanding and to the imagination. How can the orator manage appeals so that one dominates and TABLE 3.1 Campbell’s Taxonomy of Rhetorical Purposes Faculty

Understanding

Imagination

Passions

Will

Controlling Purposes Means

Elucidate a subject by • Illustration • Eviction • Argumentation

Excite admiration by • Liveliness of style • Resemblance • Detail • Sublimity

Move by • Sympathy

Persuade to action by • Moving • Moving and convincing

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the others are subordinate? This is one key question that a theory that intends to account for oratorical success must answer. Campbell’s answer is implied in a passage in which he is discussing our response to the sublime, which Campbell argues is an aesthetic, imaginative response, not a moral and passionate one. In this passage, he employs a complicated contemporary terminology to distinguish between these two types of response—a simple (even if powerful) aesthetic response from a more complex passionate one. To this end, Campbell distinguishes first the different meanings (aesthetic and moral) of the word “admire.” The aesthetic meaning of the word derives from its etymology: ad mire means to “wonder at.” The moral sense of the word involves a judgment of a person’s character. The confusion between the sublime and the passionate rests in part on an ambiguous vocabulary. The sublime, it may be argued, as it raiseth admiration, should be considered as one species of address to the passions. But this objection, when examined, will appear superficial. There are few words in any language . . . which are strictly univocal. Thus admiration, when persons are the object, is commonly used for a high degree of esteem; but when otherwise applied [as to a waterfall whose power produces wonder as a response], it denotes solely an internal taste. It [that is, admiration as an aspect of the sublime] is that pleasurable sensation which instantly ariseth on the perception of magnitude, or of whatever is great and stupendous in its kind. (POR, 3; my emphasis)

Campbell insists that an aesthetic response—to admire or wonder at an artistic performance or, especially, to experience wonder before the sublime in nature—is basically a simple response. No matter how powerful, such a response is one of an “internal taste,” that is, like a “external” taste or a sense impression, which is an immediate, passive response of the mind. But a passionate response, because it includes a judgment of value, is a more complex response—less immediate and involving a frame of reference: Now admiration when thus applied doth not require to its production, as the passions generally do, any reflex view of motives or tendencies, or of any relations either to private interest, or to the good of others; and ought therefore to be numbered among those original feelings of the mind, which are denominated by some the reflex senses, being in the same class with a taste for beauty, an ear for music or our moral sentiments. (3; my emphasis)

A passionate response is more complex because it involves placing a particular action or character in the context of a table of values. Campbell’s distinction uses a technical vocabulary that derives ultimately from Locke’s distinction between a simple and a complex idea and specifically from Gerard’s

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analysis of response in his Essay on Taste. For Gerard, a reflex sense is an immediate, involuntary and passive response, while a reflex view is a more deliberate, conscious response (1963, 145–47). It is important to note the complexity of Campbell’s analysis. The last sentence suggests that the basis for his distinctions is not the nature of particular stimuli. We can respond to moral stimuli either passionately (as a reflex view) or as a sentiment (a reflex sense). This is also true of aesthetic response which can be immediate (a reflex sense) or an informed judgment (a reflex view). We have then the following taxonomy illustrated in table 3.2. The relevance of this analysis to rhetoric becomes evident in Campbell’s description of persuasion, which, as an “artful mixture” (4), incorporates appeals to all the faculties. Persuasion necessarily involves an appeal to the passions: “To say that it is possible to persuade without speaking to the passions, is but at best a kind of specious nonsense” (POR, 77). But the passions typically respond to tropes and figures that are associated with the imagination to which the imagination also responds. Complex forms of discourse, such as persuasion, are necessarily therefore an “artful mixture” of appeals to different faculties. Appeals to the understanding and the imagination complement the primary appeals which are directed to the passions, especially in that most complex type of persuasion, the vehement (4). A theoretical account of discourse this complex must be discrete enough both to discriminate between different types of appeals in the same discourse and explain how the same appeals produce such different effects in different types of discourse. We find figuration and logical argument in some persuasion; yet their effect in this context is quite different from their effect in discourse directed exclusively to the understanding or the imagination. The appeals must be different in persuasion because apparent artistry and overt syllogisms defeat the passions, which are essential to persuasion. The orator’s art must be concealed: The imagination is charmed by a finished picture, wherein even drapery and ornament are not neglected; for here the end is pleasure. Would we penetrate further and agitate the soul [as in persuasion], we must exhibit only some vivid strokes, some expressive features, not decorated as for show (all ostentation being both despicable and hurtful here), but such as appear TABLE 3.2 Types of Mental Operations Type of Action

Nature of Response

Nature of Stimulus

Reflex Sense Reflex View

Immediate, passive (intuitive) Aesthetic or moral

Delayed, building momentum Moral, value claims

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the natural exposition of those bright and deep impressions, made by the subject upon the speaker’s mind; for here the end is not pleasure, but emotion. (POR, 5)

Emotional and aesthetic response (especially) are in tension. While the imagination responds to overt artistry, a passionate response depends on the hearer’s belief that the speaker is emotionally involved, that his language is expressive, not artificial, and reflects the “deep impressions” the subject made on his or her mind, not a conscious artistry. The orator faces a similar challenge and opportunity with regard to appeals to the understanding: “those affecting lineaments must be so interwoven with our arguments, as that, from the passion excited our reasoning may derive importance, and so be fitted for commanding attention; and by the justness of the reasoning the passion may be more deeply rooted and enforced; and thus both may be made to conspire in effectuating that persuasion which is the end proposed” (5–6). Somehow, the logical (as well as the aesthetic) appeals must be “conducive to that which is the primary intention” (1). In discourse intended to arouse a passion, which is the necessary aim of persuasion according to Campbell, figures and syllogisms must be presented in a way that the reader experiences them unconsciously. To use Campbell’s earlier terminology: the appeals to the imagination and to reason in persuasion must be such that the reader’s response is a “reflex sense—immediate, passive, unconscious—if the needed passionate response, which is the all-important one, is to occur. BOOK I, CHAPTER II: OF WIT AND RIDICULE

Chapters two and three concern “the eloquence of conversation” (8). The chapters, which take up wit, humor, and ridicule seem oddly placed. Chapter 1 introduced Campbell’s faculty psychology and the taxonomy of discourse based on it; chapter 4 takes up discourse that appeals to the understanding, the first faculty Campbell discussed in chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3, then, seem an interruption. The reader has reason to recall Campbell’s prefatory characterization of the Philosophy of Rhetoric as a “series of Essays” (lxv) as distinguished from a sustained, coherent theory, and, accordingly, is tempted to skip these chapters, especially since chapter two is concerned less with rhetoric and oratory than with poetic genres, especially mock heroic. Kathleen Holcomb notes that Campbell’s analysis is not original. But, having examined manuscripts of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, she also notes that Campbell’s colleagues were attracted to Campbell’s analysis, for it was evidence that his novel approach to rhetoric could accommodate a broader view of the art than classical rhetoric had (1987, 288). Moreover, Campbell’s analysis of wit, humour and ridicule throws light on the types of discourse discussed in the first chapter of Book I and clarifies distinctions between, for

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example, appeals to the imagination and appeals to the passions that are generally relevant to Campbell’s theory. As table 3.3 indicates, Campbell’s discussion of each of the types of discourse important to conversation includes not only comparisons intended to show how each differs from the other, but also comparisons intended to show how each is a counterpart to a type of discourse discussed in chapter 1. When Campbell discusses ridicule as a complement to vehement orator, for example, the reader learns about both. Consistent with his approach in chapter 1, Campbell’s analysis proceeds from the perspective of reception, describing wit as pleasing by surprising readers in an agreeable way—surprising them by showing that what we ordinarily regard as dissimilar has some unexpected similarity. Thus, wit appeals to the imagination, which responds to the unusual on Campbell’s psychology. In appealing to the imagination, wit is the counterpart to the sublime or the picturesque, though the affect is quite different. Wit purposefully violates decorum in three ways: (1) by debasing something wrongly regarded as grave; (2) by aggrandizing the frivolous; and (3) by showing an incongruity (8). Campbell illustrates by a number of examples from the mock heroic poetry of the Restoration and eighteenth century, drawing especially on Hudibras, Samuel Butler’s burlesque of the Puritans under the Commonwealth. The censorious Hudibras undertakes to end the popular sport of bearbaiting with the seriousness of Aeneas, who would found Rome. To do so Hudibras equips himself with the armor of learning (including rhetoric). Campbell does not cite the famous lines where the pedantic Hudibras is mocked for his practice of glossing in a rhetorical terminology his own sermons, lest his listeners miss their artistry,9 but the lines he does cite illusTABLE 3.3 Conversational Types and General Rhetorical Purpose Conversational Types

Wit

Humour

Ridicule

Faculty Corresponds to Effect

Imagination Sublimity Surprise, excites the mind

Passion Pathetic Exhibition of passions, sympathy

Will Vehemence Air of reasoning

Purpose

Debase

Excite contempt

Restrains wrong conduct

Means

Resemblance and indignity

Judgment and striking lineaments

Conceal art

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trate well how wit debases, in this case by showing that a pompous, intolerant Puritan judge takes himself and his mission of ending bearbaiting with epic seriousness: Great on the bench, great in the saddle That could as well bind o’er as swaddle, Mighty he was at both of these, And style of war, as well as peace, So some rats of amphibious nature Are either for the land or water. (Hudibras, Part ii: Canto 3; POR, 11) As Justice of the Peace and soldier, styled for both peace and war, Hudibras could either bind over a defendant for a hearing or “swaddle” him; Puritans are rats for all seasons, according to Butler. In subsequent examples, Campbell illustrates the way wit can fulfill its other two purposes—aggrandize the frivolous (Pope’s, Dunciad is the example) and censure by stressing incongruity. With his treatment of humor, the second of his types, Campbell introduces his two-part comparisons. He distinguishes humor from wit and contrasts it with its serious counterpart. Just as wit appealed to the imagination and had as its counterpart the literature of the sublime, humor appeals to the passions, for example, and is a complement to tragedy. In explaining how humor works, Campbell makes frequent references to the way the passions work generally, so that his discussion of humor takes on a general significance. For example, Campbell explains that because humor appeals to the emotions, it is transferred by sympathy, consistently the channel for the transfer of emotion from orator to audience for Campbell. The passion transferred when humor is excited is contempt, a passion that Campbell notes might also be excited by tragedy, though in the case of humor the motive behind the passion is imaginary or disproportionate to the effect and the focus is on foibles of character; in tragedy, the focus is on vice and the emotion is proportionate to the suffering vice has caused. In his discussion of examples of different types of humor, Campbell begins with passages from Henry Lord Bolingbroke and Jonathan Swift that bespeak contempt but are not humorous. Swift opposed the outlawing of dueling on the grounds that he could “‘discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own, where the law hath not been able to find an expedient’” (18). The line is contemptuous alike of rogues who duel and utopian social planners who would protect them from themselves, but in Campbell’s view, it probes weaknesses in human nature too fundamental to be humorous. But the following lines from Pope’s Rape of the Locke inspires contempt of the table of values of a heroine that ranks jewelry with virtue:

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George Campbell Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law Or some frail china jar receive a flaw; Or stain her honour, or her new brocade; Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade; Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball Or whether heaven has doom’ed that Shock must fall. (Rape of the Locke, Canto 2; POR, 19)

While Virgilian epic and Ciceronian oratory reflect accurately the seriousness of their subjects, these lines hold a concave glass up to nature so that the flirtations of a card game are given a ridiculous air of importance that becomes the vehicle for mocking the values of the fops and ladies. Ridicule, the third type of humor, is the counterpart of vehement persuasion, Campbell maintains, since both attempt to change opinion and achieve their effects through appeals to reason as well as the passions (20). Ridicule is best as a weapon against palpable error that deserves to be dismissed with a biting remark rather in contrast to persuasion, whose target is serious vice that should be fully refuted (21). While for vehement persuasion, success requires that the audience be unaware of the speaker’s attempt to move their passions, in ridicule the audience must not detect any effort to convince them, since to be effective ridicule must seem to dismiss its subject: “What we profess to contemn, we scorn to confute” Campbell writes (23). This observations parallels Campbell’s observation in chapter 1 of the necessity of a concealed artistry if the passions are to be moved. After identifying Socrates as a master of ridicule in moral subjects, Campbell examines the passages he (Campbell) cited as exemplars of wit and humor for instances of ridicule—that is, to see if their intent is persuasive and if the means employed include ratiocination, which would make them examples of ridicule as well as wit or humor. The lines from Young’s “Universal Passion,” cited as exemplary for their wit, constitute a mini-argument that qualifies the lines as ridicule as well: Health chiefly keeps an Atheist in the dark, A fever argues better than a Clarke: Let but the logic in his pulse decay, The Grecian he’ll renounce and learn to pray. (Satire IV) Campbell points out the argumentative thread of the lines: atheism is not based on reason, because it rests finally on health and can be trumped by disease (24). Campbell concludes with some reflections on the propriety of ridicule. Although he acknowledges successful exceptions, Campbell advises against

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ridicule in sermons. The gravity of the occasion, the presence of God, seems incompatible with the levity of ridicule. Chapter two, then, is helpful for identifying some psychological principles that maintain throughout POR. These include the following: • Appeals to the imagination excite the mind by showing resemblance • Appeals to the passions work by way of sympathy • When pleasure is the end of an appeal to the imagination, the artistry can be evident. • When moving the passions is the end, the appeals should be short and striking, not detailed, and the artistry concealed. • Appeals to the will combine reasoning with passion and end in moving the reader to action.10 CONCLUSION

These beginning sections of POR make quite clear what Campbell’s intentions are and how he understands the nature of his contribution to the rhetorical tradition. He does not intend to offer a “new” rhetoric that will challenge the Ancients: Considerable progress had been made by the ancient Greeks and Romans, in devising the proper rules of composition. . . . And I must acknowledge that, as far as I have been able to discover, there has been little or no improvement in this respect made by the moderns. The observations and rules transmitted to us from these distinguished names in the learned world, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, have been for the most part only translated by later critics, or put into modish dress and new arrangement. (POR, lxxv)

Rather than challenge the Ancients, his contribution will be to add “weight and evidence” (lxxv) to the achievement of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Their contributions were in to the first three stages of rhetoric. By articulating the theory of human nature or psychology that underpins their work, Campbell will contribute to the fourth stage. His goal is clearly not to usurp their authority but to deepen it. This basic intention is important to keep in mind in reading the rest of Campbell’s book because what may appear to us as a break with the Ancients, Campbell intends as a confirmation of their views. For example, Campbell’s definition of rhetoric on the opening page of POR— “That art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end”—, so often cited as a break with classical rhetoric, because it extends rhetoric beyond the classical forums to include any type of discourse that affects an audience,

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Campbell claims he chose because it “exactly corresponds to Tully’s idea of a perfect orator; Optimus est orator qui dicendo animos audientium et docet, et delectat, et permovet” (POR, note 1: p. 1). Similarly, when Campbell explains how, in discourse intended to move the passions, appeals to the imagination must operate on the reader subconsciously, as a “reflex sense,” he sees his contribution merely as providing an empiricist explanation for the classical dictum that for the passions to be moved the art must be concealed. Throughout POR Campbell seeks confirmation in ancient authors for his conclusions. Despite the modesty of his intentions, in deepening the tradition by merging it with empiricism, Campbell’s rhetoric becomes more than a redescription of Quintilian’s. He may not overturn classical rhetoric, but his focus on reception and on how we come to belief does turn classical rhetoric on its side. Moreover, the emphasis that the roles that imagination and emotion play in belief that Campbell understands from Hume and in Hume’s terms makes his rhetoric a significant departure from Aristotle’s. While remaining true to the concerns of classical authors and even to their conclusions, Campbell manages to evolve something new from his synthesis of tradition with empiricism, and the terms of this synthesis is what is, finally, most interesting about the Philosophy of Rhetoric.

FOUR

How Rhetoric “Holds” Logic Logic, Reasoning, and Evidence Philosophy of Rhetoric, Book I, Chapters IV, V, and VI

The relationship between rhetoric and logic has been a recurrent concern within the rhetorical tradition. For Plato in the Gorgias, the answer was clear: they are distinct, opposed disciplines. For Aristotle, the answer was more complicated. His concept of the enthymeme was an effort to import an informal, rough and ready logic into rhetoric. But for Aristotle, logic (his organon) was distinct from rhetoric and claimed a very different standard of proof. In chapter IV of Book I of the Philosophy of Rhetoric, Campbell takes up this same question—the question, in his own words, of how “rhetoric holds logic” (1988, 33). The modern reader who attempts to take in Campbell’s answer to the question of the relationship will likely be frustrated by two problems: terms that seem familiar but do not mean what they seem; and Campbell’s conflation of what is for us an important distinction between the psychological (how we come to belief ) and the epistemological (whether our beliefs meet the criteria of genuine knowledge). The problems result from Campbell’s synthesizing tendencies. As a philosopher, he wanted to merge the “old” logic with the “new.” As a divine, he wanted to believe that what was psychologically effective was also more likely to be true.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF LOGIC

In Logic and Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century, Wilbur Samuel Howell chronicles the changes in logic as discipline in the eighteenth century. Part of the

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story is by now familiar in our histories of rhetoric. The Renaissance critique of Scholasticism, the rise of Bacononian experimentalism, and the dominance of Lockean empiricism dethroned the syllogism from its privileged place in logic. Traditional, Aristotelian deduction or demonstration begins with a selfevident proposition, for example, “The whole is greater than the part.” Such statements can be falsified only at the cost of a contradiction in terms: the part cannot be greater than the whole. From such self-evident statements long chains of reasoning can derive conclusions that if valid are as true as the first self-evident premise. The Ancients recognized the superiority of conclusions from a priori statements over arguments based on factual statements or deductions from experience which could always be, at least theoretically, otherwise. The sun will almost certainly rise tomorrow, but it is not a contradiction in terms to say that it will not; and indeed, the sun never does actually “rise.” Even Aristotle, who certainly valued propositions based on what most people or the wise think about such empirical matters, clearly demarcated the genuine knowledge generated from first principles from the probable truths of facts interpreted by cultural or disciplinary consensus. Campbell played a belated but important role in the devaluation of the syllogistic reasoning that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In chapter VI of Book I, Campbell maintains that the syllogistic method is problematic for four reasons: (1) it is offered as a method of discovery when at best it is a way to present ideas; (2) even in mathematics and even as only a method of presentation, it is not efficient or effective since its formal rules are no guarantor of validity; (3) even as a method of reasoning only (as distinct from a method of discovery), syllogizing is of “no utility” because it leads the mind only to discover what is obvious from the first premise (63), because syllogisms necessarily “assume the point in question” (68); (4) even if they sometimes help guard the mind against “inadvertency” (67), syllogisms often also mislead and are hardly the most “expeditious” check against carelessness (69). Campbell’s conclusion is that historically the scholastic art of disputation, of which the syllogism is the major method, was based on the mistaken belief that effectively using the syllogism advances knowledge when in fact all it does is hinder “us from discerning that we are moving in a circle all the time” (70). Howell has nominated Campbell’s chapter on the syllogism as the “most famous chapter on logic in any rhetorical treatise ever written,” that its attack was to be “remembered for a long time,” its effects extending beyond rhetoric to logic itself (1971, 401).1 Concomitant with the attack on the syllogism, though less considered in our histories of rhetoric, was the effort in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to identify standards of empirical, probabilistic reasoning. The impetus for this movement was, of course, the work of Sir Francis Bacon and the rise of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science undertaken under a Baconian banner. In titling his book on method Novum Organum,

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Bacon signaled his engagement with Aristotle, whose methodological works constituted the “old” organon. In Bacon’s view, the old logic had, by the sixteenth century, substituted verbal consistency for a genuine search for truth. He castigated this logic for an exclusive emphasis on “words”; his new method would emphasize “works”—the experiments that were the bases for hypotheses and conclusions based on induction. This method, he insisted, had one great advantage over traditional logic: the results told us something about the relationship between our ideas and reality, not the relationship of one idea to another. Bacon was optimistic that a disciplined and collective experimental science could reach conclusions as certain in their own way as those of demonstration. But others doubted that natural philosophy could achieve the degree of certainty of geometry. We know that a rock will sink in water, but we know this only because we have seen it happen repeatedly; we do not know it as immediately and conclusively as we know that the part must be smaller than the whole. And the experimental method is painstaking and slow. It is a long way to achieving even a sufficient degree of probability. Although the results of natural philosophy were in some cases astonishingly impressive, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Bacon’s expectations for his method began to seem extravagant or premature in the context of normal science. Both scientists and scholars felt the need for a language to describe and discriminate among different types of certainty—the certainty based on demonstrations from first principles, the certainty of a theory confirmed by experiment, the certainty of a biblical text that is almost universally accepted, the certainty of an established moral precept such as the prohibition against murder. Could it make sense to talk of degrees of certainty? Can we be certain without absolute assurance? How does the mind come to assent to a proposition? And is assent a question of objective evidence or a feeling of confidence in our conclusions? These questions prompted considerable reflection on certainty and probability, knowledge and opinion, inference and the process of assent. Surprisingly, the origin of this discussion was not within the covers of the Transactions of the Royal Society, but within sectarian religious polemic. As Henry G. Van Leeuwen has shown, the debate began over the questions of authority and certainty in doctrinal matters and biblical hermeneutics. According to Van Leeuwen, the analysis of “certainty” was initiated by Protestant polemicists countering the claim of Roman Catholic theologians that only an infallible authority (the Papacy and Church Councils) could assure religious truth.2 Protestant theologians, including William Chillingworth (1602–44) and John Tillotson (1630–94), argued that the Papacy’s claims to infallibility were not well-founded and that proclaiming a source infallible did not make it so.3 In place of the proclamations of Popes, Church Councils, and an oral tradition, Chillingworth and Tillotson advance Scripture as a “rule of Faith,” a sufficient basis for establishing truth—more permanent and reliable

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than Church tradition or Papal proclamations. But while these liberal Anglican divines advanced Scripture as a sufficient authority, they acknowledged that Scripture is in some places ambiguous and that the lessons to be read and applied are subject to varied, legitimate interpretations. Moreover, even when certainty could be achieved, as it could (they felt) on essential matters, the certainty was not of the same nature as the certainty achieved through a deduction from a self-evident premise. The points made in the context of these religious debates that reappear and eventually influence Campbell’s chapter v are these: • That the degree of certainty to be expected from an investigation needs to be proportioned to the nature of the question asked. • That in matters of religion, it is impossible to reach a certainty comparable to demonstration in which the contrary involves a contradiction in terms (Van Leeuwen 1970, 44). • That in doctrinal matters that depend on the interpretation of Scripture, we can achieve moral certainty, a level not equal to the certainty of a demonstration, but “certain enough, morally certain, as certain as the nature of the thing will bear, so certain we may be and God requires no more” (Chillingworth 1844, 127–28; Van Leeuwen 1970, 27). • That a proposition meets the standard of moral certainty when a “prudent and considerate Man” would see no “reasonable cause” to doubt (Tillotson 1728, 2: 110; Van Leeuwen 1970, 34). • That while degrees of certainty differ, propositions derived from our sense experience that meet the level of moral certainty are true because a Providential God would not design us to be deceived: “we may be assured that the frame of our understanding is not a cheat, but that our faculties are true” (Tillotson, Works 2: 584; Van Leeuwen, 34). Gradually, the standard of moral certainty became not only the basis for a rule of faith, but the general standard for empirical certainty in all matters. The migration from religious polemic to the halls of science comes about through the work of such men as John Wilkins, who was not only the Anglican Bishop of Chester, but also among the founders of the Royal Society, and friend to Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Thomas Sprat, and John Locke. Wilkins identifies three levels of certainty: Physical, Mathematical, and Moral (1683, 5). Physical certainty is the sense we have from our external or internal senses; for example, from the external senses, “Nothing can be more manifest and plain to me, than that I now see something which hath the appearance of such a colour or figure, or, from the internal senses, “that I have in my mind such a thought, desire or purpose and do feel within myself a certain power of determining my own actions, which is called Liberty” (7). The confidence in both

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senses is immediate and virtually absolute, according to Wilkins. Similarly, with regard to mathematical certainty, assent seems compelled: “Tis not possible for any man in his wits . . . to believe otherwise, but that the whole is greater than the part; That contradictions cannot both be true; That three and three make six; That four is more than three” (7). With regard to moral certainty, our confidence that night will follow day or that our house will not collapse upon us, “though there may be no natural necessity, that such things must be so, and that they cannot possibly be otherwise, without implying a Contradiction; yet may they be so certain as not to admit of any reasonable doubt concerning them” (Wilkins, 8–9). From his discussion of each type, it is clear that Wilkins’ distinctions between different degrees of certainty rest on our experience of the mental operations that each type prompts. As Van Leeuwen points out, Wilkins seems to equate certainty with a feeling, as he talks often about the degree to which a stimulus satisfies the mind. The criteria for certainty, if they began as logical, have become psychological (1970, 63). This discussion of degrees of certainty provides a helpful, interpretative context for an understanding of Book IV of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, which, with Wilkins’ Natural Religion, can serve as primer for a reading chapters IV–VI of POR. Locke’s intention is obviously consonant with the effort to identify the grounds of reasonable assent: as Van Leeuwen notes, the Essay can be seen as an effort to articulate a ground for reasonable assent that succumbs neither to dogmatism or skepticism (1970, 123). But Locke rejects the possibility of achieving certain knowledge through empiricism so in this sense his work stands in contrasts with that of Chillingworth, Tollotson, and Wilkins. According to Locke our knowledge “is only conversant about [our ideas]”; as a result what we can know for certain is only the relationship between ideas—either within propositions that are self-evident or as the conclusions of properly conducted demonstrations from these self-evident propositions. Knowledge based on self-evident propositions, Locke calls “Intuitive”; knowledge based on valid deductions from these first principles, he calls “Demonstrative.” Campbell’s discussion of proof within POR was influenced by this tradition, especially by Wilkins and Locke. Campbell’s categories of evidence and his specific terminology are similar to Wilkins’ and Locke’s, and, more importantly, he, too, adapts phenomenological categories for judging proofs, the sense that “feelings of certainty” are crucial in assessing evidence. The taxonomy of evidence Campbell sets forth in chapter V is set forth in table 4.1. Before we can discuss each type of evidence we need to attend to Campbell’s terminology, which is deceivingly simple, because terms familiar to modern readers turn out to mean something quite different, even the opposite of what they mean today. For example, if “evidence” for us today means “facts and

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I. Intuitive Evidence; that is evidence to our intuition that brings about immediate assent A. Self-evident, mathematical axioms: e.g., “Part cannot be greater than the whole” B. Consciousness or our immediate acquiescence to sense data C. Common sense: “original” knowledge, common to all sane people: e.g., sun will rise II. Deductive Evidence that is, evidence that follows from a reasoning process A. Scientific [mathematical] reasoning: Demonstration. B. Moral evidence or inductive reasoning from experience or experiment. 1. Direct Experience 2. Analogy 3. Testimony 4. Calculation of Chances

reasons presented in support of a conclusion,” its meaning in Wilkins and Campbell is much broader: “the several [reasoned]ways whereby men come to the knowledge or belief of any thing” (Wilkins, Natural Religion, 1). In POR, “evidence” is what brings us to belief or assent in any context. Similarly “deduction” as George Campbell uses the term is not opposed to induction but refers to any reasoning process, including induction. The opposite of deduction is intellection or intuition. Most importantly, the distinction between the two broad types of evidence—intuition and deduction—is on the basis of the speed of mental operations and our awareness of them. Finally, Campbell divides deductive assent into “scientific” and “moral.” The distinction between these types of evidence is not between the transcultural knowledge that modern science makes claim to and the culturally contingent beliefs that are rhetoric’s province. “Scientific” means “certain knowledge” and is confined to mathematics or demonstrations from self-evident premises. Moral evidence refers to that which produces “moral certainty,” to conclusions based on reasoning from experience—including reasonings about nature’s laws. Campbell’s division of evidence into Intuitive and Deductive emphasizes the different mental processes that the different types of assent entail. We assent to “intuitive evidence” immediately—involuntarily. Mathematical propositions are Campbell’s primary example: we grant self-evident axioms in geometry “as soon as the terms are understood” (1988, 36). No reasoning process can or need contribute to this process: assent is immediate or not at all. What is most interesting is that Campbell stresses the speed of the process more than its objective validity: the faster the process, the more nat-

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ural it must be; the more natural, the more reliable the evidence: “Nay, in point of time, the discovery of the less general truths has the priority, not from their superior evidence, but solely from this consideration, that the less general are sooner objects of perception to us, the natural process of the mind, in the acquisition of its ideas, being from particular things to universal notions, and not inversely” (36). Campbell discusses some of the objections to intuitive evidence: (1) that what was presented as a conclusion was in fact a definition; (2) that while axioms are presented as distinct truths, they in fact are versions of “whatever is, is”; and (3) as a result, no new knowledge can be deduced syllogistically from intuitive evidence. Campbell grants these objections but wants to be sure to leave a place for demonstration within any discussion of reasoning. Though the method can be misapplied, within algebra this axiomatic method has produced the “most astonishing discoveries” (37). Though Campbell does attack the syllogism as evidence in many contexts, he insists on its importance in mathematics. But what is most important in Campbell’s discussion of intuitive evidence is that he emphasizes the speed of mental operations, not conventional validity. Intuitive evidence or assent to self-evident axioms is powerful because it results in an almost automatic assent. This is a rhetorical standard—at least rhetorical by the measure of Campbell’s theory with its premium on rhetoric that is “natural.” Campbell next discusses a second type of intuitive evidence, a type that arises not in mathematics but in actual experience, which he calls “consciousness.” An example is the assent we immediately grant to the reality of sense impressions: that this grey cat before me is similar but not identical to my black cat. Campbell’s description reveals that his confidence in this type of evidence does not rest on objective criteria—that our sense perceptions conform to reality, though he probably believes this is the case—but rests, again, on the nature of our response—its involuntary nature and its speed. We have a “perfect assurance” in our own existence and a feeling of “absolute certainty” that our sensations and passions are real and not imagined. This is the category of evidence that John Wilkins calls “physical evidence” (Natural Religion, 2–4). Campbell, as does Wilkins, specifically includes under this category the confidence we have in our “internal senses”: we grant immediate, involuntary assent to the conclusion that this building is beautiful based on the immediate pleasure we experience as it comes into our view. Campbell’s brief analysis here of the aesthetic sense or taste has additional implications for rhetoric because of the importance he places on a “concealed art” for rhetorical success in certain types of discourse, including persuasion. At the level of the internal sense, the artistry of an appeal is covert, that is, subconscious. If an aesthetic appeal operates at the level of intuition—immediately and reflexively—it complements appeals to the passions or reason that require a more deliberate process.

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The third type of intuitive evidence (or assent) derives from “Common Sense.” Campbell references Claude Buffier, Thomas Reid, and James Beattie, though Campbell maintains that his understanding of common sense is somewhat narrower than Reid’s. For Reid the confidence we have that our sense impressions are a reliable source of knowledge about reality is a most prominent instance of common sense, while Campbell classifies belief in the reliability of our senses under consciousness. What is the ground for our belief that, in Campbell’s terms, “the course of nature will be the same to-morrow that it is to-day?” (40). On this belief rests the experimental method because if nature is not uniform in its laws, nothing can be predicted based on experiments. Yet David Hume insisted that our knowledge of the uniformity of nature’s laws rested only on experience, in effect, on custom—not, from a philosophical viewpoint, a very reliable source. Campbell and Reid recoiled from the skepticism implied in Hume’s critique. Campbell agrees with Reid, who wanted to rest the conclusion on the uniformity and predictability of nature on an “original and natural” basis that was somehow “part of that furniture which nature hath given to the human understanding.” (Inquiry, 268). Campbell similarly insists that these basic beliefs of common sense are “primary principles” (40). He grants that these principles are not self-evident propositions: the opposite of them could be true without contradiction. But he insists that they are so fundamental to human thought that, quoting Buffier, to doubt them, nevertheless “implies insanity.” Those who doubt seriously that the day will follow night are not sane. Reid’s common sense principles may not meet the “contradiction” test, but they do meet this “insanity” test. The evidence from consciousness and common sense provides, in effect, the first principles (or warrants, in Toulmin’s terms) that provide the basis for the confidence we have in reasoning from experience or experiment. The second broad type of evidence or assent that Campbell identifies is Deduction. The key difference between deductive and intuitive assent for Campbell is the speed of the mental operations and the degree of consciousness. Deduction refers to any process of assent that involves a reasoning process— either reasoning from the first principles of intellection, as occurs in demonstration, or reasoning inductively from consciousness and commonsense. Campbell divides deductive assent into “scientific” and “moral.” Scientific assent is the conclusion, not of the experimental method, but of a demonstration and is usually mathematical—called “scientific” because of its certainty, a use of the term sanctioned by logic books. With regard to demonstration, rhetoric “hath little to do. Simplicity of diction, and precision in arrangement, whence results perspicuity, are . . . all the requisites. The proper province of rhetoric is the second, or moral evidence; for to the second belong all decisions concerning fact, and things without us” (43). Moral evidence or assent (as discussed earlier) is not confined to matters of morals and values, but includes all factual, experiential grounds for assent,

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including the experimental method in science. Campbell’s list of differences between moral and scientific evidence is familiar: the opposite of moral evidence, which is to say the opposite of conclusions based on experience or experiment, is possible; and moral evidence admits degrees, is often only probably true, and depends on an accumulation of facts, not a single chain of reasoning. It is the product of sense and memory and, though it can be systematized, is a natural process since everyone infers from particular experiences some general principles that are then stored in memory (46–48). This process does involve the forming of a judgment (which is why Campbell considers it under deductive evidence), but, in contrast to the deductive process, the forming of a judgment by moving from the particular to the general is “so truly instantaneous, and so perfectly the result of feeling and association, that the forming of it [the judgment] totally escapes our notice” (49). This is an important observation because it is an explanation for why induction is more natural than demonstration and, therefore, more effective rhetorically. Thus, we see that moral evidence is the province of rhetoric not only because it is concerned with contingent situations of the type rhetoric is traditionally assigned, but also, in Campbell’s psychological approach, because the reasoning process that moves from particular example to general conclusion is more common, more natural, and therefore more rhetorically efficacious than reasoning from the general to the particular. Campbell takes up in Part III the subdivisions of moral evidence: assent based on experience, analogy, testimony, and calculation of chances. But before he does, he describes in Part II (46–49) the basic processes that inform them all under the heading “The nature and origin of Experience.” This heading is confusing because Campbell calls one of the specific types of moral evidence “Experience.” Campbell explains that all experiential or moral assent involves the mental operations that respond to sense impressions, which are stored in memory. He offers a number of examples—how we informally reason our way to a realization of the fact of gravity, for example. The process does, he notes, look like one “necessarily resulting from the very constitution of the mind,” which might, then, put it in the same category as consciousness and common sense. Especially as these operations take place in children, it is a natural process involving “little or no reflection.” But even our ability to judge distance involves not merely our eyes but an additional mental operation that draws on experience as stored in memory. This process, though it is subconscious and involuntary, differs in degree, not kind, from the more deliberate process of the experiential reasoning, including the experimental method. Of more importance than Campbell’s resolution of the differences and similarities between seemingly automatic and seemingly critical cognitive processes is the fact that the differences are important to him. He sees the knowledge of how the mind processes stimuli as knowledge crucial to the rhetorician. An orator who could exploit the automatic, involuntary, immediate reasoning process described here

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would more effectively achieve the audience’s assent than the rhetor who depended on the self-conscious, deliberate process of reasoning from a syllogism or by showing the similarities and accounting for the exceptions in an inductive process. Campbell now turns to his three types of moral evidence (which he lists under “Moral Reasoning”). From his discussion of assent that arises from experience, it becomes clear why Campbell and others in the period call reasoning from particular facts to a general conclusion “deduction,” rather than induction. Campbell’s example is of the field botanist who notes that a flower is monopetalous with seven flowers. Based only on this one example, how is it that the botanist can legitimately conclude with certainty that all other flowers of this variety are also monopetalous? Because behind the botanist’s conclusion is the principle that all flowers that produce petals from one corolla are monopetalous, a conclusion that is itself based on the unexpressed premise (from common sense) that nature follows uniform laws. In other words, what appears to be induction based on a very limited sample is really deduction from a incontrovertible first premise. By contrast, there is no similar botanical axiom for the number of flowers that a monopetalous plant produces. Many more specimens of the same variety of flower would be required to produce a conclusion that would be based on similar reasoning but a conclusion of lower level of certainty. Campbell insists that the conclusions based on evidence from experience can be certain and that, therefore, empirically based conclusions are knowledge (50), in contrast not only to Hume but to Locke, who judged empirically based conclusions as only probable and therefore technically (at least) not knowledge. Campbell maintains that natural history, astronomy, chemistry, natural theology and other disciplines depend on moral evidence of this type (52–53). The second type of moral evidence is evidence from analogy. Evidence from analogy leads the mind to a conclusion by an inferential process similar to that by which the mind forms generalizations from experience, Campbell points out. We know from experience (experiment, observation) that blood circulates in the human body. We conclude that sap circulates in plants on evidence from analogy. Locke had written similarly of the relationship of inferences and arguments from analogy to experience (1959, IV: xvi), a chapter that is influential here, as also is Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion. After this explanation, Campbell considers the nature and use of evidence from analogy. In its nature, analogy is similar to the mind’s natural association of things on the basis of resemblance (one of the principles of association that the imagination naturally follows). The difference between the associational principle of resemblance and the deductive process of analogy is that analogy involves more “thought,” more conscious comparison, than does the associational resemblance that is instantaneous. Reasoning from analogy is of limited value in rhetorical contexts, not only because the conclusions reached are at

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best only probable, but also because in rhetoric a less reflective, quicker response from the audience is preferred. But analogy is effective in refutations, where a deliberate, reflective reasoning process is to be expected. Thus, analogy works “like those weapons which, though they cannot kill the enemy, will ward his blows,” as Bishop Butler’s effective refutation of arguments for atheism demonstrates (1961, 54). Campbell’s third type of moral evidence is testimony. Campbell begins with a reference to his own Dissertation on Miracles (discussed in chap. 9). Hume maintained that our acceptance of testimony is based on experience: over time we come to the conclusion that we can ordinarily accept someone’s account if we have no reason to doubt her or his veracity. But when an account violates the uniform experience of humankind, as the Evangelists’ accounts of the raising of Lazarus does, for example, then we must choose between two types of evidence from experience—the experience we have of the general veracity of testifiers against the experience we have of the uniformity of natural laws. In such a case we have a primi facie reason for withholding assent to the testimony. Campbell disagrees with Hume’s logic. He appeals to the experience of children, who accept testimony implicitly until they learn to be skeptical, as evidence that our trust in witnesses precedes our experience and is not, therefore, a result of experience. Our belief in testimony is natural, in the sense that it is unlearned and automatic. In the absence of some specific reason to doubt testimony, “we are, by an original principle of our nature (analogous to that which compels our faith in memory), led to give an unlimited assent” (55). Testimony is, therefore, closer to evidence from Consciousness than experience. The suggestion that mental operations that are original or primitive, automatic and instantaneous, should, for this reason, be trusted is identical to the argument that Reid makes for belief in commonsense principle. Hume is wrong to insist that testimony is but a weakened type of evidence from experience. While our faith in testimony is initially prior to experience, experience does, however, teach us to be critical of testimony. The extent of our belief in the reliability of testimony should depend on many factors: “The reputation of the attester, his manner of address, the nature of the fact attested, the occasion of giving testimony, the possible or probable design in giving it, the disposition of the hearers to whom it was given, and several other circumstances, have all considerable influence in fixing the degree of credibility” (55). Campbell maintains that the most important factor in judging the reliability is the number of witnesses. Numerous witnesses and no evidence of collusion trumps all countering factors. Campbell’s list is basically the same as Locke’s, though Locke was certainly more skeptical of the reliability of testimony than Campbell is (Essay, IV: 366). For Campbell, “Testimony is capable of giving us absolute certainty . . . even of the most miraculous fact” (55). The last type of moral evidence is that based on what Campbell calls the “Calculations of Chances.” Campbell’s discussion here is interesting for its

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comparison of the way we ordinarily calculate the relationship of a cause to an effect and the mathematical and statistical ways in which this can also be done. It is also interesting for the way Campbell integrates the consideration of mathematical models of probability into his theory of rhetoric. The section is sufficiently difficult to justify a brief summary. If chance is the absence of cause, it cannot be subject to analysis. But chance is the ignorance of cause, and we should understand a chance event as one influenced by a number of factors, no one of which is determinative. When a die is cast, we know that the “principles of uniform experience” (i.e. the laws of physics) will cause it to fall and land on a side. But the causes influencing the die to landing on one side rather than another (for example, the precise way in which it is thrown) remain hidden and beyond our power to observe, so that, as far as we are concerned, “the chance is equal for every one of the six sides” (57). If, however, five of the sides were marked with a dagger and one side with an asterisk, “I should . . . say, there were five chances that the die would turn up the dagger, for one that it would turn up the asterisk” (57). How does the logic by which we identify causes in the situations such as the cast of the die differ from the way we identify causes in other situations? In the case of the die, I “reckon the probability . . . not from numbering and comparing the events after repeated trials,” as I (subconsciously) would in attributing causal relationships in human behavior or in physical laws, but without any trial, by calculating the possibilities. Though these situations are different, the “effect on the mind” is similar. As I watch the die coming to land on the table or as I predict whether the closeness of the dog to the fire will cause singed hair, the “degree of hesitancy” in my belief of the prediction “is proportioned to the number of chances on the opposite side” (57). It is true that in statistical science, the degree of probability is determined demonstratively as actuarial science now predicts longevity on the basis statistical histories. Lorraine Daston has traced the rise of quantitative methods of calculating probabilities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Daston shows, the movement toward quantifiable methods is related to the effort to articulate in philosophical terms a standard of probability for judging the validity of empirical statements and predictions in the contexts of weighing the rational basis for religious belief, the weight of evidence in a courtroom, and the reliability of a scientist’s predictions surveyed earlier in this chapter. Mathematical probability developed separately with attention more to such practical matters as actuarial calculations for purposes of the selling and purchasing of insurance. Campbell’s interesting discussion combines the two, and he also makes a distinction in quantifiable methods. Calculations concerning the role of the dice are a priori calculations of probability: they are unaffected by experience. Statistical probability is an a posteriori calculation—based on the history of past occurrences. Daston’s history shows how only slowly did mathematicians come to appreciate the difference. Campbell is clearly aware of both models.

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Campbell’s comparison of the mathematical way of determining the fall of a die to the way the mind ordinarily calculates probability was probably influenced by Hume. In the Treatise, Hume provides an impressively detailed description of how the mind combines the several apparent causes that shape expectation in matters such as the roll of a die (Treatise I: xi–xii). Hume’s discussion occurs in the context of his attempt to explain apparent causal relationships as contiguous or consecutive relationships that the imagination infers as causal. Campbell’s language in this section seems to reflect Hume’s explanation—that ordinarily we determine causation “from experience,” by “comparing events after repeated trials” (57), which is to say that we come to a belief in cause but lack knowledge of it. Yet, only a few pages earlier, Campbell seemed to embrace Reid’s common sense theory, which explains the mind’s acceptance of causation as “original,” prior to experience, and therefore analogous to a self-evident axiom. But the important point is that while Campbell seems confused, from the rhetorical perspective he adopts, the difference doesn’t matter. He no doubt would argue that, from a psychological perspective, we have a general sense of causation, whether as an original principle or through the habit of associations, and we test relationships against this hypothesis as we come to provide explanations or make predictions. All the orator need be concerned with is whether it is more efficacious to begin with a causal explanation and draw a specific conclusion or work toward the generalization from examples supporting the relationship. Campbell consistently argues for the later because, he says, it conforms to the way the mind ordinarily or naturally works. Campbell concludes this chapter with a comparison of the evidence derived from demonstration (scientific evidence) with the evidence derived from experience, his intention being to raise the status of evidence from experience: “the prerogatives of demonstration are not so considerable, as on a cursory view one is apt to imagine” (58). When viewed “in themselves” (or from the perspective of logic) demonstration seems superior; when viewed in application and from the perspective of their effects (from the perspective of rhetoric), our judgment might be different. Confidence in the generalizations formed from the evidence of experience assumes the reliability of memory, which is why the reliability of memory is one of Reid and Campbell’s common sense principles. But the lengthily demonstration of a geometric proof also depends on a good memory: “in spite of the pride of matesis, no demonstration whatever can produce or reasonably ought to produce, a higher degree of certainty than that which results from the vivid representations of memory” (59). Locke makes a similar point about the demands demonstration puts on memory (Essay IV. xii: 408), though more interesting than the similarity of his point to Campbell’s is the strikingly different implications that Campbell draws. Locke is merely attempting to show that a demonstration deduced from a self-evident, intuitive premise is as valid as the premise itself if the

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demonstration is properly conducted, though it may not seem so because of the difficulty of following a lengthily proof. From Campbell’s (rhetorical) perspective, a feeling of certainty is the criterion so that any proof is only as good as its degree of vivacity. The fact that mathematicians check and recheck their calculations is evidence of low feelings of certainty, of low-levels of vivacity. On the other hand we have a feeling of certainty that day will follow night, to the extent that we would not believe even an expert who claimed otherwise.4 Campbell reinforces these points by reference to practicing mathematicians who must assume the truth of many experience-based conclusions to carry out their work. These points of comparison do not, of course, address the objective superiority of mathematical proof over experimental procedures. They do, however, prepare the way for Campbell’s general claim: that arguments that move from particular point to general conclusion are more rhetorically efficacious than demonstrations, because they mimic the way the mind “naturally” works. The emphasis on the psychological effects of the phenomenological quality of proofs that has characterized my discussion of Campbell’s types of evidence to this point is perhaps a slight distortion of his text, for, within his discussion, Campbell intersperses remarks about the validity of conclusions based on each type of evidence as well; that is, he considers epistemological criteria as well as psychological ones. He insists, for example, contra Locke, that evidence from experience produces genuine knowledge, and, contra Hume, that testimony can yield “absolute certainty.” But my discussion is only a slight distortion that results from my making a distinction between the psychological and phenomenological, on the one hand, and the methodological and epistemological on the other that Campbell wanted to blur. Campbell is hardly alone in the eighteenth century in his merging of the psychological with the epistemological. Locke is the source for this confusion, or for what seems to us, since Immanuel Kant, to be muddled thinking. As discussed in chapter 2 above, Locke’s stated goal in the Essay on Human Understanding was to determine the limits of what the human mind can know, an epistemological inquiry into the grounds of knowledge and the basis for its validity, but he approaches the question of knowledge not by way of defining validity but by describing the mind’s operations—how the mind forms ideas from sense data. As Richard Rorty writes, “Why should Locke have thought that a causal account of how one comes to have a belief should be an indication of the justification one has for that belief?” (Rorty 1979, 141). I won’t attempt to answer Rorty’s question for Locke (Rorty does), but for Campbell the answer is this: Campbell wants to believe that our faculties, properly trained and continually disciplined so that they function as they naturally would, can know the truth. As he says at the outset of this section on evidence, “. . . the properties of our clear and adequate ideas can be no other than what the mind clearly perceives them to be”(36), a sentence that echoes part 4 of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method: a benevolent God is the guarantor of the

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truth of our clear and distinct ideas. Moreover, God-the-Designer has further helped reconcile psychology with epistemology by having the mind take pleasure in the truth. Campbell writes, “In order to satisfy the mind, in most cases, truth, and in every case, what bears the semblance of truth, must be presented to it” (33–34).5 While we would today put pressure on the distinction between truth and verisimilitude, Campbell is reassured by the fact that we are so designed that “truth is always an object of the mind” (34).

CONCLUSION

At the outset of chapter vi, Campbell characterizes what he has provided in the chapters we have been discussing as a “natural logic,” a logic formed on the way the mind normally forms inferences and grants assent. Campbell is the first to incorporate this Lockean, “natural logic” into rhetoric. And his presentation is theoretically coherent. Within a theory of rhetoric that features reception and is based on mental operations, which the Philosophy of Rhetoric is, logic’s traditional epistemological categories of proof, validity, and method would be superseded (though not altogether replaced) by rhetoric’s psychological criteria and by the speed and automaticity of assent. The satisfaction the understanding takes in the truth is greater if it follows immediately upon hearing a discourse or reading an argument. A rhetorical presentation based on this assumption is effective because it resembles the way the mind normally or naturally would respond to ordinary sense impressions. This process can also be trusted because the Designer has assured that our faculties, though imperfect, can, if informed by faith and disciplined by reason, still be trusted.

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FIVE

Imagination, “Resemblance,” and Vivacity

In attempting to delineate Campbell’s analysis of imaginative response, we are confronted with one of the unhappy implications of Campbell’s prefatory statement that he regards POR as a “series of Essays” that were the product of intermittent work on rhetoric over a twenty-five year period. Campbell’s description has the tone of disclaimer—an admission that POR lacks the unity of sustained, coherent argument. The implication of this description is especially troublesome when attempting to understand his analysis of the imagination, because key concepts related to the role that imaginative appeal plays in his theory are confused, are important, and have, in our time, been contested. Briefly, Campbell changed his mind concerning the role that the imagination plays in cognition in the course of the twenty-five years in which he wrote the Philosophy of Rhetoric, but he did not change his text, and as a result, readers are confronted with an unstable vocabulary, especially a shifting sense of key words including “resemblance” and “vivacity.”1 The ultimate cause of the confusion turns out to be one of the virtues of Campbell’s general approach to rhetoric: his effort to merge classical concepts with modern eighteenth-century theory. One of the consequences of Campbell’s confusing vocabulary is the wellknown scholarly disagreement between Professors Lloyd F. Bitzer and Dennis R. Bormann on the meaning and originality of Campbell’s concept of rhetorical vivacity. According to Bitzer, Campbell’s concept of vivacity is strikingly innovative. On his account, Campbell recognized that Hume’s epistemology provided an opening for rhetoric: ideas can be made to resemble sense impressions by rhetorical means, specifically by Campbell’s concept of rhetorical vivacity. “Vivacity, or the liveliness of ideas—which was, according to Hume, the essential quality of belief—became the dominant concept in Campbell’s rhetoric,” Bitzer wrote (“Hume’s Philosophy in George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric,” 140). Dennis R. Bormann, on the other hand,

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denies that Campbell was influenced by Hume or that Campbell’s concept of vivacity is an innovative concept. For Bormann, Campbell’s concept of vivacity is unoriginal and uninteresting, a new name for a traditional idea—“the old and traditional rhetorical-poetic doctrine of enargeia [or detailed description]” (“George Campbell’s Cura Prima on Eloquence—1758”). Because Campbell is attempting to marry classical rhetoric with modern empiricism, in a sense both views are right. Campbell begins with the literal and visualist’s view of vivacity found in Roman rhetoric. But in the end Campbell understood vivacity as a metaphor for all the stylistic means that enable rhetorical discourse to resemble in its impact a primary sense impression—an idea that has its origin in the role that the imagination plays in Hume’s epistemology.

TWO VIEWS OF THE IMAGINATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

If the inconsistencies in Campbell’s text make POR often a frustrating read, they also bring at least one compensation. In tracing the changes in Campbell’s text, we can track an evolving discussion in the eighteenth century about the nature of aesthetic response, especially to language—a discussion that is of more than historical interest, because it raises some fundamental questions about the nature of our response to language. In 1712, in his very popular series on the imagination in the Spectator, Joseph Addison characterized the imagination as a pleasure-seeking faculty that finds gratification in the great or sublime, the uncommon or novel, and the beautiful (Spectator, No. 412: 141–45). Addison understands these stimuli and the imagination generally in visual terms. According to Addison, sight is “the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses “ (Spectator, No. 411: 138), and the imagination, as its etymological root confirms, is especially receptive to graphic depictions. Indeed, for Addison imaginative response is virtually always linked to images. He lists two types of pleasures that gratify the imagination. The “primary” pleasures of the imagination “proceed from such objects as are present to the eye”; the “secondary” pleasures are those “which flow from ideas of visible objects,” absent but recalled or fictitious (139), including word painting. Even while acknowledging that language is a conventional, symbolic system that does not appeal to the imagination as a painting does (Spectator, No. 416: 159), Addison singles out descriptive writing as the best way to appeal to the imagination: “Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves” (160). Addison’s description of the imagination in ocular terms and his sense that the imagination responds almost exclusively to visual stimuli or word painting makes visual response paradigmatic of aesthetic response. This conception of imaginative response is echoed in the eighteenth-century discus-

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sion of ut pictura poesis—that poetry is best conceived as a speaking picture. The phrase has its origin in Horace, but as Jean Hagstrum has demonstrated, the eighteenth-century interpretation of the phrase to mean that poetry should imitate painting rested on a misunderstanding that resulted from an error in punctuation in a corrupt text.2 As a result of the error, the idea that poetry and oratory and the verbal arts generally are best if they are speaking pictures was lent an Horation authority—though a counterfeit one. With regard to rhetoric, perhaps the most important discussion of the role that word painting plays in oratory occurs in the context of discussions of enargeia. Enargeia (in Latin, evidentia) is the term for detailed verbal description that is intended to create a picture of a place, person, or action in the mind of the listener.3 Quintilian, who discusses evidentia at a number of places in the Institutes (e.g., IV. ii: 63–65; VI. ii: 32; VIII. iii: 61–71, IX. 2: 40–44), at one point (VI. ii) suggests that vivid descriptions can produce a response in the audience similar to that prompted by an actual prop—such as the orator’s display of the bloody toga that was carried at Gaius Caesar’s funeral procession: “From such impressions comes that enargeia which Cicero [Part. Or vi: 20] calls illumination [illustrate] and actuality [evidentia] which makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence” (Institutes VI. ii: 32). At VIII. iii: 63, he describes the importance of appealing not merely to the hearing of the judge but “to display the facts in their living truth to the eyes of the mind [oculis mentis ostendi].” Enargeia is certainly one effective way in which an orator engages the listener’s imagination. Campbell will bring Hume’s theory of vivacity to explain what Quintilian observed and, in the process, complicate his own understanding of imaginative response to language.

IMAGINATION AND COGNITION: DAVID HUME’S TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE

David Hume’s description of imaginative appeal is not uninfluenced by Addison and Roman rhetoric, but while in Addison and the Ancients imaginative response is a belated response to surface features of a text, in Hume imaginative response is a primary element in the cognitive process itself. For Addison and Quintilian, orators appeal to the imagination to win the audience’s attention and poets to please while teaching—appeals that follow after discovery or invention. In contrast, for Hume, the imagination plays the major role in the way we come to belief. Belief is not a matter of demonstration or proof generally but primarily a matter of the way we experience an idea: “Wherein consists the difference betwixt believing and disbelieving any proposition?” Hume asks (I. vii: 143). Belief, he answers, “consists not in the nature and order of our

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ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind.” (I. vii: 146). We tend to believe ideas that are based on present, actual experience or on recalled actual experience because they are “more strong and lively” and have “more force and vitality” than abstract ideas subject to the operations of reason (Treatise I. V: 133–34). If an idea is presented in a lively way, that is with vivacity, we not only experience pleasure from it; we are more likely to believe it, because its impact on the mind would resemble a sense impression. Furthermore, the imagination plays a crucial role in inference according to Hume. In Hume’s description of cognition, the imagination is responsible for our ability to relate ideas. As discrete ideas or impressions impress on the mind, it is the imagination which combines them, inferring, for example, a causal relationship from ideas that seem to be in constant conjunction. We watch some who smoke cigarettes develop lung problems; before we can test for a relationship, the imagination infers a causal one. We see a wombat; it reminds us of a kangaroo; we create an idea of a marsupial, an abstraction that we could never know except by this power of the imagination to, by means of the principles of association, see relationships, including resemblance. Hume identified three such principles that guide the imagination in its ordinary inference-making activity: resemblance, contiguity (in time and place) and cause/effect. His principle point is that we know causation by experience and imagination, not by a priori prediction, demonstration, or reason (Treatise, 57–58). Finally, Hume does not present imaginative response in visual terms particularly. The mind he (and Locke) imagine is famously a tablet but it is not usually a slate tablet that is evoked but a wax tablet, a permeable surface subject to “impressions.” To describe how an idea “resembles” a sense impression, Hume sometimes draws on a visual vocabulary—ideas can be faint or marked, clear or obscure (147). But more often, Hume expresses the difference using a tactile imagery. Ideas we believe have greater “solidity and firmness” (146), greater “force” as they “strike upon the mind” (I. i: 49)—words that become synonymous for “liveliness” and “vivacity.” The metaphor for “resemblance” shifts from visual resemblance to a tactile one—from seeing to a smack up side the head.

THE IMAGINATION AND “RESEMBLANCE” IN POR

Campbell discusses imaginative response at three crucial points in POR: in his description of the faculties in Book I, chapter I; in his discussion of “Hearers” in Book I, chapter VII; and in his discussion of vivacity in Book III. We can trace this shifting sense of the imagination and of resemblance that characterized the eighteenth-century discussion in these sections. The discussion of the imagination in the first chapter of POR recalls the visual sense of this faculty of Addison and the ut pictura poesis tradition. Campbell writes as follows:

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The imagination is addressed by exhibiting to it a lively and beautiful representation of a suitable object. As in this exhibition, the task of the orator may, in some sort, be said, like that of the painter, to consist in imitation, the merit of the work results entirely from these two sources; dignity, as well as in the subject or the thing imitated, as in the manner of imitation; and resemblance, in the portrait or performance. Now the principal scope for this class being in narration and description, poetry, which is one mode of oratory, especially epic poetry, must be ranked under it. . . . But that kind of address of which I am now treating, attains the summit of perfection in the sublime, or those great and noble images, which, when in suitable colouring presented to the mind, do, as it were, distend the imagination with some vast conception, and quite ravish the soul. (3)

Campbell thinks of the imagination in literal, visual terms here: the orator creates word pictures that call up mental images in the reader’s mind. He even cites the section of Institutes (VI. ii: 29–30) in which Quintilian discusses visions or enargeia. By this understanding, art imitates nature in this sense: the word pictures resemble nature as realistic painting or a photograph does. This is the meaning of “resemblance” in the earliest sections of POR. It is significant that there is no mention of vivacity at this point. While Campbell does not mention vivacity in his discussion of the imagination in chapter I, vivacity is mentioned in his discussion of the imagination in chapter VII: [In addition to the audience understanding the discourse], the second thing requisite is that his [orator’s] reasoning be attended to; for this purpose the imagination must be engaged. Attention is prerequisite to every effect of speaking, and without some gratification in hearing, there will be no attention, at least of any continuance. Those qualities in ideas which principally gratify the fancy, are vivacity, beauty, sublimity, and novelty. Nothing contributes more to vivacity than striking resemblances in the imagery, which convey, besides, an additional pleasure of their own. (73)

This passage recalls Addison’s description in the Spectator, where the imagination is credited as being the avenue to securing attention because it seeks immediate “gratification,” which can be quickly provided by stylistic devices. Campbell then offers a list of qualities that bring pleasure to the imagination. The last three items—beauty, sublimity, and novelty—correspond to Addison’s three general “pleasures of the imagination,” in Spectator No. 412. While the list is traditional, since Campbell cites Addison’s Spectator on the imagination elsewhere in POR (9), we can be fairly certain that Addison is the source. But more important than the source of Campbell’s conception is the fact that Campbell, with the literal, visual understanding of the imagination in mind, links vivacity to “striking resemblances in the imagery.” As did the previous passage, this one understands “resemblance” in literal, visual terms:

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poetry or oratory appeals to the imagination by creating word pictures that resemble a referent. Vivacity is understood as word pictures: “Nothing contributes more to vivacity than striking resemblances in the imagery, which convey, besides, an additional pleasure of their own” (73). In this same section, however, Campbell examines the relationship of the imagination to belief, addressing specifically Hume’s view that belief is an imaginative response: But there is still a further end to be served by pleasing the imagination, than that of awakening and preserving the attention, however important this purpose alone ought to be accounted. I will not say with a late subtle metaphysician [David Hume], that “Belief consisteth in the liveliness of our ideas.” That this doctrine is erroneous, it would be quite foreign to my purpose to attempt here to evince. Thus much however is indubitable, that belief commonly enlivens our ideas; and that the lively ideas have a stronger influence than faint ideas to induce belief. But so far are these two from being coincident, that even this connexion between them, though common, is not necessary. Vivacity of ideas is not always accompanied with faith, nor is faith always able to produce vivacity. The ideas raised in my mind by the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, or the Lear of Shakespeare, are incomparably more lively than those excited by a cold but faithful historiographer. Yet I may give full credit to the languid narrative of the latter, though I believe not a single sentence in those tragedies. If a proof were asked of the greater vivacity in the one case than in the other . . . let these effects serve for arguments. The ideas of the poet give greater pleasure, command closer attention, operate more strongly on the passions, and are longer remembered. If these be not sufficient evidences of greater vivacity, I own I have no apprehension of the meaning which that author affixes to the term. (73–74)

Campbell denies Hume’s thesis—that the imagination has a fundamental role in cognition and that belief is largely a matter of how we experience ideas. He concedes that ideas with vivacity “give greater pleasure, command closer attention, operate more strongly on the passions, and are longer remembered” than ideas that lack vivacity. This formulation saps Hume’s thesis of its radical skepticism and turns it into a confirmation of what the rhetoricians have long taught—that rhetoric can make ideas forceful, moving, and memorable. The imagination is still responding to stylistic, surface features. But there is an important difference from the view he expressed previously in POR. Campbell has shifted his perspective from the means (imagery”) to ends (forceful, moving, memorable). This change is significant because it suggests that Campbell is moving toward a metaphorical understanding of vivacity: vivacity is language that has a certain type of impact—an impact that is like an actual sense impression. In the next paragraph (in Book I, chapter VII), Campbell further emphasizes his disagreement with Hume by comparing appeals to the judgment and appeals to the imagination.

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Where then lies the difference between addressing the judgment and addressing the fancy? and what hath given rise to the distinction between ratiocination and imagery. . . . ? It is evident, that though the mind receives considerable pleasure from the discovery of resemblance, no pleasure is received when the resemblance is such a nature as is familiar to every body. Such are those resemblances which result from the specific and generic qualities of ordinary objects. What gives the principal delight to the imagination, is the exhibition of a strong likeness, which escapes the notice of the generality of people. The similitude of man to man, eagle to eagle, sea to sea, or in brief, of one individual to another individual of the same species affects not the fancy in the least. . . . Again, the similarity of one species to another of the same genus, as of the lion to the tiger, or the alder to the oak, though this too be a considerable fund of argumentation, hardly strikes the fancy . . . inasmuch as the general properties, whereof every species participates, are obvious. (74)

The passage makes clear that Campbell understood Hume. Campbell maintains that Hume had collapsed an essential distinction between “ratiocination and imagery”—between appeals to the understanding or judgment and appeals to the imagination. Hume argued that we judge more true those ideas that the imagination experiences as “lively” or with “vivacity” or force and that we judge those relationships to be true that the imagination has inferred to be related, because they are linked by one of the three principles of association— contiguity, resemblance, and cause and effect. Campbell selects the principle of resemblance to make his point about the principles of association generally. The imagination responds to resemblances between things that are essentially unalike—the “exhibition of strong likeness, which escapes notice of the generality of people.” The judgment responds to comparisons of things that are essentially alike—things of the same genus. Argument from analogy, Campbell goes on to say, can appeal to both the judgment and the imagination. It is significant that he references Quintilian in support, citing Quintilian’s advice that the orator who makes an argument from analogy in presenting his narratio will both win the attention of the judge (because the comparison will appeal to his imagination), while convincing the judge by the strength of his argument. Rhetoric can appeal to both the imagination and the understanding but relies on different means to do so. Campbell has broadened his sense of imaginative appeal, but accepts Hume’s epistemology only in so far as it conforms to Quintilian. The extent to which Campbell’s understanding of imaginative appeal and vivacity is expanded in the course of POR becomes strikingly apparent in the opening section of Book III, whose subject is stylistic vivacity. Campbell defines vivacity as follows: . . . I come now to those qualities of style by which [the discourse] is adapted to please the imagination, and consequently to awake and fix the

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George Campbell attention. These I have already denominated vivacity and elegance, which correspond to the two sources whence . . . the merit of an address to the fancy immediately results. By vivacity of expression resemblance is attained, as far as language can contribute to the attainment. . . . (285)

This definition of vivacity and its relationship to resemblance is significantly different from the definition in chapter 1 of Book I, where Campbell had written: “Nothing contributes more to vivacity than striking resemblances in the imagery” (73), a sentence that supports this understanding of vivacity: vivacity is achieved through imagery and concrete diction that depicts graphically an actual scene. This sense of vivacity reflects rhetoric’s traditional preference for concrete language and imagery and supports Bormann’s claim that the concept is unoriginal. But here in Book III, the relationship between vivacity and resemblance is reversed. It is not that “resemblance” produces vivacity but that vivacity creates resemblance. This sentence supports Bitzer’s Humean interpretation of vivacity. It defines vivacity as embodying all stylistic devices that result in language having an impact on the hearer or reader that is analogous to the impact that a dramatic or sudden nonlinguistic sense impression has. It is an arresting, attention getting style. This is a significantly different view. Why did Campbell not resolve the differences and bring the early sections of his text into conformity with the later sections? One answer to that question is that the text is presented as a “series of Essays,” not a single, disciplined argument. Another explanation is that Campbell never felt that he had to choose between literal and metaphoric understandings of resemblance and vivacity. This is clear from the section from Book I, chapter VII, where he compares poetic conceit or metaphor to discursive comparison (74). Rather than attempt to arbitrate between the different views, Campbell collapsed distinctions. That the traditional definition of “resemblance” and Humean understandings of “resemblance” are not incommensurate may have been enough for Campbell to attempt to ignore differences and focus on similarities. In his defense, Campbell could argue that the meanings of “resemblance” coalesce at a higher level of generality. The poet’s ability to show us “resemblance” through metaphor is an instance of the poet’s perfecting what humans naturally do in creating new ideas by seeing their resemblance to others—as Hume has shown by identifying resemblance as one of the principles of association. Therefore the metaphor-producing faculty of the traditional imagination is only a special case of the universal principle of resemblance Hume identified. And rhetoric, which must appeal to both the imagination and the understanding, can draw on both. John Farquhar, a colleague of Campbell’s in the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen, merges the two in an unpublished paper that he read before the society in 1758: “On the nature [and] operations of the imagination, in which Mr. Hume’s theory of this faculty is particularly

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considered.” Campbell did also. Painting a detailed word picture (enargeia) is one way, albeit not the only way, for an orator to lend vivacity to discourse in a way that literally “resembles” the experience of a sense impression. Resemblance in the narrow construal (resemblance between word pictures and things) is one way of producing resemblance in the broader sense—resemblance between a response to an actual or recalled stimulus and a response to an imagined one, but hardly the only one. Vivacity for Campbell is a metaphor for all the ways in which stylistic choice directs attention, making an idea lively. In the end, vivid imagery is only one of the stylistic means that rhetoricians have to make an idea lively. Campbell provides in Book III an exhaustive analysis (131 pages!) of the stylistic means at the rhetor’s disposal, which I discuss in the chapter on style later in this book. Here, however is one example from Book III to illustrate how Campbell blends traditional rhetoric and empiricist philosophy to show how rhetorical discourse can be structured to mimic our encounter with nature. The example combines Hume’s account of how the mind comes to know cause and effect with the literal interpretation of ut pictura poesis. On Hume’s analysis, the mind does not come to know cause/effect through reason or by means of syllogisms but through experience, inductively, over time. Campbell summarizes, “All that comes under the cognizance of our senses, in the operations of either Nature or of Art, is the causes which precede, and the effects which follow. Hence is suggested to the mind the notion of power, agency, or causation” (366). We experience and know causation originally as a recurring pattern of consecutive, separate events, not as a logical relationship. Campbell synthesizes Hume’s account with the rhetorical tradition. First, that we come to know cause/effect inductively explains the effect that asyndeton (the absence of conjunctions, relative pronouns, etc.) has on vivacity. Because they link clauses overtly as a syllogism might, conjunctions and relative pronouns are “most unfriendly to vivacity.” Second, that we learn cause/effect through experience alone explains and justifies the traditional rhetorical preference for graphic images that awaken the imagination and move the emotions— enargeia. This analysis has consequences for rhetorical theory: Would you then copy nature in an historical or descriptive poem, present to our imaginations the causes and the effects in their natural order; the suggestion of the power or agency which connects them will necessarily result from the lively image you produce in the fancy, as it results from the perception of the things themselves, when they fall under the cognizance of the senses. But if you should take the other method, and connect with accuracy where there is relation; and, with the help of conjunctions and relatives, deduce with care effects from their causes, and allow nothing of the kind to pass unnoticed in the description, in lieu of a picture, you will present us with a piece of reasoning or declamation. Would you, on the contrary, give to reasoning itself the force and vivacity of painting, follow the method first prescribed and that

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George Campbell even when you represent the energy of spiritual causes, which were never subjected to the scrutiny of sense. You will thus convert a piece of abstruse reflection, which, however just, makes but a slender impression upon the mind, into the most affecting and instructive imagery. (367)

The passage contrasts two ways for an orator to establish a cause/effect relationship. One way is to present the events sequentially and in “lively” images. To use this method is to “copy nature” in the sense that it presents cause and effect in “their natural order,” since Hume has discovered that the mind learns cause/effect by frequent observation of successive events. The contrasting method of presenting cause/effect would use “conjunctions” and “relatives”; that is, would create a syllogism and appeal to reason rather than to the imagination. Using the first method is natural and lends vivacity to the presentation, because it resembles the way the mind originally comes to “know” causal relationships. Campbell’s analysis, then, draws on Hume’s explanation of the role of imagination in inference but merges this with the traditional understanding of the imagination as an image-making faculty that responds to lively images and pictures. It is important to keep in mind, however, that vivacity refers only to the stylistic means for achieving resemblance to a sense impression in POR. As we will see in the next chapter, Campbell recognized other means for rhetoric to achieve an impact that resembled that of an actual sense impression. For example, if an idea has an emotional impact it resembles the impact of a sense impression because a passion is a sense impression according to Hume and Campbell’s psychology. This resemblance can be achieved not only by stylistic means (vivacity) but by making ideas “lively” in other ways—through appealing to the seven circumstances or by a speaker’s creating a sympathetic response with an audience—techniques that will be discussed in the next chapter on the passions. In his analysis of imaginative response, Campbell begins with the analysis of the ancient rhetoricians who understood well the appeal that tropes and figures, especially those that appeal to the mind’s eye, have to gain an audience’s attention and to move the passions. In Hume’s concept of the lively idea, Campbell found a much deeper explanation for Quintilian’s sound advice. He understands his contributions as merging the two—so that Hume’s Treatise explains Quintilian’s Institutes.

SIX

Securing Belief by Engaging the Passions The Seven Circumstances and Sympathy Philosophy of Rhetoric, Chapters VII, VIII, IX

Within the classical tradition of rhetoric, an analysis of the emotions in the context of a discussion of persuasion entailed addressing a number of complex questions. What is the relationship between reason and emotion? Between the emotions and value choice? Between the emotions and the willingness to act on values? Within the pages of the Philosophy of Rhetoric, Campbell addresses these questions, drawing on empiricst philosophy to explain recommendations and concepts central to classical rhetoric.1 The questions of the relationship of emotion to reason, to the virtues, and to action are fundamental to the Aristotelian tradition in rhetoric. In the opening chapter of the Rhetoric, Aristotle faults those handbook writers who emphasize appeals to the emotions since such appeals “warp the ruler”—that is, distort the judge’s judgment—and he praises as well-governed those states that proscribe such appeals in courts (I. i: 1354a). At this point in his Rhetoric, Aristotle seems to regard emotional appeal as counter to reason and good judgment. Subsequently, however, Aristotle maintains that emotional appeal is essential to rhetoric, and in Book II he offers the first systematic analysis of the emotions. Because Aristotle’s description of the emotions links them to beliefs, the emotions as he presents them are subject to being influenced by reason and argument. When Aristotle defines anger as a desire for retaliation because of a slight directed “without justification,” he identifies a distinctly justifiable emotion (II. ii: 1378a; my emphasis). Indeed, in his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle links feeling emotion to a virtuous life: “to have these feelings [fear, confidence, 75

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anger, desire, pity] at the right times, on the right grounds towards the right people for the right motive and in the right way . . . is the mark of virtue (II. vi: 1106b). Despite their capacity to mislead us, the emotions are requisite to a virtuous character. Finally, on Aristotle’s psychology, the emotions—reasonable or not, bad or good—are necessary for a commitment to action. In Book III of De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle maintains that willing and acting require the arousal of appetite; engaging the rational soul only is not sufficient to precipitate action (III: ix–x). It follows from this psychology that appeals to reason are necessarily insufficient in persuasion. Campbell’s analysis of emotional response provides an empiricist explanation of what the Ancients described. NONRATIONAL RESPONSE: THE PASSIONS

In eighteenth-century Britain, the category of what constituted a “passionate” response was expansive, including both occurant situational responses (e.g., an angry reaction) and relatively stable traits of character that reflected values (e.g., a kindly disposition). This analysis of the passions, which included important contributions from Lord Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, Alexander Gerard, and David Hume, began within moral psychology, the motivation being not to provide an objective analysis of the emotions but to provide an alternative to the account of human motivation offered by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. The implication of Hobbes’s Leviathan was that social and moral responses were not original instincts but were acquired with the recognition that self-preservation, which was primary and instinctual, required cooperation and restraint. Moral behavior is, on this theory, the means to an egotistical goal: we cooperate to promote our selfinterest. To counter the implication of the view that humans were by nature selfish, Hutcheson and Shaftesbury advanced benevolence as a second, original, primary passion that rivaled self-interest. In his Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil (for example), Hutcheson included benevolence as a foundational passion, as primary and instinctual as the appetites and self-interest (British Moralists, 86). We naturally respond to others’ needs. Hutcheson treated these intuitive, natural responses of self-preservation and concern for others as analogous, in Lockean terms, to sense impressions, developing his theory of “internal senses” on the analogy to the impressions the mind receives from the five senses. As a result, moral response and situational emotional reaction were both identified as passions. REASON AND MOTIVATION

The implications of Hobbes’ analysis for reason were also radical. According to Hobbes’ analysis, self-interest (an appetite) is always the goal; reason cal-

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culates the means to achieve this end. With regard to reason, Hutcheson accepts Hobbes’ conclusion, arguing that reason was incapable of establishing motive or exciting us to action (Illustrations, 122). But it was Hutcheson’s most famous student, David Hume, who became the leading proponent of the doctrine that reason cannot establish motive, that it is inert. “‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” or “to prefer even my own acknowledge’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter” (Treatise II. iii: 3, 463). It is not unreasonable to prefer my own pleasure to your pain. Values, desires, preferences cannot be held to reason’s tests because preferences or ends are not true or false. Reason cannot provide a definitive basis for choosing between competing values or courses of action. Because he sees the passions as motivating human choice and action, Hume treats the passions as motions or forces that shape human choice and action. In Book II of the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume distinguishes the “calm” from the “violent” passions on the basis of the degree of activity the mind experiences when under the influence of each type. The violent passions Hume sometimes calls “emotions,” drawing on the etymology of the word to suggest the sense of movement or agitation that a person experiences under their influence. Hume maintains that these passions (or emotions) associate with one another, that they combine and build on the principle of resemblance. “All resembling impressions are connected together, and no sooner one arises than the rest immediately follow. Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be compleated” (II. i: 4, 335). Through association, the passions typically “assist and forward each other” (335), as one passion “swallows” (II. iii: 4, 468) a subordinate passion (467) or is “transfused” with another, resulting in “agitation in the mind (470), a “hurrying” of the mind (468–70). This analysis would have obvious relevance to the orator who wanted to arouse an audience to a particular emotional state. Hume also identifies a category of passions that are the seat of values and the constituents of character—the “calm passions.” The “violent passions” or emotions are more active, but the calm passions are more enduring. While the violent passions seize the mind and thrust it into agitation, the calm passions are both more settled and more forceful or influential. The violent passions are states of mind but over time a state of mind can become a trait of character— a person frequently angry becomes an angry person. “‘Tis evident passions influence not the will in proportion to their violence, or the disorder they occasion in the temper; but on the contrary, that when a passion has once become a settled principle of action, and is the predominant inclination of the soul, it commonly produces no longer any sensible agitation. . . . [I]t directs the actions and conduct without that opposition and emotion, which so naturally attend every momentary gust of passion” (II. iii: 4, 466). Furthermore,

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for Hume, reason is powerless to control the passions. Although we sometimes speak of reason controlling the passions, Hume insists that what we experience as calm control of reason is in fact a calm passion controlling a violent one (II. iii: 3, 464–65). Benevolence is such a calm passion, and its dominance can assure that the passions become virtues: “Courage and ambition, when not regulated by benevolence, are fit only to make a tyrant and a public robber,” Hume writes (654).

CAMPBELL ON THE PASSIONS: STATES AND TRAITS

Campbell, influenced by Hume, shares many of Hume’s conclusions about the role of reason and the passions. But Campbell is willing to accept Hume’s conclusions only in so far as he is able to reconcile them with his Christian faith and Quintilian. “To make me believe it is enough to show me that things are so; to make me act, it is necessary to show that the action will answer some end. That can never be an end to me which gratifies no passion or affection in my nature,” Campbell writes in offering his analysis of the place of the passions in persuasion in chapter vii (77). Campbell, too, understands reason in the limited sense of the logician, as the faculty that oversees the process of moving from universal propositions to particular conclusions; as such, the faculty is not only inert, it is amoral. Reason is limited to establishing truth or falsity, can test “the conformity of our conceptions to their archetypes in the nature of things” (POR 35) and test the relationship between statements and between ideas (43). Campbell would not have come to Hume’s conclusions with Hume’s intentions, but as a minister, he could embrace Hume’s view that reason cannot justify values. “In short, no hypothesis hitherto invented,” he writes, “hath shown that by means of the discursive faculty, without the aid of any other mental power, we could ever obtain a notion of either the beautiful or the good” (79). Reason can establish whether our belligerent neighbor has or probably has the means to do us harm; but we cannot establish definitively by argument whether justice requires us to sue for peace or prepare a preemptive strike. The passions fill the two voids left by this limited sense of reason; that is, the passions are the source of values that enable choice and the source of energy that enables action. Campbell also offers a taxonomy of the passions in POR, one that (as we shall see) follows Hume’s taxonomy, but, reassuringly, also tracks a distinction Aristotle and Quintilian make. Campbell divides the passions into vehement, intermediate and torpid on the basis of the degree to which they animate or disturb the mind. The vehement passions, for example, hope, ambition and anger, “elevate the soul and stimulate to action” and are, therefore, especially useful for persuasion (5). As did Hume, Campbell describes the “attraction or association among the passions” and insists

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that, “rarely any passion comes alone” (129). As they combine, the passions build in complexity and influence, hurrying the mind. But Campbell does not regard this animating, hurrying effect of the passions negatively. Quite the contrary, according to Campbell (referencing Dubos), the mind, in the absence of passion, falls into a “listlessness” that it finds “disagreeable” (113), a “languor” that is “oppressive” (129), a state that the stimulative effect of the emotions helpfully remedies. For Campbell the passions (in their role as stimulating to action) do not obscure judgment but enable action. The mind is oppressed not by the passions but by their absence. The passions are then natural and good for Campbell, though, of course, they need to be properly directed. Like Hume, Campbell regards the passions not only as the source of energy and movement, but also as the source of value choice. At times, he refers to the seat of values as “disposition,” as he does in the following passage: Are we then to class the virtues among the passions? By no means. But without entering into a discussion of the difference, which would be foreign to our purpose, let it suffice to observe, that they [virtues] have this in common with passion. They necessarily imply a habitual propensity to a certain species of conduct, an habitual aversion to the contrary: a veneration for such a character, an abhorrence of such another. They are, therefore, though not passions, so closely related to them, that they are properly considered as motives to action, being equally capable of giving impulse to the will. The difference is akin to that, if not the same, which rhetoricians observe between pathos and êthos, passion and disposition. (80)

The passage is sufficiently complex to require explication. The first sentence recalls the section in the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle determines that virtue (aretê) cannot be a feeling because we are not praised or blamed for having feelings. Emotions are good in moderation; bad in excess. Virtue is a disposition (hexis)—the ability to determine this mean (1105b–1106a). “The dispositions are the formed states of character in virtue of which we are well or ill disposed in respect of the emotions; for instance, we have a bad disposition in regard to anger if we are disposed to get angry too violently or not violently enough, a good disposition if we habitually feel a moderate amount of anger . . .” (1105b). The source of the last section of the quotation (concerning êthos and pathos) from POR is Institutes VI. ii: 6–25, 421–31. While Aristotle distinguishes êthos and pathos on the basis of their source—êthos with the speaker, pathos with the audience—Quintilian distinguishes êthos as referring to morals (mores), while pathos refers to emotions (adfectus). He states, the “more cautious” writers on the difference “explain pathos as describing the more violent emotions and êthos as designating those which are calm and gentle” (Institutes VI. ii: 9, 421–23). Campbell here echoes Quintilian’s distinction.2 Campbell is cognizant of the association of disposition with what in the eighteenth century were regarded as the two primary, original motives:

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selfishness and benevolence. He hears in this discussion Quintilian’s distinction between êthos and pathos. Campbell refers to a mother’s special love for the “most sickliest” of her children as evidence of a “humane disposition,” a disposition that begins in sympathy, increases through a habit of commiseration, and becomes rooted in character (133), while those who are “hardhearted,” or “insusceptible to sympathetic feeling,” are described as men of “selfish, contracted, or even avaricious disposition” (137). Campbell’s discussion of a listener’s “favourite passion,” that is, the propensities and habits developed over time, that make “liberty and independence” the “prevalent motives” of republicans or that make “men of genius” more vulnerable to appeals to fame, “men of industry” to riches (95), should, despite his calling it a passion, be understood as a disposition, since it functions as Quintilian’s êthos or Aristotle’s disposition—as a character-defining emotion or character trait. Within the context of persuasion, the listener’s disposition cannot wisely be ignored, nor easily changed. As Campbell makes clear in his discussion of the audience’s perception of the speaker’s character as a source of persuasion (96–98), differences in values are the greatest obstacle to persuasion (98). Where they can be exploited, these dispositions or “favorite passions” afford the “intelligent speaker an easier passage to the heart” (95). The dispositions then represent the values that constitute character: Quintilian’s êthos. As such, they are, as Campbell maintained in the passage cited earlier, “motives to action, being equally capable [with the passions] of giving impulse to the will” (80). This function of the dispositions would seem to license amending Campbell’s psychology to include the dispositions: “To make me believe it is enough to show me that things are so; to make me act, it is necessary to show that the action will answer some end. That can never be an end to me which gratifies no passion or affection [or disposition] in my nature” (77). So while Campbell’s language is confusing, we can see in his words the distinction between character trait and emotional state found in Aristotle and Quintilian. If we call response that is grounded in values and relatively predictable a “dispositional” response (or trait), that would limit “passionate” response to the more occurant, nonmoral situational response (a state) that Hume often calls “emotional.” While Campbell might have made matters easier for his readers, the basic distinctions are clear enough. And he has provided us with a theory of motivation based on desire. COMMUNICATING, TRANSFERRING EMOTION: THE SEVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, SYMPATHY, AND STYLISTIC ANIMATION

Since he is writing a philosophy of rhetoric and not a philosophy of the passions, the emphasis of Campbell’s analysis is on how emotion is com-

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municated—aroused toward a subject and transferred from subject to audience or from speaker or writer. Campbell accepts Hume’s analysis at least to this extent: that an idea must be invested with the force of a sense impression if emotion is to be aroused or communicated. A passion is most strongly excited by sensation. The sight of danger, immediate or near, instantly rouseth fear; the feeling of an injury, and the presence of the injurer, in a moment kindle anger. Next to the influence of sense is that of memory, the effect of which upon the passion, if the fact be recent, and remembered distinctly and circumstantially, is almost equal. Next to the influence of memory is that of imagination; by which is here solely meant the faculty of apprehending what is neither perceived by the senses, nor remembered. Now, as it is this power [imagination] of which the orator must chiefly avail himself, it is proper to inquire what those circumstances are, which will make the ideas he summons up in the imagination of his hearers, resemble in lustre and steadiness, those of sensation and remembrance. For the same circumstances will infallibly make them resemble also in their effects; that is, in the influence they will have upon the passions and affections of the [reader/hearer’s] heart. (81)

Hume’s and Campbell’s psychology begins with the mind’s transforming a sense impression to an idea; it ends with an idea being transformed into a sense impression or an idea that resembles a sense impression. According to Campbell, rhetoric can play a crucial role in this second transformation, for eloquence can present ideas in a way that their impact on the mind simulates an actual, present sense impression. This simulation is, then, the first principle of Campbell’s theory of rhetoric. According to Campbell, emotion can be aroused and communcated in three ways: (1) infusing ideas with emotion through appeal to the seven circumstances; (2) creating in the audience sympathy for the speaker; and (3) presenting ideas in an animated style. Campbell discusses the circumstances that are “chiefly instrumental in operating on the Passions” at I.vii: 5. He describes seven circumstances as aids to rhetors intent on awakening, sustaining, or subverting a passion. Rhetors are advised (1) to increase the probability; or (2) the plausibility of an action’s occurring or having occurred; (3) to increase the audience’s sense of the importance of what is at stake; (4) to increase the urgency by stressing its proximity in terms of time; (5) its connection to the audience’s place; (6) its relationship of those affected to the hearers or speaker; and (7) to increase hearers’ sense of the consequences at stake. As prompts for orators, the circumstances serve the heuristic function of traditional topical schemes. But in calling them “circumstances,” Campbell also signals their difference from Aristotelian topics, functioning as situational features that intensify belief or that increase the audience’s attention or sense of urgency, but they do not prove a point. As is true of vivacity and the lively idea generally, the goal is

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to make a situation present in the mind of an audience—with the immediacy and the force of an actual sense impression—not to prove. The circumstances create passionate response and thus influence belief. But because they are intended to increase the belief in the reality of a situation, appealing to the circumstances is not an irrational appeal. If a speaker were to show that it is probable (circumstance 1) that your enemy has the capacity to produce significant (circumstance 3) harm to you (circumstance 6), fear is not an irrational response. But arousing a passion through these circumstance does not prove that a threat is imminent. At the conclusion of this section, Campbell insists that the seven circumstances do not function enthymetically: I shall conclude what relates to the exciting of passion when I have remarked, that pleading the importance and the other pathetic circumstances, or pleading the authority of opinions or precedents, is usually considered . . . as being likewise a species of reasoning. This concession, however, doth not imply, that by any reasoning we are ever taught that such an object ought to awaken such a passion. This we must learn originally from feeling, not from argument. No speaker attempts to prove it. . . . Even when he is enforcing their [hearers’] regard to the pathetic circumstances above mentioned, it is not so much his aim to show that these circumstances ought to augment the passion, as that these circumstances are in the object. The effect upon their minds he commonly leaves to nature; and is not afraid of the conclusion, if he can make every aggravating circumstance be, as it were, both perceived and felt by them. (92)

The passage is revealing not only of how the appeals to the circumstances function but also of what Campbell means by reason. It may not be unreasonable to respond with fear to a demonstrated threat or with anger to an obvious slight. But, Campbell says in his Humean voice, this we did not learn originally from reason but from experience. There is no axiom that would allow us to predict in advance of experience the emotional response to an action or situation. Emotions are not subject to apodiectic analysis and prediction. Since experience teaches us that many people respond emotionally similarly to a common action or event, we begin to think of such responses as “reasonable,” but this is only a layperson’s way of speaking, not the logician’s. Furthermore, the orator typically emphasizes not the relationship between fear and the situation but rather the fearful elements of the situation. The circumstances do not function by proof but by making the reality of the possibility of something fearful or hopeful present to the mind of the audience as a sense impression is present. The emphasis is not on logical validity but on presence. The goal is to fill the mind, to make some emotionally charged pictures present to it. If we return to a consideration of the particular circumstances with this perspective in mind, we can see that Campbell’s seven circumstances reinforce

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his view that an effective rhetoric must be founded on empiricist principles, not logic. The importance of experience over logic at least for arousing a passion is clear from Campbell’s consideration of the first two circumstances, probability and plausibility. Probability and plausibility are presented as sisters in Campbell’s allegorical lesson (85). Though they have different mothers, both Probability and Plausibility claim Experience as their father and Sense as their distant progenitor. Their effectiveness for arousing a passion derives ultimately from Experience and Sense. Probability’s mother is Reason and this parent is the source of probability’s greater efficacy in discourse addressed to the understanding (83). But Plausibility has “greater efficacy in arousing the passions” than probability or even certainty (82–83), because plausible argument is, almost by definition, what experience has taught us to expect; what is probable or even certain can run counter to our expectations or experience. Appeals to probability, in the context of arousing a passion, work not to create an argument but to recall a related experience from the reader’s memory or to create one in the reader’s imagination. According to Campbell, “if the train [the orator] deduceth coincide with the general current of my experience; if in nothing it thwart those conclusions and anticipations which are become habitual to me, my mind accompanies him with facility, glides along from one idea to another, and admits the whole with pleasure” (83). As Campbell’s language suggestions (“glides along” “with facility”), appeals to plausibility can, in their impact, have that artless resemblance to the way the mind processes ordinary sense impressions that is, for Campbell, the most effective rhetoric. More generally, the purpose of appeals from either plausibility or probability is not only to confer a “brightening, and strengthening” of a recalled or imagined experience, but also to “bespeak the assistance of experience” in such a way that the orator’s language will have the immediacy and impact of an actual sense impression. The presentation of the other circumstances similarly underscores how what could be seen as reasonable appeals can be effective at rousing passion so long as they function to mimic experience, rather than to prove. There is nothing irrational in increasing an audience’s sense of the importance of an action by, for example, stressing the number of people the action will affect. But the goal of the circumstance importance is achieved, Campbell writes, “by fixing attention more closely, to add brightness and strength to the ideas” (86). The language clearly is intended metaphorically to suggest the mind’s response to a sensation, not to an argument. The last section of chapter vii, “How an Unfavourable Passion must be calmed,” develops further the relationships between passion, reason, and character. Campbell’s first point is that the orator can use the circumstances in an inverse way to calm a passion, for example, showing the improbability of an event that has elicited a passionate response can subdue a passion. On this view, since passionate response is dependent upon a belief that can be shown to be

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true or false, the passions are again linked to cognition. Campbell’s second way to subdue a passion extends this philosophy. “The second way of silencing an unfavourable passion or disposition, is by conjuring up some other passion or disposition which may overcome it. With regard to conduct, whenever the mind deliberates, it is conscious of contrary motives impelling it in opposite directions; in other words, it finds that acting thus would gratify one passion; not acting, or acting otherwise, would gratify another. To take such a step, I perceive, would promote my interest, but derogate my honour” (93). According to this advice passions still have a significant cognitive element, but the strength of the passions to pull us in one way or another varies; they are presented as competing forces that compel the mind in several, often opposite, directions. Campbell summarizes his view with an analogy that reveals the general psychology behind his treatment of the passions within oratory: Thus we have seen in what manner passion to an absent object may be excited by eloquence, which, by enlivening and invigorating the ideas of imagination, makes them resemble the impressions of sense and the traces of memory; and in this respect hath an effect on the mind similar to that produced by a telescope on the sight; things remote are brought near, things obscure rendered conspicuous. We have seen also in what manner a passion already excited may be calmed; how, by oratorical magic, as by inverting the telescope, the object may be again removed and diminished. (94)

This passage is crucial to understanding Campbell’s empiricist rhetoric. According to an empiricist psychology, a passion is an impression. By evoking an emotion, eloquence can make an idea resemble in impact a present sense impression, thus creating a disposition in the audience to believe that parallels our disposition to believe what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Eloquence can make an absent idea have a presence in the minds of listeners or speakers that parallels the presence of an actual, nonverbal sense impression. This view too has an ancient source, in Roman rhetoric, the concept of visio (Institutes VI. ii: 29–32.) that takes its most memorable form in the prosecutor who would present the jury with Caesar’s bloody toga. As does Quintilian (and Locke), Campbell here makes sight paradigmatic of how the mind experiences ideas. His comparison of eloquence to a telescope is revealing: it suggests that eloquence essentially functions by changing proportions, not by proving: it makes a situation seem more or less important, closer or farther from us. It works by manipulating circumstances, not by proof.

SYMPATHY

On Campbell’s theory, passions can be transferred directly from speaker to audience through sympathy, as well as by amplifying the subject via the seven

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circumstances. The direct transfer from speaker to audience is the subject of Book I, chapter IX: “Of the Consideration which the Speaker ought to have of Himself.” Campbell’s explanation of how a passion is transferred from one person (a speaker) to another (an audience) draws on Hume’s principle of sympathy to explain what classical rhetoric had long recommended. Hume regards sympathy as a basic, human instinct, and, with the “lively idea,” as one of two important engines by which passion is communicated from one person to another.3 Within Hume’s psychology, passions are secondary, reflective impressions. As impressions, they can be communicated. And indeed, according to Hume, sympathy is the most important “engine” by which passions are communicated. “No quality of human nature is more remarkable . . . than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from . . . our own,” Hume writes (Treatise, II. i. xi: 367). Sympathy involves our identifying with another. Since we have a natural concern for ourselves, when we identify with another through sympathy, the transfer of sentiments is “lively.” Using the word “lively” in its semitechnical sense of “like a sense impression,” Hume states as follows: ’Tis evident, that the idea, or rather impression of ourselves is always intimately present with us, and that our consciousness gives us so lively a conception of our own person, that ‘tis not possible to imagine, that any thing can in this particular go beyond it. Whatever object, therefore, is related to ourselves must be conceived with a little vivacity of conception, according to the foregoing principles; and tho’ this relation shou’d not be so strong as that of causation, it must still have considerable influence. Resemblance and contiguity are relations not to be neglected; especially when by an inference from cause and effect, and by the observation of external signs, we are inform’d of the real existence of the object, which is resembling or contiguous. (Treatise II. i. xi: 368)

We naturally experience more strongly what we relate to ourselves—in empiricist terms we are always present to ourselves as a sense impression. If we identify with another, we experience what this person experiences in a way analogous to the way we are present to ourselves. If a person’s situation resembles ours, what that person feels is transferred to us by the principle of resemblance (one of the three principles by which the imagination associates ideas, according to Hume); if a person is physically near to us, the emotion this other experiences is transferred to us via a second principle of association, contiguity. This psychology has implications for rhetoric that Hume is well aware of. In the passage below he discusses the two ways an idea may have the impact of a sense impression: Nothing is more capable of infusing any passion into the mind, than eloquence, by which objects are represented in their strongest and most lively

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While Hume associates only the emotional heightening of ideas through language with eloquence, classical theorists and George Campbell associated the second also with rhetoric—how the action of a speaker can infuse emotion directly in an audience. Campbell’s discussion of the role that sympathy plays in rhetoric assumes, rather than articulates, the dynamics of the transformation of an idea into an impression by means of sympathy that Hume makes explicit. Campbell does state that sympathy is a channel for transferring passion: “Sympathy is not a passion, but that quality of the soul which renders it susceptible of almost any passion, by communication from the bosom of another” (131). In the Philosophy of Rhetoric, sympathy is then a vehicle for converting an idea to an impression—making it lively—and transferring the passion to the audience. An audience feels sympathy for or with a speaker and the transfer of emotion is direct from speaker to audience. The title of chapter IX of Book I, “Of the Consideration which the Speaker ought to have of Himself ” evokes Aristotelian êthos. Campbell’s advice on how speakers should manage and communicate a persona recalls Aristotle’s discussion. Campbell then presents general and specific obstacles to an audience’s sympathetic response. The three general obstacles are, at least vaguely, Aristotelian: hearers’ low opinion of the speaker’s intellectual abilities and morals and their sense that the speaker is insincere block a sympathetic response. Sincerity is the most important factor in influencing belief, especially among “the vulgar” (96); moral character is more important than judgments of a speaker’s intellect, especially for the transfer of emotion, since hearers “will think themselves in less danger of being seduced by a man of weak understanding, but of distinguished probity, than by a man of the best understanding who is of a profligate life” (97). The value we place on character is “instinctive,” “untaught,” therefore “hath a foundation in human nature,” and “hence it hath become a common topic with rhetoricians, that, in order to be a successful orator, one must be a good man.” The refernce is, of course, to Quintilian’s ideal of the “vir bonus dicendi peritus.” The Ancients have intuited what Hume can now explain. While these three qualities—sincerity, intellect, and character—influence a sympathetic response in all rhetorical situations, particular factors also pre-

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vent the development of a sympathetic relationship. In factious times and places, party spirit, whether of the political or religious variety, is a particularly “inflexible” and “unjust” “prepossession.” Even “the divinest eloquence” will not win the sympathy of “violent party-men” (97). Personal prejudice for or against the speaker similarly strongly influences sympathy or antipathy. This is especially true for “the rabble,” who, aware “of their incapacity to guide themselves” are prone to “submit to the guidance of some popular orator,” who recommends “himself to their esteem by a flaming zeal for their favourite distinctions” (97–98). Campbell concludes with some advice. When confronting an audience disinclined to their viewpoint, speakers should “show more modesty,” praise the audience for its presumed objectivity and openness, seem to defer to its judgment, and make as many concessions as possible, thus, mollifying the hostile audience and insinuating themselves into their hearers’ favor, thus, imperceptibly transfusing “his sentiments and passions into their minds” (98). On the other hand, in situations in which the audience is predisposed toward the speaker’s view, such caution is unnecessary: “When the people are willing to run with you, you may run as fast as you can, especially when the case requires impetuosity and despatch” (98). Once the speaker has gained the trust of the hearers, the speaker’s emotions can be transferred directly through sympathy. “Sympathy,” Campbell writes, “is one main engine by which the orator operates on the passions,” before quoting lines from Horace, “‘If you would have me weep, begin the strain, / Then I shall feel your sorrows, feel your pain”’ (96). Whatever weakens sympathy “must do the speaker unutterable prejudice,” both with respect to persuading the audience to the speaker’s beliefs and moving their passions (96). In a later chapter, Campbell notes that, “It is by sympathy we rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (131; Campbell’s italics). Here in chapter vii on the passions, Campbell stresses the importance of gesture and action to the transfer of emotion through sympathy: “a person present with us, whom we see and hear, and who, by words, and looks, and gestures, gives the liveliest signs of his feelings, has the surest and most immediate claim upon our sympathy. We become infected with his passions. We are hurried along by them, and not allowed leisure to distinguish between his relation and our relation, his interest and our interest” (90).4 The basic insight that emotion can be directly transferred from person to person, speaker to hearer, is virtually a truism of the rhetorical tradition. Quintilian, for example, recommends that speakers systematically attempt to bring themselves into the emotional state that they want to instill in the audience: “The prime essential for stirring the emotions of others is, in my opinion,” Quintilian writes, “first to feel those emotions oneself.” He continues, “Will he be angry, if the orator who seeks to kindle his anger shows no sign of labouring under the emotion which he demands from his audience? Will

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he shed tears if the pleader’s eyes are dry? it is utterly impossible. Fire alone can kindle, and moisture alone can wet, nor can one thing impart any colour to another save that which it possesses itself. Accordingly, the first essential is that those feelings should prevail with us that we wish to prevail with the judge, and that we should be moved ourselves before we attempt to move others” (VI. ii: 26–29, 431–33). Thus, we see again how Campbell uses Hume to explain Quintilian, fulfilling the intention he assigns himself in the Philosophy of Rhetoric—to provide an explanation in empiricist terms for the advice offered by the Ancients. In addition to providing two explanations (heightening a subject through use of the circumstances and direct transfer of passion through sympathy) of how ideas (the “sense”) can be made to have the impact of an impression through appeals to the passions, Campbell offers parallel accounts of stylistic means to address the passions. At the conclusion of the section on appealing to the passions in chapter vii, Campbell identifies animation as the style most effective for arousing the passions. Animation works in the ways that line up with the explanations here for infusing the sense with passion—that is, through heightening a subject or by transferring emotion through the speaker through an expressive style. This is explained in the chapter 8 of this study. In combining Hume’s concepts of the “lively idea” and sympathy with classical amplification and enactment (or “action”), Campbell has provided a theoretical explanation for what the Ancients advised. As I shall show in the chapter on style, Campbell’s approach also allows him to align purpose and style—clarity with the understanding, animation with the passions, and vivacity with the imagination—and thus bridges a gulf in the Ancients’ analysis, which had separated the first from the third canon.

SEVEN

Correct Usage Reputable, National, Present A Reading of Book II

Book II of the Philosophy of Rhetoric is principally concerned with usage. As H. Lewis Ulman shows, Campbell’s consideration of language in Book II of POR is consistent with the intentions he articulates in Book I. For Campbell rhetoric is the architectonic language art that subsumes within it both logic and grammar. In Book I, chapter IV, Campbell insisted that rhetors need command of logic, because the sense of the discourse constitutes its soul and must be true; and command of grammar and style, because these constitute the arts of the body of discourse (1988, 32). Of course, rhetoric goes beyond these two arts, but these are necessary (though insufficient) to a complete theory of rhetoric. The nature of Campbell’s consideration of usage is also consistent with his general aims. It is appropriately philosophical, at least to this extent: he will criticize others for censoring particular linguistic practice in arbitrary fashion, while Campbell’s consideration of usage will proceed according to the principles of his philosophy of language (Ulman, Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions, 79). Many of the reviews of POR regarded Campbell’s discussion of usage as an innovative feature of his theory—that POR represented an expansion of rhetoric, to make it an art of good writing generally (Ulman, “Discerning Readers”). That Campbell’s discussion of correct usage marks an innovation in rhetorical theory is, of course, not true. Aristotle considers aspects of correct Greek in Book III of his Rhetoric (chapter 5 on purity, for example) and Quintilian is concerned in Book I of the Institutes with matters of correctness, including usage. But Renaissance rhetorics do not take up grammar and usage, so, with regard to English rhetorics, Campbell’s practice does mark a departure—one that struck his contemporararies as innovative and important. 89

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Campbell advances three criteria for arbitrating questions of usage: we should prefer national over local use, present over archaic use, and the linguistic habits of reputable authors over common use. These three criteria of national, present, and reputable have been very influential within the handbook tradition. As W. F. Bryan observed in 1926, Campbell’s definition of good use is “so sound and serviceable that it has remained unaltered ever since” (358). But popular as Campbell’s approach has been with the authors of handbooks, it has been criticized by linguists as not only benighted but also contradictory in its own terms. This second charge (at least) is, I will argue, unfair. The political motives that sponsored Campbell’s preference for national over regional use derive ultimately from the Act of Union that united the parliaments of Scotland and England in 1707. In effect, the union made the English of England the language of law and government. To take full advantage of the union Scottish gentry typically preferred an English education and a Westminster standard for British English. Campbell apparently shared this view—that progress for Scotland was dependent on its becoming “British.” In POR, he sometimes speaks of “us Britons” (143, for example), suggesting that Campbell sought a national identity in common with England. Robert Crawford has captured Campbell’s view well: In advocating a “standard English,” Campbell contributed to forwarding the movement in the eighteenth century that came at the expense of Scots English. The growing wish for a “pure” English in eighteenth-century Scotland was not an anti-Scottish gesture but a pro-British one. If Britain were to work as a political unit, then Scots should rid themselves of any elements likely to impede their progress within it. Language, the most important of bonds, must not be allowed to hinder Scotland’s intercourse with expanding economic and intellectual markets in the freshly defined British state. Scots, who like Alexander Wedderburn in 1735 Edinburgh Review, wrote about “North Britain,” rather than “Scotland” in the context of improvement, were emphasizing the new opportunities to open a post-Union and post-Culloden Scotland loyal to the British constitution. (1992, 18)

Scotticisms were to be avoided, and books to teach the Scots “proper” English flourished (Leith, 156). Campbell’s sympathies were with these larger trends.1 Campbell’s advocacy of present and, especially, reputable use is more complicated, if no less controversial. The principal influence on Campbell’s philosophy of language is John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Book III of the Essay Locke maintains that language is largely an artificial system, not a natural one, that language depends not on a necessary or iconic relationship between words and things but on tacit agreements among users of a language. Not everyone who read Locke agreed with his view; and not everyone who claimed to agree with his view understood the implications

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of it. In Book II of POR, Campbell agrees that language is conventional and to a considerable degree, though not completely, he understood what this theoretical position entailed. Locke’s contribution is part of a general discussion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the problem of language, especially as an instrument for the communication of philosophy and science. In the Novum Organum, Bacon included the way the mind is led by words as among the idols that mislead the understanding. The “Idols of the Market-place,” Bacon writes, “are the most troublesome of all; these are the idols that have crept into the understanding through the alliance of words and names” (1994, 64). Since there are words for things that do not exist and seeming specific words for ideas that are “muddled and vague” (65), language is a potentially unstable and unreliable instrument; it misleads the understanding. Bacon’s critique gave rise to the Royal Society’s call for reforms in the communication of science, including a call for a return to the purer style of an imagined earlier time, in which, in Thomas Sprat’s famous words, “men deliver’d so many things, almost in equal number of words” (113). Fears that language is an unreliable instrument for the communication of knowledge provided the context for Locke’s analysis in Book III (“Of Words”) of the Essay, a book important both for its philosophy of language and its emphasis on error. But Locke famously rejects the notion that words can stand for things in the literal sense that Sprat and other seventeenth-century reformers envisioned: Words “came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea” (Essay on Human Understanding III. ii: 1, 8). In relationship to things, words are arbitrary; they are signs of a particular language-user’s thoughts. This theory did not make language seem less problematic as an instrument of learning; indeed, it seemed to expose even more the precarious nature of communication, since it further removed language from the world it would describe. Successful communication required that my ideas accurately reflect reality and that my words summon up in a person’s mind the exact idea I had in my own. Accepting the assumption that the most important purpose of language is to communicate learning, Locke identifies clarity as the sine qua non of language use. And while the tone of Locke’s Essay is optimistic, the emphasis is on what can go wrong. The title of chapter 9 is “Of the Imperfection of Words”; words are unreliable both for the “recording of our own thoughts” and “the communicating of our thoughts to others” (III. ix: 1, 104). Accurate, clear communication is necessarily perilous, even when everyone has the best intentions. And as the title of chapter 10 suggests, “Of the Abuse of Words,” not everyone at all times has the best intentions. Not only do some use words carelessly and inconsistently but some mislead intentionally: “all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all

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the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats . . . (III. x. xxxiv: 146). It is not an encouraging sign for humanity that such a “powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught . . .” (146). Chapter 11, as its title states, offers “Remedies” for the “Foregoing Imperfections And Abuses Of Words” (148) as a basis for an art of rhetoric appropriate for society enlightened enough to see that language is fulfilling its purpose when it is an instrument merely for clear communication of ideas. Locke’s theory and anxieties permeate Book II of POR. Campbell accepts and builds on Locke, “this great man” (262), in advancing the view that language is a conventional system. Indeed, even more than Locke did, Campbell understands the extent of the independence of language from things and even thoughts. But despite the fact that language was, with respect to the things it described, an arbitrary system and that communication, therefore, depended primarily on custom, Campbell, with most of his contemporaries, felt that language could be corrected. He assigned to the rhetorical theorist the task of guarding the language to assure that it was an instrument for clear and accurate communication. Campbell accepts the basic elements of Locke’s theory: that words stand not for things but for our ideas of things. Indeed, the title of the first chapter of Book II, “The Nature and Characters of the Use which gives Law to Language,” makes conventional use determinant of grammatical rule. But in the course of his discussion, he embraces a theory more radical than Locke’s: that we communicate by habit. Because Campbell’s most complete description of how language works comes toward the end of Book II, in chapters VII and VIII, it makes sense to start with these later chapters, which can provide a framework for understanding the earlier ones. Campbell’s general position is, at the outset, Locke’s: the connection between words and things “is not a natural and necessary, but an artificial and arbitrary connexion” (258). But though words are not linked directly to ideas, the effect is the same as if they were because “we contract a habit of associating the sign with the thing signified” (258). Indeed, gradually we lose awareness of the connection between words and things and communicate merely the association of some words with other words: “Hence the words and names themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in the fancy a relation additional to that which they derive purely from being symbols of related things,” a tendency that is “strengthened by the structure of language” (259). Campbell concludes that communication often occurs on the basis of habit, not the more deliberate process of Locke’s description, that, indeed, communication depends on expectations, not on the things-ideas-words-ideas-things circuitry that Locke describes. Indeed, Campbell concludes, “we really think by signs as well as speak by them” (260).

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Campbell then weighs in on the side of Berkeley and Hume on the question of whether general and abstract terms signify discrete general ideas, as Locke’s description suggested, or whether general terms are linguistic creations that represent particulars. Campbell concludes that “a particular idea is made general, not by any change produced in it” but (quoting Hume) “by its being set up as the representative of many particular things” (262). We may have general ideas only because we have general words. If words do not necessarily stand for things or ideas, then words may stand merely for other words. But writers and readers often assume that the words they write or read stand for distinct ideas and so sometimes write nonsense or fail to detect that what they read is gibberish. We can, Campbell states, “be imposed on by words without meaning” (266). He offers three abuses, all having to do with the problem of indeterminacy. First, the excessive and inappropriate use of metaphor, in which writers “talk in metaphor,” as distinguished from using metaphor “as the immediate signs of [the writer’s] thought” (266); we assume that a metaphor relates to a plausible idea or to reality, but it may not. Second, the dependence on “mixed modes.” Mixed modes is Locke’s term for complex ideas that the mind creates by combining simple ideas. The simple ideas have a reference to things but the combined simple ideas may not. “Resurrection” is an example: death and awakening exist but not necessarily in combination. According to Locke, the mind sometimes creates such combinations without experiencing them (III. v. vi: 45). Campbell’s fear is less of concepts that don’t exist but of the different understandings that readers have of the words that a writer uses, the same problem that results when abstractions are used, Campbell’s third abuse against clarity based on the nature of signs: “the more general any name is, as it comprehends the more individuals under it . . . the more it must have of indistinctness and obscurity” (269).2 An understanding of language generally as conventional would suggest that use or custom would determine what is acceptable and appropriate. Consistent with this understanding, Campbell forcefully proclaims the primacy of custom or general use in regards to grammar and usage in the first chapter of Book II. “Every tongue whatever is founded in use or custom” he writes; “language is purely a species of fashion” (139). It follows from this principle that grammar would be guided by use, and Campbell sometimes states as much: “the general but tacit consent of the people” establishes meaning, syntax, and grammar (139). In light of the authority of general use or custom, the “only business of grammar is to note, collect and methodize” (140). It is not that use must bend to the laws of the grammarian but that the laws of the grammarians must yield to the “tribunal of use” (143). But the primacy of use or custom does not, for Campbell, make grammar into a descriptive science or the grammarian a compiler of forms that most find acceptable. Grammarians do collect and systematize what use legislates

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but they also engage in “verbal criticism,” which establishes rules to decide cases of “divided use” and even attempts to influence use by censoring some words and constructions. Campbell’s intention in chapters I–IV of Book II is, then, clear: while acknowledging and affirming use or custom as the ultimate determinant of grammar, he is hopeful (though not certain) that the prescriptive grammarian can influence use and therefore indirectly shape grammar. Intending to both establish the primacy of use and to improve English, Campbell defines acceptable use as reputable, national, and present. “Reputable use” refers to the customary practices “of those who have had a liberal education” (143), a standard embodied in the practices of “authors of reputation” (144), that is, the authors the public holds in highest esteem, “celebrated authors” (145). The grammarian should also recommend national use over regional or the use of a particular segments of society, such as a profession. The accent and the idiom of “the upper and middle ranks, over the whole of the British Empire” (145), Campbell claims, is uniformly recognized, if not always practiced in common, and therefore must be standard English; provincial dialects differ as much from each other as each does from this standard, and therefore lack the uniformity to serve as a standard. Writers and speakers should also prefer “present” usage to archaic forms, such as “sitten,” which the grammarian Robert Lowth maintained was the “true” form of the participle of “sit,” a logic which Campbell argues would burden grammarians with introducing futilely numerous similar forms (hitten, casten, letten, etc.) that are no longer “true” by the measure of present use (148). Campbell also maintains that the criterion of reputable use as embodied in the practice of celebrated authors will assure that “present” is distinguished from “novel and upstart,” (150), the fashionable and modish of the passing scene. In chapter II, on verbal criticism and the canons, Campbell further qualifies his endorsement of general use. He sets forth nine principles or canons to guide the recommendations of the grammarian. The first five are intended to arbitrate situations in which two or more locutions meet the standards of reputable, national, and present use. Which variation should be preferred? The rules listed are presented in a hierarchical order; that is, if appeal to the first canon (prefer the univocal form to a potentially ambiguous one) arbitrates the choice, then the grammarian need not proceed to the second canon (prefer the form that is more consistent with existing rules). If the disputed forms meet these two canons equally well, then the critic should resort to the third canon (prefer the form more agreeable to the ear); if not, on to the fourth and the fifth. While, presumably, the first five canons (from the first section of the chapter) would not come into play if use were not divided, the canons set forth in the second section of the chapter are more controversial because these are applied in some cases where use is not divided. Is everything sanctioned by customary use good? “In some instances, custom may very properly be

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checked by criticism” (160), Campbell insists. Campbell is aware of the seeming contradiction that his endorsement of verbal criticism raises for the criterion of conventional use but he maintains that his goal is not to legislate what is not consistent with use but to influence what becomes or remains customary. The problem is obvious: how can the grammarian influence without, in effect, legislating? But Campbell insists that persuasion is the tool (160–61), by which he would, assuming synonyms exist, “disenfranchised” or “consign to oblivion” any words and constructions that are a challenge to pronounce (canon 6), etymologically misleading (canon 7), archaic (canon 8), or syntactically awkward, though idiomatic (canon 8). On these grounds (respectively) “sillily,” and “chroniclers” are to be discouraged on the basis of canon 6; “unloose” would be discontinued because etymologically it suggest the opposite of “untie,” while in fact it is its synonym; the archaic “lief ” would be replaced by the modern “like”; and idiomatic but ungrammatical phrases such as “I’d had rather do” would be replaced by simpler, grammatical equivalents. Chapter III, “Of Grammatical Purity,” brings a significant change in perspective. An analogy with law marked chapter two: the grammarian was compiler and shaper of usage laws that custom established. In chapter III, the analogy is with architecture and the focus is on the rhetorician, not the grammarian. The rhetorician, like the architect, is a designer concerned with achieving certain effects. The distinction is important because Campbell now seeks to help those who aspire to use language precisely, not merely to use it acceptably. Rhetors need both the designing knowledge of the architect, which has been the subject of Book I and will be the subject of Book III, and the mason’s knowledge of materials because, unlike the architect, the rhetor both designs and constructs. The change in perspective in chapter III is apparent in the nature of the errors singled out and the prestige of those identified as offenders against grammatical purity. Campbell lists as violations barbarism, solecisms, and improprieties, a list similar to Quintilian’s consideration of correctness in Institutes I. v, though the discussion of barbarisms and solecism differs. The errors Campbell identifies tend to be ones of commission, rather than errors from ignorance—pretentious use of language of various types, for example, use of obsolete words, or new coinages from France, or affected abbreviations to impress. Similarly, the examples of solecisms and imprecision that Campbell identifies are from the pens of distinguished authors—including Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and John Milton—who, perhaps as a result of their effort to achieve parallelism or concision, have lost control of a sentence. The point is that here in chapter III and also in IV, in which Campbell contests recommendations by other grammarians, the editor’s perspective and values, not the linguist’s, dominate.3 While Campbell’s work has been praised as reasonable and sound, it has also been judged misguided and inconsistent. Wise as Campbell’s advocacy of

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reputable use is, the principle is also futile: more often than not, use has not been ruled by the canons (Bryan 1926, 368). Bryan concludes that Campbell’s work “shows the futility of attempting to direct or restrain usage” (370) by reference to such standards as “reputable.” The realization that language is dictated, not by handbooks but by custom, is one reason that linguistics is a descriptive science. To some, history has proven Campbell wrong. Indeed, the scholar who, except for Ulman, has examined Book II in most detail, Sterling Andrus Leonard, has been particularly harsh. Noting that in chapter I Campbell expresses the view that language is product of use or custom and that in subsequent chapters he proceeds to proscribe customary constructions, Leonard concludes that Book II is an “amazing instance of attempted adherence to the principle [of use] and its utter betrayal” (1929, 16). There is no question that the verbal criticism that occupies much of Book II seems theoretically discordant with the Campbell’s insistence that use is “the sole mistress of language”(151). When Campbell begins to explain what his criterion of use means, the standard he applies is not what most people speak because “the generality of people speak and write very badly” (142). The generality, “by reason of poverty and other circumstances, deprived of the advantages of education, and condemned to toil for bread, almost incessantly, in some narrow occupations” (142), “misapply” words they happened to hear in several incorrect ways (142). And since the grammarian’s job is, on Campbell’s own statement, to compile the laws that use creates, why does he endorse the view of the verbal critic as “the man who seasonably notifies the abuses that are creeping in” (152)? Even if we limit verbal criticism to the arbitration of doubtful cases of divided use, why would the verbal critic need “settled principles” and canons to decide such cases? If grammar is the child of custom, then the critic has merely to identify the custom, to count cases. These apparent contradictions that amaze Leonard can be explained if Campbell’s position is seen within his own intellectual milieu. Leonard understands Campbell’s position as contradictory, because he (Leonard) views it from the perspective of oppositions within linguistics of the early-twentieth century: the standard based on elite authority of a prescriptive grammar versus the standard based on an empirical inquiry into customary use. Campbell seems to endorse the empirical standard in the abstract but applies the prescriptive standard in particular instances. But these are not the oppositions that inform Book II, and, even if Campbell’s view of usage turns out not to be ours, it is not, as Leonard’s judgment implies, incoherent in its own terms. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, investigation into the English language was an important intellectual activity that increased in sophistication and volume. Drawing on the work of R. C. Alston, Carey McIntosh reports that the number of grammars published in England in the second half of the eighteenth century increased over the first half nearly fourfold, from 106 to 400. Robert Lowth’s popular A Short Introduction to English

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Grammar, which Campbell frequently cites, went through forty-five editions from 1762–1800 (McIntosh 1986, 47–48). And while Renaissance grammars were, for the most part, directed toward those seeking to learn English, Lowth’s grammar was intended to teach native speakers how to express themselves “with propriety” and enable them “to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not” (Lowth 1967, x). Campbell signals that he intends to make a contribution to this emerging emphasis on correctness when he observes that “verbal criticism” started only in the “beginning of the present century (for in this island we had little or nothing of the kind before)” (151). Within this rising concern with correctness, two types of works appear. An older scholarship evolves out of a rationalist philosophical tradition. Works within this tradition attempt to make a contribution to a philosophy of language; specifically, to identify universal concepts and principles common to many or all languages that would form the basis for the particular grammars of the ancient and modern languages. The second tradition is more practical and teacherly. It attempts to identify the laws that govern English with the goal of improving spoken and written English (Murray Cohen). Campbell’s contribution is to the second tradition, but to understand his approach and positions it is necessary to know something of the philosophical work as well as the practical work. The goal of much work in linguistics during the seventeenth century is to demonstrate a natural correspondence between language and the natural order, between words and things and syntax and nature’s processes. This ambition was supported by the widely held belief in the historical accuracy of the biblical account that God had instituted a perfect, universal language that had given way to the chaos of Babel. If the laws unlocking such a correspondence were discovered, linguistics would be as universal and as ordered as nature, its laws as generalizable as mathematical laws. Even in the wake of Locke’s influential argument in Book III of the Essay that words did not stand for things in nature but ideas in the mind, these efforts continued, though a revisionist theory maintained that the basis for the universality was not a correspondence between linguistic elements and nature but linguistic elements and the operations of the mind (Murray Cohen, 58). The most famous proponent of “universal grammar” among Campbell’s contemporaries was James Harris, whose Hermes Campbell knows and cites. The second tradition is less philosophically ambitious. It is not concerned with demonstrating an harmonious order in nature and language, not concerned with creating a metatheory of language. Rather its concerns are to fix English, establish its laws, and promote conformity to them. This effort was motivated by fear that English was declining, was losing its “purity,” especially since the Civil War. Fear was also expressed that the rate of change was so significant that, if not arrested, the works of eighteenth-century poets would be as inaccessible in next century as Chaucer’s work was to all but experts in the

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eighteenth (Baugh 1957, 314–15). These fears sponsored proposals for the creation of an Academy similar to ones already established in Italy and France, with Jonathan Swift’s Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712) being the most famous, and calls for the creation of a dictionary, which eventuated in Samuel Johnson’s monumental Dictionary of the English Language. Academies were judged to be futile in preventing change or, if successful, deleterious in limiting the vibrant growth of the language, as well as compromising the sacrosanct freedom of John Bull (Baugh, 325–26). Education and persuasion seemed preferable to laws, and English grammars that could bring order and regularity, two treasured Enlightenment values, preferable to academies. What is to be the relationship between these two traditions with their contrasting purposes? As Murray Cohen has shown, the two traditions are not necessarily opposed nor consistently opposed (84–86); indeed Robert Lowth, after summarizing his own practical goals, directs those who “would enter more deeply into this Subject” to Hermes for “the most beautiful and perfect example of Analysis that has been exhibited since the days of Aristotle” (Lowth, xiv–xv). But this extravagant praise notwithstanding, “nowhere does Lowth suggest that Hermes is useful or necessary to learning a language” (Murray Cohen, 85). Harris’ work is not relevant to establishing correct contemporary usage. This attitude of Lowth toward Harris is generally representative of the attitude of the practical grammarians to other work seeking to identify a source for grammar external to contemporary practice. In addition to the laws of universal grammar, at least three other principles were discussed as a basis for contemporary rules. One was to develop grammatical rules similar to the grammar of Latin and Greek. John Dryden, for example, allowed that, in the absence of an established English grammar, he sometimes resorted to translating his words into Latin to decide on the appropriate case and then translated back to English (Baugh, 308). Where appropriate, should English imitate the ancient languages? Or should rules be based on ancient English practice? Should the earliest meaning of a word serve as the basis for its correct current meaning? Should earlier usage generally be preferred where practice varies? Another possibility was in questionable cases to recommend a rule based on analogy with existing, established rules that dictate usage in other areas. This would, consistent with Enlightenment impulse, increase the order and predictability of English. The practical grammarians rejected all these external standards. They advanced custom or use as the basis for contemporary grammar. Campbell, who sides with the practical grammarians, consistently contrasts a standard internal to the practice of language, which he designates “use,” to the various external standards of the rationalist tradition. This opposition is clear in his response to Swift’s statement (quoted by Campbell) that “‘our language . . . offends against every part of grammar’” (140). Campbell

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wonders if Swift had in mind a “universal archetype by which the particular grammars of all different tongues ought to be regulated?”(140). Campbell doubts that there is such an “ideal grammar” (140). Or “perhaps [Swift] meant the grammar of some other language,” such as Greek or Latin, a standard that Campbell insists is irrelevant to English grammar. Similarly, when Campbell faults Lowth for approving of Thomas Middleton’s argument on behalf of “sitten” as the “true participle of sit” (148), he advances customary use against the arbitrary rules of an external, bookish standard (148–49). In advancing “use” as the basis of grammar, then, Campbell is not distinguishing the most common practices of his own day from what he regards as the best practice of his own day but advancing acceptable contemporary practice as the basis for grammar against rules based on an external standard such as the discoveries of universal grammar, or the grammar of Greek or Latin, or earlier English practice. Throughout POR, Campbell emphasizes that grammar and expression are the body of discourse, logic and substance its soul, that grammar and expression are not constant across nations but that logic and substance are. To us, these point seems painfully obvious, but Campbell is attempting to make a specific point for his readers: the grammar of a language cannot be derived from or evaluated by an external standard. But one must acknowledge that Campbell’s advocacy of “use” is qualified even when compared to some of his own contemporaries. Ulman probably has it right in characterizing Campbell’s attitudes toward the development and improvement of language as reflecting “an unresolved tension between dynamic and static views of language” (85). We hear in Joseph Priestly a decidedly less ambivalent view toward customary use as the basis for grammar: It must be allowed, that the custom of speaking is the original, and only just standard of any language. We see, in all grammars, that this is sufficient to establish a rule, even contrary to the strongest analogies of the language with itself. Must not this custom, therefore, be allowed to have some weight, in favour of those forms of speech, to which our best writers and speakers seem evidently prone . . . ? (The Rudiments of English Grammar 1969, ix)

Indeed, Campbell and Priestley’s differences on linguistic matters parallel differences in their politics. Priestley, a nonconformist who embraced democracy, would allow the practices of “the generality” to be the decisive vote in determing the criterion of acceptable use. Campbell, by contrast, was an an establishment, moderate republican. Those among the public who are able to read and to purchase books “vote” in linguistic matters indirectly, through their purchase of works by reputable authors, whose practice Campbell would make the measure of acceptable use. Campbell insists that he judges authors as “reputable” solely on the esteem they hold with the public “not their intrinsic merit” (144). In linguistic matters, then, Campbell’s system allows a franchise limited to the liberally educated, who are represented by the authors they deem reputable.

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The moderate conservatism that characterizes Campbell’s standard of “reputable use” is characteristic of his approach to linguistic matters generally. It informs his sense of what a standard is. For modern linguists, such as Sterling Leonard, who understand linguistics as a science that traces customary uses synchronically and diachroically, a standard is what is acceptable at a given time or in a given region. Theoretically, such a standard could change by the minute or by the mile. But although Campbell understood that language changes over time and varies over region, a standard capable of change so frequently or with that degree of geographical variance would be no standard. For Campbell and many of his contemporaries, a standard must have an appropriate degree of uniformity and universality. Of course, a linguistic standard cannot achieve the degree of uniformity and universality of Newton’s law of gravity, but Campbell envisioned that part of the grammarian’s “business” was to articulate standards that achieve a degree of uniformity and universality appropriate to the character of language. Thus, he offers as a basis for rejecting language use of the “generality,” not that their language is wrong but that it is wrong in different ways—not according to any standard. “There is rarely any uniformity” in error (142). And later when he grants that in some “vulgarisms” there is a uniform practice, we can be sure that these practices are the result of common negligence, since those who use them in speech often correct them in writing (142–43). A standard must be uniform and informed. Campbell’s goal is to maintain what is “firmly rooted,” “fixed or stable” (149). The voice that we should seek to hear in Campbell is not the emerging voice of linguistic science but the self-consciously moderate voice of eighteenth-century Augustan humanism. Specifically, the voice relevant to Campbell’s intentions is, once again, Quintilian’s. At two footnotes in Book II, Campbell directs the reader to chapter vi of Book I of the Institutes. In that chapter, the task Quintilian sets for himself parallels Campbell’s in Book II: to identify the standards of usage appropriate to the Latin language of his day. Much of what Quintilian writes in this chapter (and in chapter v of the same book) has its counterpart in Campbell. Quintilian too sees the task of criticism as weighing a linguistic choice from a number of different perspectives: “Language is based on reason, antiquity, authority and usage” (Institutes I.vi.i: 113). He, as also does Campbell, regards all four principles as relevant but insists that customary use is the most important of the four: “Usage, however, is the surest pilot in speaking, and we should treat language as currency minted with the public stamp” (I. vi. iii: 113). He then examines each of the factors individually, insisting that in each case “we have need of critical judgment.” Judgment must be used to assure that grammar is consonant with linguistic practice, but neither grammatical prescription nor common use can be adapted as a general rule. Etymology too can be some guide in locating the precise meaning of words but we need to move cautiously in taking the origin of a word as a basis for its correct meaning. The practices of the best ancient

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authors can also help in deciding correctness, though we must apply judgment in each case, not slavishly adopt a rule. Important as use is as a guide to what is acceptable, even here judgment is no less needed, Quintilian insists: But even here the critical faculty is necessary, and we must make up our minds what we mean by usage. If it be defined merely as the practice of the majority, we shall have a very dangerous rule affecting not merely style but life as well, a far more serious matter. For where is so much good to be found that what is right should please the majority? The practices of depilation, of dressing the hair in tiers, or of drinking to excess at baths, although they may have thrust their way into society, cannot claim the support of usage, since there is something to blame in all of them. . . . So too in speech we must not accept as a rule of language words and phrases that have become a vicious habit with a number of persons. To say nothing of the language of the uneducated, we are all of us well aware that whole theatres and the entire crowd of spectators will often commit barbarisms in the cries which they utter as one man. I will therefore define usage in speech as the agreed practice of educated men, just as where our way of life is concerned I should define is as the agreed practice of all good men. (I. vi. xliii–xlv: 133; author’s emphasis)

Leonard’s characterization of Campbell’s inconsistency, understandable as it is, is not fair to Campbell and certainly does not help us to see Campbell’s intentions. What Campbell is attempting to do is to locate a middle ground among principles that are in tension. From his point of view, that middle ground has already been discovered—in classical rhetoric, especially by Quintilian. His intention is to establish the continuing relevance of classical rhetoric in the context of a contemporary debate over linguistic usage.

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EIGHT

Style and Book III Vivacity and Animation as Stylistic Qualities

Campbell’s analysis of style, though incomplete, affords us an interesting instance of the way his dialogue with both the Ancients and the Moderns results in an analysis that is both familiar and strikingly different. Quintilian’s influence is never more in evidence than in Campbell’s analysis of style; yet, because he examines rhetoric from the viewpoint of reception (as distinguished from production), Campbell’s analysis is different from and significantly superior to Quintilian’s. As others have pointed out, Campbell’s analysis of style is incomplete. In Book II, he identifies six qualities of style: purity, perspicuity, vivacity, elegance, animation, and music (or beauty). He considers purity in the subsequent chapters of this book (II) since purity (correctness) is a matter of grammar. (See chap. 7 of this study.) The other qualities of style are the province of rhetoric, he tells us (214–15). But while he examines perspicuity in detail in Book II and vivacity in detail in Book III, he does not provide a parallel consideration of the other qualities of style. Nevertheless, his passing remarks on animation, which, with vivacity, is clearly fundamental to his theory of the “lively idea,” are sufficiently suggestive for us to deduce his larger intentions. We can see what he had in mind and the considerable promise of his basic approach. Even as incomplete as it stands, Campbell’s analysis of style is perceptive and provocative. Campbell’s analysis of the units that constitute style is virtually identical to Quintilian’s. Quintilian (and Cicero) identify three resources of style; that is, three variables that the orator can manipulate to achieve a desired effect: word choice or diction, the arrangement of words in a sentence or syntax, and the choice of figures, this last broken down into a standard three types— tropes, figures of speech, and figures of thought (Institutes VIII). Quintilian also identifies qualities of style, qualities in the sense of criteria of a good style.

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These are purity or correctness, clarity, ornament or distinctiveness, and appropriateness; appropriateness is understood as the proper relationship between the extent of ornament and external situational factors such as the character of the speaker and the audience and the forum and occasion of the discourse. On the basis of these units and qualities, Quintilian (and Roman rhetoric generally) identifies three styles: (1) the relatively colloquial plain style, in which the artistry is least evident; (2) the grand style, which is the most stylized and emotional; and (3) the middle, which is between the two others. Campbell ‘s analysis of style is rooted in this classical analysis but is, finally, quite different. His debt to Quintilian is most evident in his analysis of perspicuity. Indeed, his discussion is so close to Quintilian’s that it seems likely he had the Institutes opened before him as he composed the sections on perspicuity in Book II. The elements that comprise Campbell’s analysis of perspicuity are the same as Quintilian’s: word choice and syntax; ornament is not an element for either Campbell or Quintilian in achieving clarity as both see clarity as achieved through an absence of faults. Campbell’s claim in the first sentence of his analysis that perspicuity is “the first and most essential” quality of style echoes Quintilian, whom Campbell, in fact, cites. Campbell’s consideration of ellipsis and redundancy (217–19) as causes of obscurity follows a similar discussion in Quintilian (VIII. ii: 16–22), as also does Campbell’s discussion of faulty word choice (220–22), which Quintilian takes up at (VIII. ii: 14). Campbell comments on how long or ungainly sentences obscure the sense (224–26), as does Quintilian (VIII. ii: 13–16). Even Campbell’s seemingly eccentric distinction between equivocation and ambiguity (226–43) echoes a similar distinction in the Institutes (VIII. ii: 2, 6–11), and Campbell cites Quintilian’s insistence that a style in which the sense can be construed but only with effort does not meet a genuine standard of clarity (221). Although Campbell goes beyond Quintilian in his discussion of the causes of total unintelligibility, essentially Campbell merely adapts Quintilian’s discussion to his needs by adjusting for the differences between Latin and English and by adding contemporary examples as illustrations. But there is nothing in Quintilian that parallels Campbell’s stylistic types, such as the vivid or animated style. Within classical rhetoric, style is analyzed predominately from the viewpoint of the composing orator, not from the point of view of the critic. Quintilian’s four qualities (purity, clarity, ornament, and propriety) are not intended to distinguish types of styles but to define the qualities of good style: all oratory should be correct, clear, and appropriately ornamented. The basis for the four qualities and the three styles are implicit in Book III of Aristotle’s Rhetoric where Aristotle assumes a dichotomy between prose and poetry. The base line for prose is colloquial speech. Clarity and correctness are the sine qua non of good speech. Furthermore, Aristotle maintains that the very best prose is also urbane or, as he says in the Poetics, has an “uncommon air,” that gives the listener or reader pleasure. In this latter quality, prose draws from poetry: it is, like poetry, distinctively orna-

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mented. But in prose the artistry is less evident: the best prose occupies a mean between colloquial speech and poetry. Because this analysis is founded on a dichotomy between prose and poetry, it focuses on the conspicuousness of the artistry; were Aristotle trying to distinguish the different types of prose style, the broad difference between an ornamented poetry and an apparently plain speech would not have been useful. Examined from the viewpoint of the critic, as distinguished from that of the composing orator, the limitations of the classical analysis become quickly apparent. The distinction between the three styles is the degree and nature of ornament and the emotional tenor of the speech. But these are not helpful distinctions for the critic or theorist. It is not that Cicero and Quintilian are unaware of the different effects of different styles or the different experience of listening to or reading one style and another. They mention numerous discrete effects that ornamentation can have: ornamentation can enhance, can invigorate, can amplify; it can increase the force or the vividness or the gravity, the beauty of the ideas. This technical vocabulary might have been the basis for a taxonomy of different stylistic effects, in which a forceful style would be distinguished from a passionate one, a vivid style from a grave one, and an elegant style from a forceful one. Cicero and Quintilian might have distinguished discrete effects, but they did not. Campbell’s qualities of vivacity, elegance, and animation identify, by contrast, discrete stylistic effects. Campbell comes to this different analysis by way of his different point of departure from the Ancients—his faculty psychology and his taxonomy of purposes that is based on these faculties. Each of the styles corresponds to a faculty and a purpose: the understanding responds to clarity, the imagination to vivacity and elegance, the passions to animation and music. This psychological perspective not only provides Campbell with a lens that focuses on effects, but it also provides him with a list of technical terms more discretely related to effects than terms such as “weightiness” or “impressiveness” of Roman rhetoric. The distinction Campbell makes between a vivid style, which is the subject of Book III, and an animated style is especially perceptive. In the section that follows, I highlight the differences between vivacity and animation. Both are highly figured styles, but vivacity works on the intellectual level dramatically to call attention to particular points, while animation intends to stir the audience up by expressive figures that transfer emotion from speaker to listener.

VIVACITY AS A STYLISTIC QUALITY

Campbell begins his analysis of vivacity in Book III by identifying the two types of style (vivacity and elegance) that appeal to the imagination, defining vivacity in terms of its appeal to the imagination, and by identifying three constituents of style.

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The key term for achieving vivacity is “resemblance,” which, as we have seen in chapter 5, is a complex and shifting term in POR. Here, in Book III, Campbell states that a vivid style creates “resemblance”—creates an effect that resembles a primary sense impression. This effect is achieved by the rhetor’s manipulation of the three stylistic variables of word choice (which includes the use of tropes and figures), the number of words, and their syntactical arrangement. Specifically by a vivid style the mind is awakened, the attention fixed as occurs with a sudden or dramatic sense impression. Vivacity is, then, a style that achieves emphasis, a style that directs or rivets the listener’s or reader’s attention on a conceptually relevant element by engaging the imagination. Any device that directs the reader’s attention on the part of the sentence that expresses the particular feature of the idea that the orator wants to make present to the audience’s mind is a technique of vivacity. In the first section of Book III on word choice and tropes, Campbell emphasizes specificity and sensuousness as resources of language that bring an idea to the attention of the reader or listener—makes something present to the hearers’ minds. Whatever “tends to subject the thing spoken of to the notice or our senses, especially of our eyes, greatly enlivens the expression” (291), Campbell observes in a sentence that clearly underscores the traditional sense of the imagination as a faculty that functions as the mind’s eye. Some of the examples suggest that vivacity produces “resemblance” by ocular language or sensuous detail that directs the reader’s attention by filling the mind with a picture; others recognize nonvisual resources of language that can achieve a similar attention-directing effect. To emphasize his dedication, Paul (in Acts xx: 33–34) says to the Ephesians, “‘I have coveted . . . no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel; yea ye yourselves know that these hands have ministered to my necessities and to them that were with me’” (292; Campbell’s emphasis). Campbell’s speculation that the passage invites us to imagine Paul holding up his hands in a dramatic gesture recalls the relationship between words and actual referent that characterizes classical enargeia. But Campbell’s explanation of the vivacity in the sentence does not focus on the image of Paul’s hands but on the demonstrative pronoun. “These hands,” Campbell notes: “Had [Paul] said, ‘my hands,’ the sentence would have lost nothing either in meaning or in perspicuity, but very much in vivacity” (292). In this case, it is not sensual detail that contributes to vivacity, but the demonstrative pronoun that

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rivets the listener’s attention. Demonstrative pronouns are the linguistic equivalent to an actual thrusting before the eyes; language can “resemble” a primary sense impression. In the section on tropes, Campbell singles out metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and antonomasia as particularly helpful to promoting vivacity. The first three, which embody the abstract, appeal to the imagination by presenting to the mind “some image, which from the original principles of our nature, more strongly attaches the fancy than could have been done by the proper terms whose place they occupy” (310). Other figures work by “distinguishing the most interesting point,” so that the reader’s attention is drawn to the substantive point the rhetor wants to emphasize. In Dryden’s substitution of “hands” for laborers in “all hands employ’d, the royal work grows warm,” the “coincidence in the expression with the bent of the imagination, both pointing to that particular with which the subject spoken of is immediately connected” directs the readers attention appropriately (301–302; my emphasis). The reader’s imagination is drawn to the concreteness of “hands,” but the vivacity follows both because of the concreteness of the image and also and especially from the conceptual coincidence of the metonomic part (hands) to the sailors’ function as workers. By “personifying the abstract,” Campbell notes, “you leave no room for thinking of any other quality; the attention is entirely fixed on that to which the action related is imputable, and thus the natural tendency of the fancy is humoured by the expression” (303). The figure produces a response that resembles a response to an actual experience by dramatically drawing the imagination to a salient detail in a way that an actual sense impression would. Vivacity also engages the imagination by defamiliarization and surprise. Campbell’s consideration of syntax in the third section of Book III is conclusive evidence of his awareness that language has unique ways of creating resemblance. Syntax, after all, has no obvious parallel in the pictorial arts. Because word order is a matter of convention, syntactic transposition becomes a way to establish emphasis through defamiliarization, through surprise. At the same time, syntactic transposition rivets the attention by appeal to an imagination conceived along traditional lines—an imagination attracted to the unusual and the dramatic. An example shows how departures from the conventional S-V-O order establishes salience by disrupting the reader’s expectations and dramatically appealing to the imagination in order to fix the listener’s or reader’s attention on a conceptually relevant detail. Shakespeare writes, “‘Not in the legions / Of horrid hell, can come a devil more damn’d, / In ills to top Macbeth’” (361). Campbell explains that the departure from the expected S-V-O arrangement directs readers’ and listeners’ attention to Macbeth’s guilt. If “you dispose the words in the usual manner, and say, ‘A more damned devil in the legions of horrid hell cannot come to top Macbeth in his ills’; we shall scarcely be persuaded

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that the thought is the same” (361). An example from Zechariah (1. 5) shows how a similar transposition can increase vivacity by substituting a “natural” order for the artificial linguistic one: “‘Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live forever?’” The sentiment these lines express, that life is frail, is “one of those obvious truths” that need to be enlivened if they are to be attended to and effective. The point is not to make us believe, but to make us feel. . . . And nothing can be better adapted to this purpose than first, as it were independently, to raise clear ideas in the imagination, and then, by the abruptness of an unexpected question, to send us to seek for the archetypes” (364; Campbell’s emphasis). An explanation in empiricist terms accounts for the effect of a sequence well established in the rhetorical tradition: a dramatic invocation of an image followed by a figure (rhetorical question) that arouses emotion. In Book III, vivacity, then, is an intensifier, a sentence-level stylistic device that leads the reader or listener to attend to one feature over others. Its appeal is aesthetic. The orator or poet chooses words, tropes and figures, and syntactic structures that exploit the incredible resources that language has for the sensitive writer or speaker. And, importantly, part of the pleasures that the reader or listener experiences via the imagination follows from his or her appreciation of the writer’s ability—part of the pleasure is aesthetic.

ANIMATION AS A QUALITY OF STYLE

If Joseph Addison had written essays on the pleasures of the emotions to parallel his series on the imagination (see chap. 5), the essays would have stressed that the emotions satisfy the mind’s desire for activity. According to Dubos, whose Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting Campbell cites, the mind disdains inactivity and listlessness. Because the mind receives pleasure from activity, pain from inactivity, the nature of the stimulus that will relieve the mind from this “oppressive languour, which preys upon it in a state of inactivity” (113) is less important than that languor be relieved. As is discussed in Chapter 6 of this study, Hume understands the passions as forces that combine to build momentum and hurry the reader to judgment. Campbell notes that the same tropes and figures that the imagination finds so gratifying, in other contexts can have a “marvelous efficacy in rousing the passions, and by some secrete, sudden, and inexplicable association” awaken all the “emotions of the heart” (4). But he insists that ornamentation must not appeal primarily to the imagination if listeners are to be moved emotionally. If the reader is aware of a figure as a figure, if the listener becomes impressed by the artistry of the orator, the emotional spell is broken and the building passion brought to a halt. According to Campbell: “The imagination is charmed by a finished picture, wherein even the drapery and ornament are

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not neglected. Would we penetrate further, and agitate the soul, we must exhibit some vivid strokes, some expressive features, not decorated for show (all ostentation being both despicable and hurtful here), but such as appear the natural exposition of those bright and deep impressions, made by the subject upon the speaker’s mind; for here the end is not pleasure, but emotion” (5). Campbell’s style that appeals directly to the passions—one that would complement vivacity and perspicuity that appeal to the imagination and understanding respectively—is the “animated” style, a term that draws on the Latin “animorum,” the term both Cicero and Quintilian use for a style that “moves the soul” (Institutes IX.iv: 515). Campbell, lists the particular figures that are most effective for arousing emotion: climax, correction, vision, exclamation, apostrophe, and interrogation. These figures function in two distinct ways: “The first three [figures], correction, climax and vision,” Campbell writes, “tend greatly to enliven the ideas, by the implicit, but animated comparison . . .” (94). Exclamation and apostrophe, by contrast, operate chiefly by sympathy, as they are the most ardent expressions of perturbation in the speaker” (94). Campbell’s distinction is clear: the first three figures amplify the emotional import of a subject. Climax can serve as an example of how the first three figures are directed toward enlivening a subject. A most famous example of climax, also called “amplification,” is Cicero’s attack on Verres, an example that Campbell himself cites (POR, 90–91, n 4): “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to slay him is almost an act of murder: to crucify him is—what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed” (Against Verres, Part II: 655–57). Quintilian cites this passages as an example of incrementum or augmentation (Institutes VIII. iv: 4–5, 265) and classifies such figures as schemes because the syntax creates a pattern that moves toward the most serious offense. Psychologically, the audience’s outrage builds with the terms in the comparison. The second group of figures, exclamation and apostrophe work differently—as Campbell states, “chiefly by sympathy.” Campbell understands them as expressive figures: they express the orator’s response. Cicero’s Second Philippic provides an example, one that is especially appropriate because Campbell himself cites in it POR (6 n7) and because it combines climax with exclamation: “Oh, the hideousness of it, not only to see, but even to hear!” Cicero proclaims of Antony’s vomiting in the Roman Assembly. These figures (exclamation, apostrophe, interrogation, or rhetorical question) are traditionally called “figures of thought.” The audience becomes infected by the orator’s response through sympathy, as the audience identifies emotionally with the speaker. Campbell’s analysis parallels the two ways that he discussed for enlivening an idea—through appeal to the circumstances and through the speaker’s action or gesture (see chap. 6). He has thus aligned an analysis of style with an analysis of the sense. But he has done even more than that. As I have indicated in table 8.1, Campbell has provided in his analysis of vivacity and animation a

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Faculty: Purpose: Phenomenological: Rhetorical: Explanation:

Vivacity

Animation

Imagination Please Fix attention Emphasis Resembles SI*

Passions Move Stir, move Action Transfers SI*

Note: *SI = Sense Impression

complete description of two styles that infuse an idea with the force of a sense impression: by appealing to the seven circumstances and by appealing to the audience’s sympathy, as was discussed in chapter 6. In Hume’s empiricist psychology, an emotion is an impression so in infusing an idea with emotional import by amplifying its emotional impact through the seven circumstances or though the audience’s identifying or sympathizing with a visibly agitated speaker, the orator transforms an idea into sense impressions, which are more powerful in influencing belief.

CONCLUSION

Campbell’s analysis of style makes a significant contribution to the rhetorical tradition. While the Ancients’ division of rhetoric into the five canons tends to separate invention (the first canon) from style (the third), Campbell’s approach, which targets a faculty and features an overriding purpose, aligns the conceptual and linguistic resources of emotional appeal. Moreover, Campbell provides a complete description in empiricist terms of two rhetorically important styles, as the table 8.1 indicates. In merging classical rhetoric and empiricist psychology, Campbell thus produces a comprehensive and coherent account of rhetorical style.

NINE

Campbell’s “Other” Work Dissertation on Miracles, Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence, the Sermons

There are several reasons for attending to George Campbell’s “other” work. Jeffrey Mark Suderman reads these works to show how Campbell’s “system of thought” was representative of the eighteenth century—that Campbell was a moderate divine who sought natural, philosophical evidence to support a faith that rested finally on Revelation (1996, 388–89). It is also true that much of Campbell’s work is inherently interesting. The Dissertation on Miracles is a lively critique, his lectures to his students on church history and the study of Scripture, while hardly breaking new ground, are exemplary of the way history can be made interesting and relevant, and his sermon on the American Revolution should be of considerable interest to the North American readers of this book. But these works are also interesting because they illuminate themes in the Philosophy of Rhetoric. This is especially true of the Dissertation on Miracles, which cast light on Campbell’s attitude toward Hume and Reid and on Campbell’s theory of evidence, and of his Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence, which shows how the theory in POR (or some of it) manifests in the practical, applied context of pulpit oratory. This chapter provides an introduction to some of Campbell’s other work but emphasizes those elements in them that bear on our understanding of his theory of rhetoric. Campbell’s first published work was his Dissertation on Miracles—written in response to Hume’s “Essay on Miracles” (1748), and which was itself part of an ongoing debate that began in the seventeenth century. The miracles became a subject of controversy with Deists’ critiques that belief in them was not only unnecessary for salvation but unjustifiable on rational grounds. The Deists argued a priori that nature’s laws were uniform and that belief in miracles should be rejected as not reasonable. Furthermore, reports of miracles, the Deists maintained, were to be found in greater number among “ignorant

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and barbarous people,” not among advanced cultures, suggesting that these reports were the product of fear, superstition, and credulity (Burns 1981, 75). Christians generally applied a double standard, accepting as true the Evangelists accounts of Christ’s miracles, while dismissing as superstition similar claims on behalf of other religions (Burns, 75). Nor, some Deist argued, is there reason to accept even the Evangelists’ accounts uncritically, since good people will justify dissembling in a good cause, more so when the cause is saving souls. Moderate Christians, such as the Latitudinarians,1 tended to claim that the miracles could be accepted on empirical grounds. Belief in miracles was a question of weighing evidence and proportioning judgment of the certainty of the conclusions (absolutely certain to probable) to the weight of the evidence. These “probabalists” maintained that their approach to belief in miracles rested on the same grounds and proceeded in the same way as belief in historical testimony to non-miraculous events. This procedure involved a twopart approach. First one weighed the credibility of the witnesses—their number, integrity, and skill. Then one looked at the claim—its consistency and unanimity.2 Against the Diests, believers could argue that believing in miracles that met this test was hardly irrational. Though Hume offers his own version of the Diests’ arguments in Part II of his “Essay on Miracles,” he took what he regarded as a new and more radical approach to the topic in the first part of the essay—an approach that he thought delivered a knock out blow to belief in the miracles. The focus of Hume’s attack was the two-part approach of the probablists. Rather than separate the assessment of the credibility of witnesses and the credibility of the event itself, Hume reduces the separate equations to a single equation. Both our assessment of the intrinsic credibility of the event and our assessment of the credibility of the testimony itself are to be measured against a single standard: experience. “The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them” (103). Because experience teaches us that testimony is generally (though not always) reliable, we are inclined to believe witnesses to rare or even miraculous events. Similarly we accept that nature follows predictable laws by the same principle—by experience. We believe that the sun will rise, not because the statement that the sun will not rise is a logical absurdity but, because it conforms to our constant experience. But the regularity of nature’s laws is much more uniform and predictable than the reliability of testimony. The sun rises with more regularity than witnesses give truthful accounts. Since a miracle is by definition “a violation of the laws of nature,” something not merely rarely experienced but contrary to our “unalterable experience” (1988, 104), the probability that a witness to a miracle is deceiving or deceived is greater than the probability that nature has diverged from its uniform laws.

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There are not two scales—one to weigh the intrinsic credibility of the event and a second to weigh the probability of the testimony—but one. According to David Hume: The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.” When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other. . . . If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion. (1988, 105–106)

Campbell’s response to Hume in his Dissertation on Miracles is interesting and important in its own right. But it is also important as an aid to understanding Campbell’s rhetorical theory. First, the “Advertisement” to the Dissertation confirms what we could infer from the Philosophy of Rhetoric: that Campbell admired Hume’s analytic powers but adamantly rejected Hume’s conclusions. Campbell notes this of Hume: “I have not only been much entertain’d and instructed by his works; but, if I am possess’d of any talent in abstract reasoning, I am not a little indebted to what he hath written on human nature, for the improvement of that talent. If therefore, in this tract, I have refuted Mr. Hume’s Essay, the greater share of the merit is perhaps to be ascrib’d to Mr. Hume himself ” (1988, vi–vii). On the other hand, Campbell writes that Hume has a “mortal antipathy” (74) for religion and that his Essay is “one of the most dangerous attacks that have been made on our religion” (v–vi). Campbell was clearly impressed by the quality of Hume’s thought and the clarity of his style. But made one of the ambitions of his life to refute Hume’s conclusions. Second, the introduction to the Dissertation on Miracles confirms the limited role that reason plays in Campbell’s psychology. Campbell begins the Dissertation on Miracles by establishing the relationship between reason and faith. He maintains: “No arguments unaccompanied by the influences of the Holy Spirit, can convert the soul from sin to God” (A-1). Within the context of the debate over miracles, this point is intended to establish that a miracle (in the sense of a divine intervention) is necessary to conversion, that miracles are important and not to be dismissed as not essential, that the skeptical cannot reason their way to faith, and that Campbell cannot hope to persuade those who are not open to faith. This position also resonates with Campbell’s theory

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of persuasion and helps us understand the basis for the limits that Campbell places on appeals to the understanding. Campbell’s belief that conversion is not a matter of reasoned argument is consonant with his view that persuasion cannot be secured without appeals to the passions. According to Campbell’s psychology, in creating belief, reason has a limited role: “In short, no hypothesis hitherto invented,” he writes, “hath shown that by means of the discursive faculty, without the aid of any other mental power, we could ever obtain a notion of either the beautiful or the good,” Campbell writes in POR (79). Hume is, of course, famous for his criticism of reason, as hobbled and belated, but while Campbell is arguing on behalf of the necessity of faith, Hume is arguing toward skepticism. Campbell does insist at the outset of the Dissertation on Miracles, that while reason is not enough, it can supplement faith—can discover evidence that confirms the truth of faith. This view too is consonant with his theory of persuasion, which allows reason the role of testing the relationships between the values sought and the means proposed, an important, though subordinate role. Third, Campbell’s argument that our belief in testimony is prior to experience reflects his allegiance to Thomas Reid’s principles of common sense and is consonant with his analysis of evidence in POR. Campbell’s most effective and original argument in the Dissertation on Miracles is that, against Hume, our faith in testimony is not the consequence of experience, does not originally derive from repeated experience of the validity of witnesses’ reports. Campbell advances the view that testimony has evidentiary status independent of experience. Hume had claimed that our belief in testimony rested on experience, as also does our belief in the consistency and uniformity of nature’s laws. Campbell argues that our belief in testimony is temporally prior to our experience of the reliability of testimony; that is, we first accept the truth of testimony intuitively, which is later confirmed or not by experience. As children we believe what others report; only later does experience cause us to maintain or discard this initial trust. For Campbell this initial acceptance is a sign that accepting testimony is “original,” something unlearned and unmotivated and therefore more true: “. . . that, on the contrary [to Hume’s view], testimony hath a natural and original influence on belief, antecedent to experience, will . . . easily be evinced. For this purpose let it be remark’d, that the earliest assent, which is given to testimony by children, and which is previous to all experience, is in fact the most unlimited; that by a gradual experience of mankind, it is gradually contracted, and reduced to narrower bounds. To say therefore that our diffidence in testimony [as opposed to our belief in testimony] is the result of experience, is more philosophical, because more consonant to truth, than to say that our faith in testimony has this foundation. Accordingly youth, which is unexperienc’d, is credulous; age, on the contrary, is distrustful.” (14–15)

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Campbell insists that our acceptance of testimony is “unaccountable,” based on “some original grounds” of human nature. In this it is like our confidence in the general reliability of memory—a first principle that we must accept if we are to believe that experience is the basis for subsequent learning (17–18). Campbell’s insistence that we must accept some beliefs a priori—in this case the general reliability of testimony and memory—before we can make sense of experience also is consonant with Reid’s comprehensive critique of empiricism. Essentially, Campbell’s argument is that we accept the reliability of testimony on what Reid calls a “common sense” first principle (discussed in chap. 2); for Campbell in POR common sense is a type of evidence or a reason for assent. Ultimately Campbell’s assumptions that memory and testimony are reliable rest on the argument from design: our mental faculties were designed by God in a way that enables us to function rationally and to act. That children have confidence in the reliability of their mental processes is evidence that the confidence is instilled by God. Our faculties were designed for our needs. This trust in our natural faculties is a reassuring view for one writing a psychological theory of rhetoric. And it is the basis for Campbell’s belief that rhetorical discourse that is “natural,”—that is, that embodies principles that enable the discourse to be processed by the mind naturally—is more likely to be believed and therefore has greater efficacy. Finally, on the rhetorical level the Dissertation on Miracles characterizes Hume’s argumentative style as reminiscent of the schoolmen—the Scholastic philosophers, who, in the cartoonish portrait of the Enlightenment, defended their dogmatic views through verbal feats, such as the syllogism. In POR, Campbell argued that the syllogism was generally fallacious because it begs the question. In the Dissertation on Miracles, Campbell maintains that Hume is guilty of this same fallacy. When Hume maintains that what is opposed to our constant experience cannot be rationally accepted and then defines a miracle as that which is opposed to our firm and unalterable experience (43), Campbell maintains that Hume merely dismisses in the conclusion what he had excluded by definition in the premise; Hume never answers the question of how miracles are opposed to our unalterable experience. In light of this criticism, we should not be surprised that Campbell casts Hume as a Scholastic. Of Hume’s axiom in his “Essay on Miracles,” “never to lend any attention to testimonies or facts urged by religion, with whatever specious pretext they may be covered,” (Dissertation, 78), Campbell comments: I had almost congratulated Mr. Hume and our enlighten’d age, on this happy invention, before I reflected, that tho’ the application might be new, the expedient itself, of resolving to be deaf to argument, was very ancient, having been often with great success employ’d against atheists and heretics, and warmly recommended by Bellarmine and Scotus and most others of that bright fraternity the schoolmen. (78–79)

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In other words, Hume is dogmatic. Campbell’s charge that Hume is dogmatic is consonant with the Latitudinarian view generally, who contrasted their willingness to weigh evidence and decide on genuinely reasonable grounds with the unreasonable, authoritarian Roman Catholics, Deists and, here, skeptics, who dismissed some positions a priori. In contrast to Hume, we religionists, Campbell insists “scorn to take shelter in obscurity, and meanly to decline combat; confident as we are that REASON is our ally and our friend, and glad to find that the enemy at length so violently suspects her” as to be unwilling to subject some propositions to evidentiary tests (81).

CAMPBELL’S LECTURES

As Professor of Divinity at Marischal, Campbell presented lectures intended to prepare students for the ministry. These lectures are notable for their clear, lively style, and for the way in which they model the professor-student relationship. They are also helpful as an aid to understanding POR, though this is more true of the Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence than the Lectures on Ecclesiastical History or the Lectures on Systematic Theology. Among the main topics of Campbell’s theological lectures was the history of the church—lectures that were published after Campbell’s death as Lectures on Ecclesiastical History (LEH). The lectures narrate a polemical history of decline—from a pristine, communal early Church to a corrupt, tyrannical one with its seat in Rome. In Campbell’s words, the lectures trace the “progress of ecclesiastical dominion” (LEH, 290). Campbell stresses that the episcopal system that characterizes Roman Catholicism and Episcopalianism is a corruption of Christ’s and Paul’s intention. He brings philological arguments to prove this point, for example, that the current power of the bishops in the Roman Catholic and Scottish Episcopalian churches rests on a mistranslation of the Greek word for “church,” specifically that originally a bishop had power over a church in the sense of a single congregation, not of the Church in the sense of the Church as the embodiment of all believers. In casting doubt on the historical legitimacy of the current status and power of bishops and insisting that in the early Church presbyters were equal to bishops, Campbell argues for the greater legitimacy of the governance system in his own Presbyterian Church of Scotland and gives his lectures currency and point. But while maintaining that the weight of evidence is on his interpretation of governance in the early church, he also grants that historical arguments are not definitive with regard to modern practice—that early church practice need not dictate contemporary systems of governance—another indication of Campbell’s moderate, Latitudinarian temper. This moderation does not apply to Roman Catholicism, however, as its exercise of civil power is characterized as one of the “grossest usurpations and one of the greatest evils that have infested the christian church” (46).3

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As an aid to understanding Campbell’s rhetorical theory, LEH has, perhaps, little to contribute. But one point is worth reflection. In LEH, Campbell does not aspire to provide a chronology of events; rather, in a scientific vein, he identifies the “springs of action and principle causes” (1807, 266) that shaped history. This language and this theoretical intention echo his effort in POR to identify the science of human nature on which his rhetoric would be founded and to which it contributes. In identifying his lectures on church history as a contribution to the “science of theology” and his work in rhetoric as a contribution to the study of the “science of the human mind,” Campbell situates his work within the Enlightenment project that, taking inspiration from Newton’s Principia, would identify the hidden laws that explain the movement of nature, or of history, or mind. When Campbell’s Lectures on Ecclesiastical History were published in 1800, a few years after his death, the reviews were very positive: both the reviewers in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review praised the lecturers for their erudition and judiciousness—even though the reviewers did not share Campbell’s allegiances to the Presbyterian Church.4 But subsequently partisans attacked the book, especially Scottish Episcopalians, who thought Campbell was attempting to undermine their legitimacy in Scotland (Suderman 1996, 94–96). Campbell also lectured on “systematic theology.” As Suderman observes, the title is misleading because the lectures do not provide a systematic summary of Campbell’s theology. Indeed, Campbell spends considerable time in the six lectures that comprise the body of what was published as the Lectures on Systematic Theology warning students away from systems and commentaries— a view consonant with Campbell’s distrust of deduction and syllogisms expressed in POR. In the Lectures on Systematic Theology, Campbell advances the Latitudinarian view that what is essential to salvation is clear to reasonable people (1810, 53). Partisanship and sectarianism either imagine difficulties or exaggerate the importance of genuine ambiguities. But, rather than provide his students with a systematic theology (even his own), Campbell provides them with a method that will enable them to arrive at a view of the Gospel that they can use in judging the commentaries and systems of others. The method would bring a sincere open-mindedness, humility and patience, to an understanding of the “spirit and sentiments of sacred writ” (78). With this understanding, Scripture can become the arbiter of competing claims of orthodoxy among the commentators and systematizes. The reviewer for the Monthly Review praised Campbell profusely for his knowledge, judgment and style (371). Of all Campbell’s “other” work, the Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence (LPE) is the most important as a gloss on the Philosophy of Rhetoric. Campbell’s twelve lectures to his divinity students were intended to provide practical guidance, with some theoretical explanation, on preparing and, to a lesser extent, delivering sermons. Because they were intended to provide practical help, they lack

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the theoretical framework of the Philosophy of Rhetoric, though they draw on the theory advanced there. But, also in contrast to POR, LPE is written in the readable, confident, collegial style—creating a professorial stance in which the assumed difference between professor and student is a matter of experience only. Because LPE provides an excellent introduction to POR and because it is long out of print and not easily accessible, I provide an abstract of the appendix 1. In the first lecture, Campbell directly states his respect for and allegiance to ancient rhetoric. As far as the practical art of rhetoric is concerned, in the genres that the tradition encompassed, there is little to add to what the Ancients (Aristotle, Cicero, and, especially, Quintilian) have achieved. Having surveyed the French and English moderns who have written on the art, Campbell tells his students that “everything valuable is servilely copied” from the Ancients, though he does add that Charles Rollin, François Fénelon, and Hugh Blair are good (165–66). Campbell insists that his contribution is merely to apply what the Ancients taught to a type of rhetoric their teaching did not encompass: “It is not my intention by these lectures to supersede the study of ancient critics and orators, but only to assist you in applying their rules and examples to cases so different from those with which alone they were concerned” (454). 5 In POR, Campbell extends a similar deference to the Ancients: in terms of practice and pedagogy, their work had brought rhetoric to completion; his generation’s contribution could be only to provide a theoretical explanation for their sound advice. But while Campbell wanted to supplement, not supersede, the Ancients, he also sought to correct what he regarded as the distorted and limiting view of rhetoric that had developed in the Renaissance. This theme pervades Campbell’s lectures to his Marischal divinity students and is the basis for Campbell’s extension of rhetoric to all forms of discourse in POR and his expansion of rhetoric to include grammar and logic. In the first lecture, Campbell expresses his sense that Medieval and Renaissance logic and rhetoric are distortions of these arts. Those who think that eloquence is an unnecessary distraction from the Gospel message and unbeffitting a minister mistakenly associate rhetorical skill with contentious logamachy of the Scholastics or with a decorated “flowery” style intended to “set off the speaker’s art” (355) of Renaissance rhetorical theory. But if eloquence is thought of as that “art or talent whereby the speech is adapted to produce in the hearer the great end which the speaker has . . . it is impossible to doubt the utility of the study” (355). Indeed, rhetoric is especially relevant to the ministry, for the minister must not only know the truth, but also be able to communicate it effectively, as numerous Biblical verses beseeching us to spread the Word testify. Even the “homliest” discourse has more of true eloquence than “frothy harangues” (355), and the Bible contains many models of “simple” “natural” discourse illustrative of a true art of rhetoric.

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But if Renaissance rhetoric had bent rhetoric too much in the direction of ornate, figured language, Campbell intended to straighten the branch without bending it too much in the direction of the Enlightenment critics who would banish rhetoric from the pulpit in favor of an art of teaching and sermons that would appeal only to the understanding. Throughout the Lectures, Campbell maintains that appeals to the imagination and the passions are essential to most types of pulpit discourse and advocates a pulpit rhetoric that is clear in instructing about the Word, but that is also engaging and affecting—that is, a rhetoric true to the Ciceronian tradition that insisted on wisdom and eloquence. It is instructive to observe him negotiate his way to a modern Ciceronian position that (he feels) does not compromise Enlightenment values. The restraint on appeals to the imagination and the passions in Pulpit Eloquence is not moral, but rhetorical. It is not a sense that the imagination can mislead or that the passions can impede the operation of reason that is the basis for Campbell’s stance but his sense of rhetorical propriety. With regard to appeals to the imagination, “Whatever soars above the reach of the congregation, whatever appears either unintelligible or affected is faulty and offensive” (456). And figures of speech can be used in any type of sermon. The degree and nature of use depends on the sermon’s purpose: similes should teach what is unfamiliar by comparison to what is known; in controversial sermons, ministers may make an analogical argument; in commendatory sermons they may please by making present the beautiful, the sublime, or the wonderful (456). Campbell’s disciplinary principles are rhetorical—a sense of what’s appropriate given the audience and the purpose. This is same synthetic view of the art of rhetoric that we saw in POR, where a theory is advanced that explains why necessarily all rhetorical discourse appeals to the understanding, but also that most rhetoric (mathematics only is excepted) appeals also to the imagination, and that the most important type of rhetoric (persuasion) necessarily must engage all the faculties but especially the passions—a justification in Enlightenment theoretical terms of what Cicero knew well. There is an obvious similarly between Campbell’s taxonomy of rhetorical discourse in POR and his taxonomy of sermons in Pulpit Eloquence. Campbell lists five specific types of sermons: explanatory, argumentative or controversial, demonstrative, pathetic and persuasive (228)—a list that parallels the more general purposes identified in POR (2–3). But in POR Campbell mentions only in passing the specific genres that correspond to each aim, whereas in Pulpit Eloquence, which is far more genre-centered, there is detailed discussion of specific types of sermons and their relationship to the aim and the targeted faculty. This is especially enlightening with regard to discourse that appeals to the passions. Campbell’s example in POR is literary: the only type of discourse that he mentions as being targeted toward the passions primarily is tragedy. In Pulpit Eloquence, Campbell discusses a type of sermon that is intended to prepare the congregation for receiving the Eucharist as exemplary of the

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“pathetic” sermon. Campbell explains that the purpose of appealing to the passions in this case is not to persuade: the faithful’s presence for the purpose of receiving the Eucharist is evidence that they do not need persuasion. Rather, appeals to the passions are intended “to operate on all the grateful and devout affections of the heart, and to put his hearers . . . in a proper frame of spirit for discharging the duty for which they are assembled, in such a reverend and pious manner, as may produce the best effect upon their minds, and tend most to the edification and confirmation of themselves and others” (321–22). This is not a description of an effect that we ordinarily associate with passionate rhetoric, yet Campbell is convincing in his insistence that by focusing on the love of Christ’s or on his sufferings and death (this latter called passion sermons), rhetoric can bring the faithful to the proper emotional disposition. Other particular technical aspects of rhetoric, justified in abstract terms in POR, are similarly presented more directly in Pulpit Eloquence. Campbell’s explanation in psychological terms for the superior efficacy of induction as more “natural” than deduction is manifest in the Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence in his criticism of the schoolman’s logic as pretentious, artificial, and obtrusive. Being genuinely skilled in the discursive art does not mean “being well versed in the artificial dialectic of the schools . . . but being conversant in the natural and genuine principles and grounds of reasoning, whether derived from sense or memory, from comparison of related ideas, from testimony, experience, or analogy” (165). True logic is not learned from Aristotle but “is best studied . . . in the writing of the most judicious and best reasoners on the various subjects supplied by history, science, and philosophy” (166). Despite some people’s suspicion of those who would instruct ministers in an artful rhetoric, the dialectic of the schools is “fifty time more artificial, or if you will mechanical, than that which true rhetoric would inculcate.” It is the business of rhetoric “to bring men back from all scholastic pedantry and jargon, to nature, simplicity, and truth” (275–76), Campbell tells his students. In POR Campbell stressed the importance of art that conceals art. This preference for a concealed art, which is the basis for his criticism of the syllogism, is also reflected in Pulpit Eloquence in his emphasis on the importance for the minister to seem genuinely moved, not artful. Campbell writes that the parishioners must perceive the minister’s agitation and the “animation” of his language as “far from being the result of a deliberate settled purpose,” but rather as “the necessary, the unavoidable consequences of the sense that he has of the unspeakable importance of the truths he utters, joined with an ardent desire of promoting the eternal happiness of them who hear him” (326–27). Furthermore, Campbell’s emphasis on the importance of clarity in both works leads him to endorse a more plain style because, for Campbell, a plain style is not opposed to a passionate or imaginative one but to a pretension one. In Pulpit Eloquence, while clarity is the sine qua non of style, the style must also

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be “affecting” (184). It is only an unnatural affectation that defeats the minister’s purpose; a natural emotional appeal advances it. For Campbell ostentatious or contentious learning and the concomitant reliance on jargon, are faults against perspicuity (186–87). The “zealous disciples of Shaftsbury, Hutcheson, and Akenside” baffle their parishioners with talk of “supreme symmetry” and “inward muse of the mind.” His corrective is expressed memorably: “Think with the learned, but speak with the vulgar” (184). Finally, Pulpit Eloquence, because it addresses the requirements of the particular forum of the pulpit, provides a response to the complaint that Campbell does not understand rhetoric as a situational art.6 As he does in Book I, chapter IX of POR but throughout Pulpit Eloquence, Campbell is attentive to the unique challenges that the minister faces and the obstacles that pulpit and pew present. Because the minister speaks before a mixed audience—the vulgar and the educated, in Campbell’s terms (Lecture 3)—the challenge is to present a lesson that is simple but also profound, so that it can be understood by the least mind and yet engage the best (Lecture 1). A sermon must be clear but also polished, since the educated will be put off by errors in grammar or pronunciation and their attention to the all-important Word compromised if the style is pedestrian. Because the minister takes it upon himself to correct faults and to hold out an ideal, sincerity is essential (Lecture IV), but because he also seeks to motivate reform, the listeners affections must be engaged which presents the familiar challenge of appearing sincere while being artful. Pulpit Eloquence makes very clear that Campbell was acutely aware of the way a rhetorical situation complicates all general rules that rhetoric conceived as a “science of human nature” might recommend. This reminds us to read the Philosophy of Rhetoric as a theory—as a general explanation of efficacy—and not as all that Campbell has to say about rhetoric.

SERMONS: CAMPBELL AS ORATOR

Although the sermons that Campbell presented in the ordinary course of his ministerial duties have apparently not survived, we do have a number of sermons, given in the 1770s, that, because they were presented in response to public controversies, were subsequently published. It is impossible to know whether these published sermons are representative of Campbell’s general practice but it is unlikely (given the exceptional nature of the situations that they respond to) that they are representative of the sermons that Campbell offered as part of his regular ministerial duties. So we are limited in drawing conclusions about the extent to which Campbell’s practice as a minister reflects the precepts he offers in his Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence, or the implications for practice in his Philosophy of Rhetoric. But the sermons do afford us glimpses of Campbell as a practicing orator. And they illustrate one enduring

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facet of Campbell’s mind: his effort always to present himself as reconciling the claims of truth and tolerance, of tradition and modernity. The title of Campbell’s “The Spirit of the Gospel A Spirit Neither of Superstition Nor of Enthusiasm,” which Campbell presented at the Synod of Aberdeen in 1771, suggests Campbell’s moderate temper or at least a preference for a moderate stance. He argues that the true spirit of Christianity was neither that of the irrational superstition that Campbell claimed characterized Roman Catholicism nor that of the emotional excesses that he thought characterized low church evangelicalism. Predictably the sermon was praised by Presbyterians and attacked by Roman Catholics, Scottish Anglicans, and other non-jurying sects. The most important and compelling of Campbell’s sermons from the viewpoint of this study was delivered in 1776 in response to the American colonies Declaration of Independence. The title, “The Nature, Extent, and Importance, of the Duty of Allegiance” suggest Campbell’s theme: that revolution is justified only in response to conditions of extreme oppression or tyranny and that, while the colonists have legitimate cause for some complaint, rebellion is unjustified. Justifying rebellion on the grounds of “taxation without representation,” while accepting the right of the British Parliament to make laws for America, seems, to Campbell, inconsistent, even absurd: But it is ridiculous to pretend an exemption from being taxed, whilst they acknowledge, as they have always done till of late, the power of the British Parliament to make laws on other articles which shall bind the colonies. Yet some are inconsistent enough to maintain, that our legislature has the power to do the one, but not the other. I should be glad to know on what the distinction is founded. (2: 164–65)

Campbell emphasizes this point through exclamation, rhetorical question, and climax that enact dramatically his outrage at such skewed values: “What! Have we command of their persons, their liberties, their lives, but not of their purses?” (165). Campbell further exposes the illogic of the revolutionaries’ insistence on representation later when he points out that, because of property requirements that limit the franchise, only one in twenty people in England vote and only one in a hundred in Scotland, yet all are said to be “represented” and are taxed. Perhaps the most compelling sections of the sermon for us today are Campbell’s charge that the American revolutionaries are hypocrites. Throughout his work, Campbell exhibits impatience with lofty abstractions; in this sermon he effectively interrogates such sacrosanct phrases as “original compact,” “consent of the governed,” “perfect liberty,” and “the laws of nature and nature’s God” by pitting the ideals embodied in these phrases against the lived-politics of the revolutionaries themselves. On the principle of perfect liberty the revolutionaries would claim that “every man of whatever quality, character, station, or circumstances has an equal share in governing; because

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to exclude any man from this honour, which you deem his birth-right, and to enslave him, ye affirm are the same. It has been asked (but I have not yet heard of any answer) why not every woman and child?” (2:176–77). And he reminds his audience that some among the authors who invoked nature and nature’s god in defense of unalienable rights were slave holders: “It is indeed scarcely credible that any who entail slavery on their fellowcreatures, whom they buy and sell like cattle in the market (and some such, it is said, are in the congress) should have the absurd effrontery to adopt this language. If they really believe their own doctrine, what opinion must they entertain of themselves, who haughtily trample on what they acknowledge to be the unalienable rights of mankind? Will they dare to allude this charge, by declaring that they do not consider negroes and Indians as the human species? That they account them beasts, or rather worse, one would naturally infer from the treatment they too commonly give them. But I have not yet heard, that they openly profess to this opinion.” (2: 191–92)

But despite the failure of the colonists to justify rebellion, Campbell would not resist their revolution. It is neither right nor wise to go to war: “Better far to let them have their beloved independence. I am not sure that this would not have been the best measure from the beginning,” he concludes (2: 220–21). Campbell’s “The Success of the First Publishers of the Gospel: A Proof of Its Truth” argues that the success of the early church in the face of so many formidable obstacles can only be explained by a Divine intervention. The sermon is rigorously deductive, which indicates that Campbell, despite his sense that the syllogism was artificial, was not opposed to a demonstration in situations where the audience (here, members of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge) would expect and would be responsive to a philosophical approach. ‘The human and natural means originally employed for the propagation of the gospel, would, without the divine interposition, have proved both foolish and weak, and therefore utterly incapable of answering the purpose. The purpose was nevertheless by these means fully answered. Consequently they must have been accompanied with divine interposition, and our religion is of God, and not of man.’ I shall first therefore endeavour to evince the truth of the first proposition, and show the utter inability of the natural means employed in promulgating the gospel, to effect the end. I shall next evince the truth of the second, pointing out the rapid and unexampled success of the means that were employed;—and shall conclude with observing the influence which the obvious consequence of these deductions ought to have upon us, and the improvement we ought to make of this doctrine. (2:9)

Campbell then details the formidable obstacles to the Christian message for Jewish and Greek audiences of the first and second centuries: the Cross was a

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symbol of derision to Jews, ignominy to Greeks; Jesus did not meet Jewish expectations for the Messiah; Greeks hated Jews. Furthermore success cannot be attributed to the messengers: the Apostles were, for the most part, unsophisticated fisherman. Campbell’s assessment of Saint Paul’s oratorical ability is worth quoting: I am far from denying, that this eminent servant of our Lord possessed considerable talents in respect of natural eloquence, depth of thought, strength of reasoning, nervousness of expression. But that his Greek diction was pure and classical, or that in composing he followed the rules laid down by rhetoricians, we have the greatest reason to deny. His works that are extant, do, to every able and candid judge of these matters, show the contrary. The contrary was admitted by the best critics and orators among the Greek fathers, who must be allowed more capable of judging of propriety, fluency, and harmony, in their native tongue, than any modern can be in a dead and foreign language. (2:35–36)

Campbell’s “The Happy Influence of Religion on Civil Society,” which he presented before the Assizes at Aberdeen in May 1779, is, among the published sermons, the one most consonant with his Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence. The sermon argues that religion plays a beneficent role in civil society because it fosters obedience to law and, therefore, protects liberty and implies that those who oppose religion threaten civil society. The sermon meets the criteria for successful explanatory sermons in the Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence. For example, Campbell insists in “Lecture VII” that the text serve the theme in an explanatory sermon, not the other way around, and that the text be directly and obviously relevant to the sermon’s theme. The text he choose here “Righteousness exalteth a nation” (Proverbs 14: 34) echoes the sermon’s thesis in exemplary fashion. Furthermore, following his own advice in the Lectures, Campbell’s introduction establishes interest, importance, and a degree of surprise—by its reference to “libertine” critics who claim that religion is harmful to society. The introduction also previews the points he makes, as a classical narratio would and as Campbell recommends in Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence: You ask, “How is religion conducive to the exaltation and felicity of the body-politic or nation?” I answer, It conduces to this end in these four different ways: By the tendency and extent of its laws; by the nature and importance of its sanctions; by the assistance which it gives to the civil powers, both in securing fidelity, and in discovering truth; and by the positive enforcement of equity and good government on the rulers, and of obedience and submission on the people. Let it be observed, that though, in this discourse, I speak of religion in general, I am always to be understood as referring to the Christian religion in particular. (2:81)

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In noting a bit later that, “There are so many topics of the argument, by which the great truth contained in my text, That the righteousness, or true and practical religion, exalteth a nation, is at once both explained and evinced” (2:81–82), Campbell seems self-conscious, determined, in a teacherly way, to assure that the appeals of the sermon complement one another—just as he had insisted that text, explanation and argument work seamlessly together in his lectures on the explanatory sermon. Finally, in his “An Address to the People of Scotland upon the Alarms That Have Been Raised in regard to Popery,” Campbell argues for the removal of penal statues against Roman Catholics, in effect, for more tolerance of Roman Catholics. In a classic Enlightenment move, he offers support from Scripture, reason, and utility. The New Testament shows Jesus zealous but not intolerant; He urged his disciples not to respond to intolerance with intolerance (2: 272–78). From a political point of view, Campbell advises the magistrates to punish, not because a view is false, but only if it is demonstrably subversive to civil rights, especially if it is delivered in an incendiary fashion. But except where they pose a threat to order, Roman Catholics should be left alone, for they will ultimately be converted, not by oppression, but by compassion: The bulk of mankind are more influenced by their passions, in forming their opinions, than by reason. Render people objects of our compassion, bring us once heartily to sympathize with them as with persons oppressed, not for any crime, but for what they cannot remedy, their opinions, and ye have gone a great deal to make us turn proselytes. . . . Woe to that nation, whose laws every sensible and honest heart must be convinced there is greater virtue in disobeying than obeying. This is the case with persecuting laws, though the persecutors should have truth upon their side.” (2:315)

Campbell’s views in these sermons were attacked by Scottish Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. In the last years of his life, Campbell devoted time to answering these attacks in tracts that were never published but which survived his death.7

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TEN

Review of the Scholarship and Conclusions

This chapter provides a summary of the major scholarly work on George Campbell. Most of the work on Campbell was done in the 1950s and 1960s by speech-communication scholars inspired by Douglas W. Ehninger’s pioneering study of eighteenth-century rhetoric and in the 1980s and 1990s by composition scholars in English, who, following the leads of Robert J. Connors and James A. Berlin, were interested in tracing the roots of the modern first-year writing course. I divide my review into these two groups and organize my discussion around the interpretive problem discussed. Because I offer my views on these problems in the course of this review and distinguish my approach from the previous work, this chapter also serves as a conclusion to this book. Predictably the question of the nature and degree of Campbell’s innovation has been a concern of scholars. How different is Campbell’s theory from classical rhetoric? What is its distinctive contribution? And how does Campbell’s theory compare to other eighteenth-century work in rhetoric? Douglas W. Ehninger was the first to raise these questions in a systematic way, and his work prompted numerous responses. In “George Campbell and the Revolution in Inventional Theory,” Ehninger made bold claims on behalf of POR: “Original in conception, comprehensive in plan, provocative in development, [The Philosophy of Rhetoric] furnishes much of the understructure upon which rest our present-day theories of discourse” (1950, 270). Ehninger focused specifically on Campbell’s treatment of invention, which he characterized as a revolutionary departure from classical rhetoric. According to Ehninger “of the three functional elements inherent in the rhetorical act—i.e., the speech, the speaker, and the audience—classical inventio was focused almost entirely upon the speech itself. Its specific purpose was to organize and to regularize the first step involved in ‘discovering’ what might be said” (273). By contrast, Campbell’s

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focus is on the audience. According to Ehninger, the implication of POR is that the orator “should begin his preparation not with an exhaustive analysis of the subject, but with an investigation into those principles of mind by which his hearers would be led to understand and to believe what he was going to say” (274). In Campbell’s theory, the “sources of persuasion lie not only in external things, but in mind itself ” (276). In his subsequent essays, Ehninger probed the broader implications of his view that Campbell, along with Hugh Blair and Richard Whately, made a radical contribution to rhetorical theory. In “Dominant Trends in English Rhetorical Thought, 1750–1800,” Ehninger identified four movements or trends in eighteenthcentury rhetoric, represented, respectively, by the classicists, who revised the five-canon structure of Ciceronian rhetoric; the elocutionists, who created new systems of gesture; the epistemologists, who drew on the principles of empiricism; and the bellestristic rhetoricians, who emphasized developing students’ taste through the analysis of literature. In a subsequent article, Ehninger faulted standard histories that characterized the eighteenth century as a period notable for its revival of the five-part structure of classical rhetoric, after its dismemberment under the influence of Petrus Ramus. These histories missed what was truly innovative in eighteenth-century rhetoric—the original contributions of Campbell and Blair (“Campbell, Blair, and Whately: Old Friends”). Subsequently, Ehninger advanced a “systems” approach to rhetoric, identifying the rhetoric of the eighteenth century as having an epistemological, as distinguished from classical rhetoric’s grammatical, starting point, as being audience-centered rather than subject-centered, and as understanding rhetoric as managing proofs, not discovering them through the topics (“On Systems of Rhetoric”). Ehninger’s work established the issues and themes for much of the subsequent work on Campbell by speech scholars. His argument for the revolutionary nature of Campbell’s emphasis on audience prompted scholars to insist that classical rhetoric also emphasized audience (McDermott 1963; LaRusso 1968). Some of these criticisms derived from a misunderstanding of Ehninger’s position, for Ehninger was aware of the importance of audience in classical rhetoric. His point was that audience psychology is not the starting point for Aristotelian rhetoric; creating enthymemes is. But even if his critics’ objections were largely beside the point, they do prompt reflection on how “audience” is theorized in classical rhetoric and in Campbell’s theory. In Aristotle, an audience is defined with respect to the public site in which oratory is practiced. Audiences are distinguished in large part by the different roles that hearers play when they are sitting as jurors or judges, functioning as legislators, or listening on ceremonial occasions. In contrast, Campbell does not allow much influence to the mediating element that politics or culture plays. Campbell’s emphasis on a philosophy or science of rhetoric leads him to offer a theory of a universal response.

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Ehninger’s view of the revolutionary nature of eighteenth-century rhetoric received support from Wilbur Samuel Howell, who in his monumental Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, blamed scholars for predispositions that blinded them to what was genuinely innovative in eighteenth-century rhetorical theory: “Too often, alas, the rhetorical works of Blair and his contemporaries have been studied as if their sole rhetorical content abides at those points where they are obviously close to the old rhetoric of Aristotle and Cicero” (1971, 670). Howell exhorted scholars to be sensitive to both “modern versions of the rhetoric of the past” and “the emerging forms of the new rhetoric” (670). Although he did not invoke Ehninger’s systems’ taxonomy, Howell clearly understood the Philosophy of Rhetoric as a response to the eighteenth-century empiricists’ analysis of mental operations in the works of Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Reid. According to Howell, Campbell created a coherent system of rhetoric “framed to stand in strict correspondence to Campbell’s own way of explaining the operations of the human mind” (599). Howell identified seven points of reference between Campbell’s theory and the work of these philosophers, linking not only Campbell’s explanations of rhetoric in Book I of POR to these theorists, but also books two and three as well (599–601). Other scholars also faulted critics for classical blinders that caused them to overlook the innovations Campbell introduced to rhetoric. Phil Dolph maintained that scholars had missed Campbell’s attention to taste and the imagination in the Philosophy of Rhetoric. More recently, Barbara Warnick’s The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents placed Campbell in the belletristic tradition. Warnick’s book was the first attempt to offer a theory of bellestristic rhetoric. She linked the Scottish rhetoricians to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literary and rhetorical theory. She faulted Ehninger and other scholars, including Howell, for noting the significant changes in eighteenth-century rhetoric but then proceeding to present the changes in terms of deficiencies relative to classical rhetoric. Recognition of the absence of traditional inventional theory in the works of Smith, Blair and Campbell has not been accompanied by a commensurate appreciation of the importance of aesthetic appeal in their theories. It would be hard to ignore the Scottish authors’ preoccupation with the Sublime, beauty, novelty, propriety, and the like, but few commentators have seen that this preoccupation replaced notions comparable to traditional theories of invention. (1993, 11)

While the Sixth Canon is a significant contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century rhetoric, Campbell fits awkwardly into the belletristic classification. “Taste,” “Criticism,” Genius,” the “Pleasures of Taste”: these heads from Blair’s Lectures define the essential concerns of belletrism. Campbell, however, is not motivated by an effort to develop his students’ receptive

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capacities to literature or with most of the other concerns characteristic of belletristic rhetoric. As Joan H. Pittock has argued, generally in Aberdeen taste was seen as important instrumentally—toward the development of a moral sensibility, for instance, as distinguished from a literary or aesthetic one (1987, 276). Campbell’s analysis shares this emphasis, since it is principally motivated by his understanding that the philosopher of rhetoric must provide a complete theory of belief and by his view of the importance of the imagination in creating belief, not by a desire to develop a capacity for imaginative response. A related debate among speech scholars concerned Campbell’s basic philosophical allegiances. Was the Philosophy of Rhetoric more influenced by the radical David Hume or beholden to the orthodox Thomas Reid? With which philosophy did Campbell’s allegiances lie? These two questions have generated more heated discussion among Campbell scholars than any other— in large part because they have too often been treated as if they were one and the same question. Lloyd F. Bitzer has consistently maintained that the greatest influence on Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric was Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature. In his dissertation and in his published work, Bitzer attempted to find in Hume’s Treatise a source for all the distinctive concepts in Campbell’s theory of rhetoric: Major elements of Hume’s view—including the primacy of imagination and feeling, the attitudes of empiricism and skepticism, the doctrine of the association of ideas, the process of experience and, above all, the analysis of belief—were taken over by Campbell without significant modification and became constituents of his own framework. Furthermore, vivacity, or the liveliness of ideas—which was, according to Hume, the essential quality of belief—became the dominant concept in Campbell’s rhetoric. (“Hume’s Philosophy,” 140)

Bitzer supported his case with impressive textual evidence in which Campbell’s text often seemed to echo Hume’s. But would Campbell, a respected member of the Scottish kirk, embrace the philosophy of David Hume, whose work was the target of a condemnation passed by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1755 (Sefton 1987, 124)? It seems unlikely. Moreover, Campbell was a founding member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, whose members were among Hume’s most persistent and effective critics. Finally, Campbell himself made his reputation with his Dissertation on Miracles, an attack on Hume’s views. Pointing to Campbell’s profession, his associations, and his friends, G. P. Mohrmann and Dennis R. Bormann separately claimed that Campbell was more influenced by Thomas Reid’s common-sense philosophy than by Hume’s Treatise. But for the most part, Mohrmann and Bormann did not refute Bitzer’s evidence so much as deny the possibility that Campbell could have accepted Hume’s skeptical views (although Mohrmann does see in

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Campbell’s concept of evidence the footprints of Reid, not Hume, a point that Bitzer had earlier acknowledged in “A Re-evaluation . . .”). These criticisms of Bitzer’s argument failed, however, to address the textual evidence Bitzer cited. Citing biographical facts that Bitzer knew is virtually irrelevant to Bitzer’s case. Other critics paid more attention to Campbell’s text and Bitzer’s specific evidence. For Gary Lynn Cronkhite, Bitzer understated the significance of Campbell’s departures from Hume. Cronkhite acknowledged that Bitzer was aware that Campbell embraced Reid’s common-sense axiom that nature followed uniform laws but insufficiently appreciated how this marked a fundamental departure from Hume’s skeptical philosophy (1967, 171). Karen Rasmussen similarly insisted that Campbell’s invocation of intuitive, common-sense axioms was an effort to avoid the skepticism of Hume’s positions but she maintained that this compromise came at the cost of a contradiction within Campbell’s otherwise basically empiricist perspective (1974, 193). Although Bitzer rarely if ever responded to his critics (perhaps following Hume, who also declined to engage his opponents), the revised introduction of his 1988 edition of the Philosophy of Rhetoric offered a solution to the seeming disconnect between the philosophy of the Philosophy of Rhetoric and Campbell’s basic commitments to Scottish Presbyterianism. Bitzer added a section on Campbell’s religious views to this introduction. Here Bitzer maintained what should have been obvious: that much of what Campbell believed, taught, and wrote about did not derive from Hume—that God’s Revelation was true and must be our guide in questions of morals, for example. He also agreed that Campbell accepted Reid’s common-sense axioms—most notably this one: “When there is in the effect a manifest adjustment of the several parts to a certain end, there is intelligence in the cause” (POR, 40). Of course, Hume would not (and did not) accept that we can rationally infer an intelligent cause on the basis of our experience of an apparently designed nature. Campbell not only accepted the argument from design but, Bitzer speculated, he might have thought the argument sufficiently grounded in experience to be consonant with empiricism—that is, a non-Humean version of empiricism. Campbell might argue, at least to his own satisfaction, that the design of the universe can be empirically established and that the belief that every cause has an effect is an “original” or intuitive first principle—one that is not learned but itself, in effect, instilled by a benevolent creator (POR, xlviii). The implication was that Bitzer believed that Campbell operated solely within the paradigm of empiricist philosophy in the Philosophy of Rhetoric—though his empiricism was modified by his positing of some common-sense axioms—but in his other works Campbell accepted sources beyond experience as the basis for knowledge and truth. “Obviously, the essentially secular theory of human nature presented in Campbell’s Rhetoric was only part of his thought” (l–li).

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In my view Campbell did not see himself as making a contribution to epistemology and was not concerned with achieving philosophical consistency. In so far as he is a philosopher at all, Campbell is, after all, a philosopher of rhetoric. As such, he provided an account of belief. In so doing, he did not accept that Hume’s account of belief was complete. In POR, he pointedly dissented from Hume, for example, when he insisted that, while vivacity and other appeals to the imagination can do much to promote belief, they are not sufficient in themselves for most people most of the time because the understanding must be convinced, as well as the imagination pleased (POR, 74). If ordinary people thought as Hume did, they would be quite different creatures from the ones they are. From Campbell’s perspective, this point was not irrelevant to a philosophy of rhetoric. Most people accept as common sense common-sense axioms. Furthermore, the Designer has fortunately assured that the mind takes satisfaction in the truth or apparently true (33), so that (in our terms) a psychology of belief is consonant with a realist epistemology. But neither my explanation here nor the arguments of any of Bitzer’s critics disproves Bitzer’s basic point, which remains true: among Campbell’s contemporaries, Hume is the greatest influence on the Philosophy of Rhetoric. Interest in Campbell among rhetoricians in composition began in the 1980s and early 1990s—in the context of compositionists’ efforts to explore the roots of the modern American first-year writing course. The project was ambitious in the sense that it brought important philosophical questions to bear on rhetorical theory and to expose as historically conditioned the assumptions underlying a contemporary practice—a popular version of first-year composition. In this work, Campbell is sometimes faulted less for sins he commits than for the misappropriations of nineteenth-century textbook writers. Still the work of the composition scholars is provocative and important—whether it is fair to Campbell or not. I will focus on the work of five compositionists, Robert J. Connors, James A. Berlin, Nan Johnson, Sharon Crowley, and Thomas Miller. Robert J. Connors’ analysis of Campbell’s work took place in the context of his attempt to trace the lineage of what he came to label “compositionrhetoric,” but which he (and others) earlier had called “current-traditional rhetoric” (Connors, Composition-Rhetoric, 4–7). “Current-traditional rhetoric” was the pejorative term for a writing curriculum that evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century and survived into the 1950s. Richard Young, who apparently coined the term, identified the features of current traditionalrhetoric as follows: The emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity. emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and the research paper; and so on. (1978, 31)

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In the judgment of composition scholars, this “paradigm” was a sorry substitute for classical rhetoric, which was informed by social purpose and which understood rhetorical discourse as situated and constrained by a sense of audience and occasion. In contrast, current-traditional rhetoric assumed that writing occurred in a “social vacuum” and according to “formula” (Connors, Composition-Rhetoric, 254). The curriculum also had students analyzing the features of texts (products) rather than helping them through a composing process. According to Connors, Campbell played a crucial role in this rhetorical wrong turn. Connors claimed that Campbell’s influence was responsible for the most discredited part of the current-traditional curriculum, the modes of discourse—description, narration, exposition, and argument as methods of development. Connors related the following history. Sprat’s and Locke’s criticisms of rhetoric resulted in a new approach that emphasized objective explanation as distinct from traditional persuasion. Eventually, this shift in emphasis created a space for the Philosophy of Rhetoric. Campbell created a taxonomy in which types of discourse were defined according to targeted faculties. His Philosophy of Rhetoric thus “paved the way for the more complex rhetorical taxonomies that would be introduced in the nineteenth century” that ultimately became the basis for the emphasis in current traditional rhetoric on the discourse types defined by aims, each with corresponding formal qualities linked to a purpose. The problem with Connors’ diagnosis is that no taxonomy of discourse types mapped to purposes appears in the Philosophy of Rhetoric. Connors answered this potential objection by appealing to Campbell’s Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence. In this work, the different faculties are aligned with different types of sermons—the explanatory and controversial sermons appeal to the understanding; narrative sermons and encomia to the imagination; sermons intended to bring the faithful into a devout disposition to the passions, and so forth. “Here is a fully developed multimodel rhetoric, at least of homilies” that “would appear in the nineteenth century as parts of a new rhetoric—a multimodel rhetoric of writing” (1997, 216). Thus, Campbell was seen as the source of a formal, even formulaic, textbook tradition. James A. Berlin’s intentions in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges were even less historical and more assertively reformist than Connors’. Berlin wanted to persuade writing teachers that theories of rhetoric were historically conditioned, not transcendent explanations, that the assumptions embedded in theories influence greatly writing curriculum and pedagogy, and that the theory that dominated the contemporary writing course, which had its origin in eighteenth-century Scotland, was not very promising (1984, 1–10). According to Berlin, Campbell’s POR was the origin for many of the ills of current-traditional rhetoric, to wit, the elimination of invention; the definition of purpose in terms of a targeted faculty; the identification of formal types of writing with the faculties; and the emphasis on correctness (21–22).

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Nan Johnson’s starting point in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America was strikingly different from Connors’ and Berlin’s. They started with what they regarded as an aberrant form of rhetoric—“current-traditional rhetoric”—and searched Campbell’s work for signs of its roots. Johnson started with eighteenth-century rhetoric—she devoted eleven pages of the first chapter to a summary of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—and then read nineteenth-century textbooks for themes from, and echoes of, the work of Campbell, Blair, and Whately. Her results are less tendentious than Connors’ and Berlin’s. Few would dispute her claim of Campbell’s influence on John Bascom, for example, who titled his book The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1866) and who wrote, “Whether composition is sought as a means of expression or of persuasion, its end is reached in mind, and mind gives the governing principles” (1991, 15; quoted in Johnson, 68). Johnson attributed to Campbell’s influence features in nineteenth-century textbooks that are central to Campbell’s work—the relationship of the study of rhetoric to the study of the mind, the principles of associationism, the five qualities of style, and so forth. Johnson did not single out the modes of discourse as a target, as Connors and Berlin had, but she did note that the mapping of types of discourse to the mental faculties was characteristic of textbooks generally sympathetic to the “epistemological point of view” (74–75). In Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric, Sharon Crowley took an approach similar to Berlin’s. Crowley attempted to trace the historical roots of current-traditional rhetoric, a project that she stated was motivated by her sense that many people regarded current-traditional rhetoric as a “natural, self-evident and universal system for the invention of discourse written in school” (1990, xi), while in fact it is based on an outmoded Enlightenment epistemology. Campbell is the theorist whose work served as the basis for this empty, formulaic rhetoric. In the course of defending these claims, Crowley offered a provocative (though a reductive) reading of the Philosophy of Rhetoric. Crowley’s thesis was that Campbell substituted an introspective theory of invention for Aristotle’s social theory. According to the Lockean empiricism that Campbell accepted, our ideas are created exclusively from the information we receive through our senses. Knowledge is a matter of deriving ideas from sense impressions accurately and naming them precisely; knowledge is not thought of as historically conditioned or socially constructed (1990, 19–22). Intentions too are theorized as private, not given as they were, for example, in Aristotle’s concept of the three forums of rhetoric. Although people’s ideas will differ as their experiences differ, since all minds work the same way (according to Campbell), rhetorical discourse organized to replicate the way the mind processes a sense impression can effectively, even automatically, create belief. On this psychology, invention would consist in the rhetor’s attempts to duplicate the way the mind processes new or recalls old sense

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experience (44–45). More generally, the challenge for rhetoric as a discipline was to articulate formulas of genre that would exploit the way the mind works in responding to sense impressions or recalling them. Crowley praised Campbell and other new rhetoricians for a coherent, innovative theory: “These were impressive achievements,” she writes. “Nevertheless, I maintain that an introspective theory of invention is not very useful to writers or speakers” (53). And in the hands of nineteenth-century textbook writers who simplified Campbell’s ideas and reified his system into current traditional rhetoric, this theory became not merely useless but damaging (98–99; 145–46). Thomas P. Miller’s The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, an important book for those interested in education and cultural history as well as rhetoric, examined the forces that led to the dominance of modernism in the eighteenth-century university, especially in what are today English departments. The rise of the “new rhetoric” played a crucial role in the transformations he documented—the movement from a rhetorical education justified in public and civic terms to one that saw its purposes in individual development. In comparison to the work of Berlin, Johnson, Connors, and Crowley, Miller’s purpose is, then, much broader, but he, too, looked back to Campbell’s work from the perspective of what followed. Miller placed Campbell’s thought within an Aberdeenian environment dominated by George Turnbull’s effort to establish the humanities, especially moral philosophy, on scientific grounds. This line of inquiry was pervasive in the Scottish Enlightenment, of course—an approach that characterizes philosophies as different as Hume’s and Reid’s. In Hume, the authority of science served as the basis for a radical critique of knowledge; in Reid, for a definitive restraint against skepticism (since Reid grounds orthodox beliefs in human nature). Campbell’s attempt to base rhetorical conventions in the science of the mind is consistent with Reid’s conservatism that ends in conflating psychology with epistemology and the scientific method with the argument from design. According to Miller, if common sense had meant in the eighteenth century knowledge-held-in common, as it did for Cicero, Campbell would have begun his theory of persuasion with an account of cultural knowledge (1997, 212). But for Campbell and Reid common sense, insofar as it referred to beliefs at all, referred to those beliefs that transcended culture; more importantly common sense was (for Reid, especially) less an ideology than a faculty: common sense meant “natural sense,” not common opinion. It thus shaped “Campbell’s effort to define the purposes of rhetoric according to the mental faculties addressed rather than by the social ends achieved” (216). As a result, “Campbell’s analysis is oriented not to scenes of political debate and moral conflict but to introspective examinations of how language affects the mental faculties” (216). With regard to rhetoric “common-sense philosophy helped shift the focus from the sociological to the psychological, and

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rhetoric became more concerned with the workings of the individual consciousness than with the practical art of drawing on common beliefs to speak to public issues” (216). (For a carefully reasoned, dissenting analysis, see Lois Agnew, who links Campbell, via Stoic philosophy, to a conception of common sense that includes the “principles of moral evidence that people naturally share in order to make judgments about the difficult and specific questions that arise in the life of the community” [2000, 83].) Examining the past for influences that may have shaped contemporary instruction in rhetoric is valuable work, but, as Stephen North has argued, this perspective carries with it a presentism that can result in a distorted reading of previous rhetorical theories (1987, 85). If Campbell were presented with Sharon Crowley’s description of the Philosophy of Rhetoric, I doubt that he would recognize it as his own work. Of course, the fact that Campbell would not see in his work what Crowley sees is not proof that what she points to isn’t there. She (and Berlin and Miller) find in Campbell a profound break with the classical tradition, which resulted in the decline of civic rhetoric. When Campbell attacked the syllogism, he separated rhetoric from the theory of social knowledge; when he drew on the empirical account of how we come to believe, he internalized rhetoric and divorced it from politics. (Essentially, these same points are made less ahistorically and very ably by literary scholar Joel Weinsheimer who maintained that the eighteenth-century’s quest for universal knowledge is not conducive to theorizing rhetoric, which is concerned with situated, contingent knowledge.) These approaches to Campbell’s text deny the Philosophy of Rhetoric a sympathetic reading in its own terms. And on some points essential to their argument, the work by composition scholars is, in my view, more than an oversimplification to make a point. For example, Campbell does not imply (even) that there are discourse formulas that wire a rhetor’s purpose to a hearer’s psyche. He is a humanist, not a crazed social scientist. Nor is his theory a formalist one; nor does he present persuasion in automatistic terms. Campbell was well aware of the difficulties that an audience’s prejudices or “prepossessions” present to a speaker (e.g., POR, 97); and his analysis of pulpit oratory in chapter ten of POR acknowledges poignantly the challenges presented to a minister who must motivate a diverse audience of unprepared churchgoers. Nor does Campbell see invention as a matter of introspection. His theory does not envision a rhetor attempting to duplicate in the hearers an experience the rhetor had. In maintaining that rhetoric should resemble experience, Campbell means that the rhetor should structure discourse so that it is received in a way that resembles the way the mind ordinarily processes a primary sense impression. For the most part, he understands “resemblance” as trope: successful rhetoric has an impact like that of a nonlinguistic sense impression. I have learned great deal from this scholarship, but my approach, one of historical reconstruction, has been different. As someone more interested in

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the rhetorical tradition than writing pedagogy, I am attracted to the Philosophy of Rhetoric for its complex merging of classical rhetoric with modern (eighteenth-century) philosophy. All agree that the work of Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Reid influenced Campbell, and scholars have identified much of what is new about Campbell’s “new rhetoric.” But previous work has not been sufficiently sensitive to Campbell’s debt and tribute to the classical tradition. And when scholars did attempt to trace Campbell’s relationship to classical rhetoric, these attempts proceeded in precisely the wrong direction—from the perspective of the tekhnê tradition. In speech communication in the 1960s, judging a theory in terms of classical rhetoric typically meant judging it in terms of the five canons. Does the theory have a theory of invention? Does the theorist recommend the five-part structure of the Ciceronian oration? Does the theory overemphasize the schemes and tropes? And so forth. It is probably not fair, in Campbell’s case, to say that he was judged generally in terms of his deficiencies; scholars such as Ehninger, Howell, Bevilacqua, and Bitzer praised what was innovative in his theory. But when he was judged with respect to the classical tradition, Campbell was seen as deficient. If one judged POR from the perspective of the handbook tradition, the lack of a section on invention would appear as a glaring omission. But Campbell never intended to produce a handbook. His work is a theory, involving an account of belief relevant to a theory of rhetoric. In Aristotelian terms, he is making a contribution to epistêmê, not tekhnê. We are, as a discipline, only coming to appreciate the extent to which even the “new” rhetoric of the eighteenth century is rooted in the classical tradition. Blair scholars are reassessing Blair’s relationship to Aristotle, Cicero, and, especially Quintilian. S. Michael Halloran has recently argued that Blair’s Lectures are best seen as an adaptation of Quintilian’s concepts and ideas. Similarly, Sean O’Rourke has maintained that Blair’s has been “ill-served” by approaches that emphasize either his links to traditional or to belletristic rhetoric to the exclusion of the other. “Our efforts should be directed toward engaging Blair and his contemporaries on their own terms, as heirs of multiple rhetorical traditions . . . (2000, 31–32).1 Campbell similarly engaged classical rhetoric at a deeper level than has been recognized to this point. Campbell’s oratorical heroes were Demosthenes and Cicero. In terms of analyzing the rhetorical situation and advising orators, he judged the Ancients, especially Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian as superior to the moderns. In both the Philosophy of Rhetoric (introduction, lxxv) and in Pulpit Eloquence (1810, 165–66), Campbell pays tribute to the Ancients (Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian) over the moderns. In the Philosophy of Rhetoric, he alludes to classical authors forty-nine times (Golden and Corbett 1990, 12); more significantly, when he cites Cicero and Quintilian he does so as confirmation of the soundness of his own conclusions. Virtually every chapter in the Philosophy of Rhetoric is in a dialogue with Quintilian, as well as

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with Hume and Locke. Campbell’s intention is clearly not to usurp the Ancients but to ground the advice they give in a deeper theoretical account. But Campbell’s merging of classical rhetoric and eighteenth-century empiricism produced an innovative theory that is valuable in itself—as a coherent, eighteenth-century account of rhetoric. The emphasis in Hume’s empiricism on the phenomenological qualities of the sense impression as the basis for belief becomes in Campbell a master trope for a redescription of traditional rhetorical efficacy. Rhetorical discourse is effective if it is present to the mind as a primary sense impression is—a theme also present in the “bloody toga” tradition of Roman rhetoric. But in Campbell the analogy of rhetorical discourse to a primary sense impression serves as the basis for a revaluation of the three traditional proofs and for an explanation of their relative efficacy. Rational appeal, now understood in psychological terms, can be effective in so far as it is presented in a way that mimics how we infer from particular experience to general conclusions—an explanation in psychological terms for the familiar rhetorical dictum that favors an art that conceals art. The imaginative resources of language and the role that imagination plays in assent takes on a new importance in Campbell’s theory (as Gerald Hauser has very ably demonstrated), because the imagination can lend to ideas the luster and force that causes us to experience ideas in a way similar to the way we experience a sudden sense impression. Similarly, because an emotion is a secondary impression, investing an idea with emotion results in hearers’ experiencing the idea as an impression. Though he draws on classical analysis and conclusions, Campbell provides a more complete, integrated theoretical account of the communication of emotion through heightened ideas, animated style, and emotional enactment than his predecessors. Campbell belongs within the rhetorical tradition, and it is not an exaggeration to state that, within the tradition, Campbell’s theory is the most complete, coherent account of rhetoric that we have between Quintilian’s and Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca’s.

APPENDIX

Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence in Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence An Abstract

LECTURE I. IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY [OF RHETORIC], AND OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

Being a powerful public speaker is essential to being a good minister. Preaching is perhaps the most important office of the ministry. The many Biblical passages exhorting us to teach all nations testify to its importance. Knowing the Word is not enough; one must be able to communicate it (1810, 159). Despite the importance of public speaking to the ministry, some think rhetoric is unnecessary, even inappropriate. These doubters may have a false view of eloquence, regarding it as “knack” that enables a minister to show off his rhetorical skill, not as a way to inform the understanding and engage the heart of the people (160). Genuine eloquence is the art whereby a speech is adapted to produce in the hearers the great end which the speaker has in view (160). Eloquence is based on logic and grammar but goes beyond them. By logic is meant not the artificial dialectic of the schoolmen but the natural and genuine logic that we find in the best reasoners in science, history, and philosophy (165). Moderns have made little progress in the art of eloquence, though Rollin, Fénelon, and Blair are good. But any public speaker needs to be conversant with Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. LECTURE II. OF THE SENTIMENT IN PULPIT DISCOURSES

Later in this series of lectures I will consider different types of pulpit discourse. In this lecture, I will discuss the basic ways to communicate thoughts to an audience. There are four: narration, explication, reasoning, and moral reflection. 139

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The standard advice about composing a narrative is to be brief, but a cold conciseness is as unwelcome as prolixity. The standard should be to include enough detail to achieve the purpose—to be intelligible, to fix the attention, and to engage the heart (170). The best models of narration are the historical parts of Holy Writ. “No where else will [the student]find such simplicity, as brings what is said to the level of the meanest capacity, united with such dignity, as is sufficient to gain the attention of the highest” (170). Explication is more challenging than narration because, while narration necessarily follows a chronological order, ordering the parts of an explication requires judgment and reflection (172). Presenting ideas through reasoning is particularly challenging because most people cannot reason well. Arguments must be simple. Practical reasoning that draws from experience to show the advantages of right conduct is far easier for most people to follow than speculative reasoning on doctrinal matters. This later type of reasoning should be used sparingly—only to teach an essential doctrine or combat an influential heresy. Moral reflection is less likely than reasoning to bore or baffle an audience because it addresses the heart and the conscience. Christ used this method when, in the face of challenges from the Pharisees, he would win the hearts of his hearer by relating parables that would “dissipate the thickest clouds raised by inveterate prejudices and party-spirit.”

LECTURE III. OF THE EXPRESSION

Expression encompasses grammar and rhetoric, with grammar serving as a foundation of rhetoric. Grammatical expression seeks purity (or correctness), while rhetoric adds elegance and energy. Grammatic purity is a matter of using proper English words idiomatically and accurately. Using a word incorrectly is a barbarism, unidiomatically a solecism, inaccurately an impropriety. Some argue that as long as the sense is clear to parishioners, objecting on grammatical grounds is mere prejudice. But “it is the business of the orator to accommodate himself to men, such as he sees they are, and not as he inspires them to be,” and “men of knowledge and taste” regard those who make grammatical errors as coarse (182). Furthermore, errors in expression divert a critical audience from the sentiments of a sermon. The first requirement of rhetoric is that the style be perspicuous. Perspicuity is a relative quality, however, since what is clear to the speaker is often not clear to the hearers (185). In preaching, it is never enough to assume that because the sentiment is clear to the preacher, it is clear to the congregation because (as distinguished from orators in the court and assembly) preachers do not address an audience educated as they are (185). To assure that his sermons would be clear to his parishioners, Archbishop Tillotson would read

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them first to “an illiterate old woman of plain sense,” striking every word that was not clear to her, for though she may not have been competent to judge the quality of the sermon, she was competent to judge its relative clarity (186). Pedantry, ostentatious learning, relying on jargon are faults against perspicuity. The “zealous disciple of Shaftsbury, Akenside, and Hutcheson,” baffles parishioners with talk of “supreme symmetry” of the universe and “inward music of the mind” (188). “Think with the learned, but speak with the vulgar” is a useful corrective. In addition to being clear, the minister’s style should be “affecting.” The French word “onction” suggestions the degree of pathos appropriate from the pulpit: an “affecting sweetness of manner which engages the heart”(192). The preacher must be perceived as sincere and well-meaning. Since humor, ridicule, and dramatic pathos do not re-inforce this perception, they should be avoided. LECTURE IV. OF PRONUNCIATION

Grammatical pronunciation involves articulating audibly and distinctly, while rhetorical pronunciation involves delivering the speech in a manner that conveys, through tone and gesture, the speaker’s sincerity. Attempting to improve grammatical pronunciation carries risks. Affected pronunciation can be more damaging than mispronunciations. Try to correct pronunciation gradually, in conversation. “Never strain beyond what you can effect with ease” (199). There are five faults damaging to rhetorical pronunciation, which is more a matter of talent than education. First, straining of the voice. Ministers often speak at a high pitch when trying to speak loudly. Second, speaking too rapidly. Third, speaking too theatrically, which is inappropriate to the gravity of the subject. Fourth, speaking monotonously in a listless or, fifth, sing-song manner. While delivering a memorized speech seems preferable to reading one, if a minister lacks the “gift of delivery,” it is probably preferable to read (204). Few can deliver a memorized speech well but many can learn to read in an affecting manner (204–205). Today, voice training is neglected and our inferiority to the Ancients will hardly bear dispute. While my advice cannot compensate for the lack of systematic study and exercise, I suggest that speakers start at a clef normal for them, preserve the same key throughout, speak deliberately and slowly, and practice before a friend willing to offer candid criticism. LECTURE V. DISCOURSES ADDRESSED TO THE UNDERSTANDING, THE IMAGINATION, THE PASSIONS, AND THE WILL

Before I discuss the types of oratory, allow me a digression. When I was a student at Marischal, I, with seven or eight other students, formed a society, the

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purpose of which was to prepare us for the ministry. We inquired into “the nature of sermons, the different kinds into which they might fitly be distributed, and the rules of composition that suited each” (213). I was assigned the task of making “an abstract of the whole” (213), which all copied. This copy is the basis for these lectures. It is also the source of my linking types of discourse to a targeted faculty and classifying discourse by purposes related to these faculties as follows: “Every speech hath, or ought to have, for its professed aim, either to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the will” (214). Speeches addressed to the understanding either inform by instruction or convince by proving a disputable point. The second type appeals to the imagination. Although some might think that addressing the imagination is inappropriate in pulpit oratory, this view rests on a misunderstanding of the imagination. Imagination is “that faculty of the mind, whereby it is capable of conceiving and combining things together, which in that combination have neither been perceived by the senses, nor are remembered” (215). In sermons and lectures from the pulpit, appeals to the imagination are common in narration and description. Appeals to the imagination reach their summit in descriptions of something sublimely excellent. The imagination responds to lively and beautiful representations that dignify a subject through imitation. The imagination can also promote the most noble end of raising the passions, which is the third type of oratory. When rousing the passions is the goal, the orator does not attempt to astonish or charm but to hurry the audience along, with artistry concealed. The fourth type is that which attempts to influence the will and persuade to action. This requires addressing the judgment and the passions. When the appeals to the judgment and the passions blend harmoniously, the orator achieves that “vehemence” that is the “supreme qualification in the orator” (216). These “universal principles” need to be applied to discourse from the pulpit (217). The ultimate function of the minister is to reform, to bring parishioners to a “right disposition and practice” (217). To achieve this end, parishioners must know what is required of them and must be motivated to fulfill their duties. Thus, the first type of pulpit discourse is explanatory: it seeks to inform parishioners of their duties and obligations. Discourses that seek to dispel parishioners’ skepticism or error are called “controversial.” A third type is commendatory sermons. These are addressed to the imagination through narratives that provide lively scenes from the life of a person of exemplary character. The life of Christ is the best source. Encomia that comprise funerary sermons are a related type—presenting parishioners with an amiable and animated pattern of Christian excellence, which, by “operating on their admiration and love, raiseth in their mind a pious emulation” (219). Without being aware of it, parishioners can be “induced to imitate what we admire and love” by oratory of this type (219)

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A fourth type of discourse are sermons addressed to the passions. The goal in these sermons is to “mould [the hearer] into “a devout, a recollected, and a benevolent disposition” so that they are prepared to reform. This type of pathos (onction in French) works predominately by hearers’ believing that the preacher speaks earnestly and is concerned about their welfare. Passionate discourse of this type combats listlessness, which is a bane to religion. The final type of discourse, persuasive, seeks to persuade hearers to a good life or dissuade them from a bad life generally, or to a particular duty or away from sin. The types of pulpit discourses just presented are parallel to the types in Ancient oratory. The controversial sermons correspond to Aristotle’s judicial rhetoric (222), since both “aim to convince through addressing the understanding.” Commendatory sermons correspond to the demonstrative panegyrics of Ancient rhetoric; persuasive sermons correspond to deliberative in classical rhetoric. The special topics of Classical rhetoric are then useful to the minister. No classical type of oratory is directed exclusively to the emotions, which rather is found in dramatic tragedy. [A digression on whether the drama is moral and instructive or debauched. Campbell concludes that, while in theory the theater could be an instrument of reform, in actual practice comedies are “a school of dissoluteness” (225), typically depicting heroes too spirited to be restrained by religion, conscience, law or custom.]

LECTURE VI. ON COMPOSITION OF LECTURES

Sermons may be distributed into five types: explanatory, argumentative or controversial, demonstrative, pathetic and persuasive. A demonstrative sermon is not one that proves by demonstration. It is one in which an object is presented by means of the rhetor’s imagination with a “strength and distinctness” that makes it “almost equal in vivacity and vigour with the perceptions of sense” (228). Persuasion differs from conviction in that persuasion involves a commitment to action; conviction pertains to knowledge and applies to speculative matters. “I am convinced but not persuaded; My understanding is subdued but not my will: the first term always and solely relates to opinion, the second to practice. The operation of conviction is merely on the understanding, that of persuasion is on the will and resolution” (229). Some explanatory types are not sermons but “lectures.” Lectures focus on a Biblical passage, either explicating a difficult passage (expository lectures) or reflecting on the implications of a passage (lectures proper). The exclusive emphasis on a passage from Scripture distinguishes lectures from sermons, which primarily develop a theme, using Scripture as a means to this end. Composing an explanatory lecture involves a number of steps. First, choose a single, distinct passage that forms a coherent unit; second, if it is necessary for

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the understanding of the passage (but only if it is necessary), relate it to the preceding passage. Third, paraphrase the passage—if its particularly difficult, verse by verse. Fourth, draw attention to obvious difficulties only. Do not pretentiously call attention to subtle differences in interpretation that would only confuse your listeners. Such a practice is similar to a builder putting rubbish in the way in order to clear it out (238). Finally, keep the consideration of inferences brief in expository lectures, though they may be longer in a lectures proper.

LECTURE VII. OF EXPLANATORY SERMONS

In selecting a subject, keep in mind that a unified theme helps parishioners understand and recall a sermon. The reason lies in the way the mind works. When ideas are brought together that have no logical connection, we remember only the last. But if the parts are connected, the laws of association will recall related, previous points. So unity of subject and design helps because the principles of association that are part of our nature help us to remember the theme (244). After the subject has been selected, a Biblical text must be chosen to illustrate it. The relationship of the text to the theme should be clear. The text should be explained. Some have objected to this on the grounds that explaining a text is tedious and lacks Ancient precedent. But the Greek and Roman orators were not preaching. While the text should not be used as a mere device or presented as an enigma, focusing on it does “fix their attention” (248). The origin of the practice of explicating the text is the early Church. Although our Lord and the Apostles, who spoke by immediate revelation, did not explicate texts, once the history of their mission had been written, their successors made explication of Sacred texts a part of their ministry. The practice was continued for a number of reasons: a deference for tradition, to establish Scripture as the basis for doctrine, and from an awareness of its effectiveness. The meaning of the illustrating passage must be clear or it cannot signal the subject of the sermon (251). Ministers sometimes choose obscure passages in order to impress parishioners with their “profound learning,” but this motive is unworthy of a Christian pastor. Because the relationship of the text to the sermon’s theme should be apparent, passages with conceits and figures should be avoided unless the relationship to the theme is clear (253). The pertinence of the text to the theme of the sermon should also be apparent. It is better not to have a text than to have one that misleads its audience. Finally, avoid texts that do not deliver truth directly; avoid quotations from nondefinitive sources, such as Satan’s words or Job’s counselors’ false advice, even if the words themselves are appropriate. “As a good choice may contribute previously to rouse attention, and even to put the hearers in a proper frame for the subject to be discoursed on, as well as to keep their minds in the time of

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preaching from wandering from the subject; so on the contrary, an improper choice will often serve to dissipate the thoughts, and put the mind in a frame nowise suitable” (257)

LECTURE VIII. ON EXPLANATORY SERMONS: THE INTRODUCTION, EXPOSITION AND PARTITION

Having considered the place of the Scriptural text in an explanatory sermon, I will now consider the other parts. Exordium: the purpose is to awaken and fix the attention. Parishioners are initially curious; the minister must “work up this favorable inclination” (260). Rouse in them the hope of something momentous or interesting—inspire a desperation in the exordium that is sustained throughout. In a sermon, unlike forensic or deliberative oratory, the urging of consideration merely personal is not appropriate. The venerable senator may preface his oration with references to his years of public service and rouse the attention and regard of his hearers. Only in extraordinary circumstance would this be appropriate for a preacher (261). Anything that courts popular applause or seems immodest can rarely if ever be attempted here. So the preacher must draw from the nature of the subject. The subject can be shown to be sublime, important, pleasant, or novel. No room for tropes here: clear, plain, striking, and self-evident discourse (263). The exposition is the next section of the sermon. The meaning of the text must be made clear; referents and references must be explained, sometimes by paraphrasing the preceding verses. In the partition, logic rules. The partition must account for all of the sermon but no more. The division should be the essential guideline. Suppose a preacher were explaining the duty of prayer. The discourse might be divided into three parts or purposes of prayer: confession, petition, and thanksgiving. To add a fourth, e.g. adoration, would be improper because adoration is not a “distinct member” but “implied in each of the others” (266). This is a “faulty division” (266). As to order, generally it is wise to begin with the simplest and plainest. The body of the Scriptural text must serve the sermon’s theme, not the other way round. Typically a preacher adds a theme in order to explain the text or chooses the text first. “The consequence is, that there is hardly one sermon in a hundred, wherein that unity of design is observed, which constitutes one great excellence in every composition” (267). As I have observed earlier, the subject provides the organizing principle for a sermon, not the text. The Scriptural text serves to illustrate the subject, which is what distinguishes sermons from lectures, in which the text is the theme. The failure to observe this distinction is responsible for the lack of unity in many sermons, a deficiency which prompted Voltaire’s observation that the preacher “is not employed in

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the discussion of any one subject, but is . . . amusing himself and his hearers with a number of little independent dissertations on the different words, idioms, and references which are found in a line or two of sacred writ” (269). Unity is also compromised when a subject is conceived too broadly. It is true that many ideas within Christianity are related to each other. But this fact cannot become a warrant for turning a sermon into a general discussion, one in which the minister offers his entire system of theology. Yet this often happens. Instead of probing a single theme with applications to the duties implied by it, preachers often present their whole theological system. “To attempt every thing is the direct way to effect nothing. If you will go over every part, you must be superficial in every part . . .” (272). The conventional method prescribed for composing sermons derives form the Schoolmen’s division of text into subject, predicate, and copula. But this method produces absurd sermons. If the topic is divine faithfulness, for example, the three heads would be “divine nature,” “faithfulness,” and the connections between these. But this “is not discoursing on a subject but cutting the text into fritters . . .” (275). This scholastic system is artificial, not genuine rhetoric: “Good people are sometime offended at the application of the word eloquence to preaching. They think it savors of something merely human and too artificial. But the art of preaching, as in fact it hath been long taught and practiced by the men, whom those people generally most admire, is the genuine offspring of the dialectic of the schools, and fifty time more artificial, or if you will mechanical, than that which true rhetoric would inculcate. On the contrary it is the business of the latter to bring men back from all scholastic pedantry and jargon, to nature, simplicity, and truth. And let me add, that discourses on this plan will be found much more conformable, in manner and composition, to the simple but excellent models to be found in sacred writ” (275–76).

LECTURE IX. OF EXPLANATORY SERMONS: ARRANGEMENT AND STYLE

In some instances the order of points makes little difference and can be left to the discretion of the minister. In a sermon developing the three points required for true obedience—that the obedience be sincere, universal and constant—the order in which the points are taken up does not affect the overall logic. In other cases, the order seems “fixed by the order of nature and of time” (278). For example in a sermon developing the three points that constitute proper repentance—conviction of sin, resolution through an awareness of divine mercy, and conversion—the points must be taken up in that order. As to style, the end of explanatory sermons is “distinct apprehension” (280) so the style should be simple and perspicuous. Few ornaments are appropriate, though imagery can relieve the mind and fix attention and illustrate the unknown by the known. Parables should be avoided because their use

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would invite comparison to the Gospel writers and because they would deviate too much from ordinary usage. Some use of similes and examples as teaching tools is welcome, however. With regard to the particular parts, it is generally wise to deal directly with difficulties. Avoid subtlety in explanation and technical language. Avoid the popular practice of echoing phrases from Scripture since this practice pleases but misleads the ignorant. The practice is often an expedient used by those who hardly know themselves exactly what they mean. Clarity of expression requires that the preacher himself understand the subject well (286). In order to understand what is appropriate to a conclusion of an explanatory sermon, keep in mind that the Gospel was not given “to gratify our curiosity but to regulate our lives” (288). A sense of the importance of instruction and a desire to promote the good of the people and a zeal for religion and virtue are methods that qualify ministers to address their flocks.

LECTURE X. ON CONTROVERSIAL DISCOURSES

The end of the controversial sermon is to conquer doubt and error and to produce belief. The difference between this and the expository sermon is the difference between convincing and informing. A controversial sermon has one thesis. Suppose a preacher should undertake to prove the lawfulness of infant baptism: the aim of the whole, and of every part, should unite in supporting this position (291). In selecting a text from Scripture, the same criteria apply: appositeness, simplicity, and perspicuity. After the exordium and a brief explanation, the point at issue would be introduced and the argument previewed. The usual order in a controversial sermon is refutation and then proof. Plain, unequivocal language is best. Avoid tedious logomachy. Also acknowledge the strength of the opponent’s best arguments; doing so will make you appear fair and open. In establishing your case, draw points from three sources: natural reason or the consent of mankind; ecclesiastical history; and Sacred Scripture. Scripture is most important. In arguing from Scripture, avoid lifting passages out of context in order to support a point. Such tendentious use of Scripture, even in a good cause, is like “bringing people to submission to magistry, by perverting the sense of the law” (296). The argument varies depending on the nature of the case. Sometimes refutation is not necessary; sometimes one proof is enough; often, many proofs are appropriate. When I attempted to prove the divine origin of our religion based on the way it was first publicized, I made two points, first proving the inadequate methods used to spread the new religion and then showing its successful propagation, thus indicating divine help. Depending on the circumstance and subject, few or many points would be appropriate.

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With regard to arrangement sometimes a “natural order” is necessary: when a subsequent point depends on an adequate understanding of a previous one, for example. When there is no order required by the nature of the argument, then “the speaker ought to consider the disposition of his hearers” (303). If the listeners are opposed, begin with what will most persuade them. The general advice of rhetorician is to begin and end with the strongest arguments in order to gain attention and to leave a good impression. Weaker points are put in the middle as a commander puts his weak troops between his stronger ones. Conclusions of controversial sermons might attempt to moderate animosities.

LECTURE XI. OF COMMENDATORY DISCOURSE

Having considered discourses addressed to the understanding, we will now consider those addressed to the imagination. These take the form of lively narrative of a life or part or parts of a life. Although in the past deceased persons were often the subject of panegyric, as in funeral oration, such are not in vogue in Scotland today, which is just as well since in Ancient panegyric the truth was often sacrificed to motives of interest. The life of Christ, the saints, patriarchs, apostles, and martyrs are now the most suitable subjects. People are inclined to imitate what they admire and to abhor what is detestable. Exhibitions of virtue or vice are thus appropriate in order to promote piety and virtue by “insinuation, that is, by the gentle but efficacious influence of example” (307). Discourses of this kind were called demonstration by the Ancients, commendatory today. The Scriptural text of commendatory sermons might express the happiness of a life well spent, the particular virtues to be praised, or, in the case of a Biblical personage, recall the person who is the subject of the discourse. The introduction would do what introductions generally do: make the hearers “attentive, docile, and benevolent” (307). The parts of the body of a commendatory discourse can follow three basic organization schemes. The first is order of time—called historical structure. The second is around the most eminent virtues of the subject’s life, which is called the logical method. You might further subdivide the virtues by their object: self (as in humility), others, and God. A third method is to organize the body of the discourse by memorable events or action in the subject’s life. This method is designated the dramatical method. The parallel between commendatory pulpit discourse and demonstrative Ancient rhetoric is close. Therefore, I commend the Ancients’ discussion of demonstrative rhetoric to you. “It is not my intention by these lectures to supersede the study of ancient critics and orators, but only to assist you in applying their rules and examples to cases so different from those with which alone they are concerned” (310–11).

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But there are some salient differences between Ancient demonstration and commendatory sermons. Ancient panegyric typically praised the gifts of intellect, beauty, and fortune, which are not appropriate as praise in sermons. Moral excellence must be the preacher’s subject; if these other qualities are mentioned, they must be presented as subordinated to this spiritual purpose. Wealth can be relevant if is used to induce the rich to spend it in a Christian way. Even poverty can be relevant if it is shown to have prompted patience or resignation or to otherwise help exhibit a pattern of a virtuous life. Because commendatory sermons are addressed to the imagination, they allow more ornament than sermons addressed to the understanding. In explanatory sermons, the illustrations and similes must be familiar and simple; in controversial sermons, the figures must carry conviction, not please the imagination. But in commendatory sermons, pleasing the imagination is good. Metaphor and other figures must be from agreeable objects—though we include within “agreeable,” the grand, sublime, wonderful and new, as well as beautiful (314). Commendatory sermons usually conclude in one of three ways. First, the conclusion might create “a clear and distinct character” of the person praised. This is difficult because every trait mentioned in the conclusion must have been emphasized in the body. The second type contrasts the life of the person commended with those of others, though this may be done throughout. The third type, which is the most common, attempts to excite the passions of the hearers in order to emulate the person commended. This type of conclusion seems natural in commendatory sermons. “There is a near affinity between the moral sentiments, with the emotions they occasion, and the passions and affections of the mind. The gradation is perfectly smooth and natural from approbation to admiration, from admiration to esteem and love, from esteem and love of the virtuous and praiseworthy, to detestation and abhorrence of the contrary dispositions, and from these to corresponding desires and aversions. The orator has only to take the advantage of this gradation, and that frame of spirit which the whole scope of the discourse was calculated to produce” (318–19).

LECTURE XII. ON PATHETIC AND PERSUASIVE DISCOURSES

I have explained the principal parts of three kinds of pulpit discourse—expository, controversial, and commendatory—and the rules to be observed in composing each. Now to the pathetic. There are relatively few occasions where sermons addressed to the passions are called for. One is in deposing a congregation to “a suitable commemoration of the sufferings of our Lord, in the sacrament of the . . . Eucharist” (321). The purpose is not to persuade them to communicate—they

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have come with that intention—but “to operate on all the grateful and devout affections of the heart, and to put . . . hearers . . . in a proper frame of spirit for discharging the duty for which they are assembled, in such a reverend and pious manner, as may produce the best effect upon their minds, and tend most to the edification and confirmation of themselves and others” (321–22). This may be done by focusing on Christ’s love or on His sufferings and death (this latter called “passion sermons”). The exordium in sermons addressed to the passions affords less occasion for much art. The topic can derive from the holiday itself or the importance of the subject. In passions sermons a narrative order is appropriate. Ornament is not appropriate; instead, dwell “longer on the affecting circumstances” (323). Passion sermons are an exception to the recommendation I made earlier: dwelling on the Scriptural text is effective here. For instance, consider the text “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Dwelling on the circumstances of the three topics expressed in the verse—Christ’s power and richness; us so undeserving; yet Christ becomes poor that you may be rich—stirs up a “grateful and devout affection” without compromising the unity of the sermon (323). Formal explanation and criticism should be avoided. Instead, present the circumstance in “the most glowing colours” (324). This raises such images in the fancy as will not only “give a greater permanency to the perception of the truths themselves, but will make them more effectually operate on the passions “ (325). Conclusions should “infix the impression as already made” (325). The last type of sermon is that directed to the will—sermons that persuade to the good or dissuade from evil (325). Such sermons combine appeals to the pathetic and the argumentative. By pathetic I mean whatever excites passion or affection or desire. To engage the will, the passions must be aroused: “Passion is the mover to action; reason is the guide. Good is the object of the will, truth is the object of the understanding. It is only through the passions, affections, and sentiments of the heart, that the will is to be reached. It is not less necessary, therefore, in the orator to awaken those affections in the hearers, which can be made most easily to co-operate with his view; than it is to satisfy their understanding that the conduct to which he would persuade them, tends to the gratification of the affections raised” (326). But though both reason and passion must be engaged, the speaker must conceal all efforts of reason or of art: “The emotion with which they perceive him agitated, and the animation of his language, far from being the result of a deliberate settled purpose, ought to appear in him, the necessary, the unavoidable consequences of the sense that he has of the unspeakable importance of the truths he utters, joined with an ardent desire of promoting the eternal happiness of them who hear him. It is not therefore here [is] one part that is pathetic, and another that is argumentative; but these two are interwoven” (326–27).

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With regard to selecting a text for a persuasive sermon, this depends on the particular purpose. Religion provides so many motives for persuading us to virtue and away from sin both generally and with regard to specific behaviour, that ministers may want to vary the motive appealed to and the texts used. In regard to the method, persuasive sermons are similar to controversial ones, since both must confront opposing arguments. One may begin by summarizing the opposing arguments and showing their weakness or organize the sermon around points, disproving the opposing arguments as the sermon progresses. In a sermon, persuading toward the rewards of virtue in the after life, you would contrast each reward with the complementary effects of sin. The order is sometimes set by the nature of the subject and sometimes can be left to the discretion of the speaker. The scriptural text can also serve as a basis for organization, although the words of the text should not be strained to yield different points, a common fault today. To recall what was and preview what is to come is a good way to aid memory (332). The conclusion should summarize the argument and then address the passions. Practical inferences are generally not needed since the sermon itself has been directed to practice, and speculative corollaries are inappropriate. Urging immediate resolve and action is appropriate because it advances the aim of a persuasive sermon.

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CHAPTER 1. GEORGE CAMPBELL: MINISTER, THEOLOGIAN, PROFESSOR, AND PHILOSOPHER OF RHETORIC

1. Jeffrey Mark Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1996). Suderman’s dissertation (University of Western Ontario, 1996) is a rich source of information on Campbell’s life and work. This work lists all of the manuscripts of Campbell’s that survive, all the editions of his works, and the facts of his life. In its completeness it is a model of scholarship. As will be evident, this chapter draws significantly on Suderman’s work. A revised version of Suderman’s dissertation has recently been published as Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 2. Technically Thomas Reid was no longer a divine in 1758, since he gave up his ministerial duties and living in 1751. 3. From the official Minutes of the Society it is clear that fourteen of Campbell’s discourses are on rhetoric; for the other four, no titles are given. See H. Lewis Ulman, ed., Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 1758–1773, table a-4.

CHAPTER 2. INTELLECTUAL MILIEU: FOUNDATIONS AND INFLUENCES

1. Phrase is Hugh Trevor-Ropers’; see “Scottish Enlightenment,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1636. For a partisan but helpful review of scholarly controversies on the nature and causes of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Donald J. Withrington, “What was Distinctive about the Scottish Enlightenment?,” in Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, ed., Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 9–19. 2. For studies of eighteenth-century influences on Campbell, see Vincent Bevilacqua, “Campbell, Priestly, and the Controversy Concerning Common Sense,” Southern Speech Journal (1964): 79–98; Dennis R. Bormann, “George Campbell’s Curia Prima on Eloquence—1758,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 35–51; Lloyd F. Bitzer,

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“Hume’s Philosophy in George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 2 (1969): 139–66; Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteen-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princetgon University Press, 1971); G. P. Mohrmann, “George Campbell: The Psychological Background,” Western Speech Journal 32 (1968): 99–104. 3. John Locke’s merging of what are now regarded as the different perspectives of epistemology and psychology has often been noted. Ernst Cassirer observed of the Enlightenment, “The objective validity of the fundamental concepts of knowledge is to be determined and judged by their origin. Psychological origin thus becomes a logical criterion . . .” (1955, 94). More recently, according to Richard Rorty: “Why should Locke have thought that a causal account of how one comes to have a belief should be an indication of the justification one has for that belief? The answer, I think, is that Locke and seventeenth-century writers generally, simply did not think of knowledge as justified true belief ” (1979, 141). 4. The Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume’s great work and one of the greatest achievements in the history of philosophy, was not well received or much read in the years following its publication in 1739–1740. Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was his effort to recast the ideas of the Treatise in a more popular style. I draw (promiscuously) from both works in summarizing those ideas in Hume that most influenced Campbell’s theory of rhetoric. 5. See also David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed., Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin, 1984), Bk. I, section, vii. 6. According to Locke, “As the mind in all its thoughts and reasonings hath no other immediate object but its own ideas . . . it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them” as distinguished from having direct contact with reality itself (Book 4. 1:1). According to Locke, knowledge results from our perceiving the relationship, especially the agreement or disagreement, between ideas, so that “we can have no knowledge further than our ideas.” 7. According to Joseph Priestley, Reid merely invented principles of common sense that would resolve each puzzle he encountered and ‘thus he goes on accounting for everything, by telling you, not only that he cannot explain it himself, but that it will be in vain for you or any other person to endeavour to investigate it further than he has done. Thus avowed ignorance is to pass for real knowledge . . . (quoted in “Editor’s Introduction,”The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd Bitzer, xxx–xxxi, note 39). 8. See Goerge Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed., Lloyd F. Bitzer, 2d ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), I: iv. Some of Reid’s common sense principles are presented as reliable types of evidence.

CHAPTER 3. FACULTIES AND TYPES OF DISCOURSE

1. For a discussion of the relationship of rhetoric to seventeenth-century modernism, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For a perceptive discussion of how Campbell’s the-

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ory relates to Enlightenment epistemology, see Joel Weinsheimer, “The Philosophy of Rhetoric in Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric,” in 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (1994): 227–46. 2. The idea that the study of the reception of discourse can contribute to our understanding of the mind is to be found also in Bernard Lamy, De l’art de parler (Paris: Pralaid, 1676), which Campbell almost certainly had read. See Barbara Warnick, The Sixth Canon (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 22–23. 3. For a provocative reading of the implications of faculty psychology for Campbell’s theory, see Sharon Crowley, The Methodical Memory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), especially, 33–55; Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), also offers sound summary of Campbell’s theory. 4. Vincent Bevilacqua first brought attention to the headnote; see “Philosophical Origins,” 2–3. For a slightly different interpretation of Campbell’s intent in referencing Bacon in his head note, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 596–97. 5. George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer, rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), lxx. All subsequent references to the Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR) are from this edition. 6. The credit for noting the link of Campbell’s definition to Gerard’s Pastoral Care belongs to Kathleen Holcomb, “Wit, Humour, and Ridicule,” in Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, ed., Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 283; see also Dennis R. Bormann, “George Campbell’s Cura Prima on Eloquence—1758,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 45. 7. Herman Cohen notes that William Leechman in his lectures on preaching to divinity students at Glasgow University in 1750 similarly divides discourse by its purpose and target faculty. According to Cohen, since Leechman’s lectures were not published, his ideas probably did not influence Campbell, nor did Campbell influence him; rather, both were probably responding to the same intellectual climate (1968, 94). 8. Campbell adds memory as a fifth faculty later in POR, 75–77. 9. For rhetoric, he could not ope His mouth but out there flew a trope; And when he happened to break off In the middle of his speech, or cough, He had hard words ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by. Else, when with greatest art he spoke, You’d think he talked like other folk; For all a rhetorician’s rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. (Hudibras, I. i: 81–90)

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10. Chapter III Campbell, which reviews Aristotle’s account of ridicule in the Poetics and Thomas Hobbes’ explanation of laughter, is interesting in its own terms but something of an excursus

CHAPTER 4. HOW RHETORIC “HOLDS” LOGIC

1. Richard Whately offers a devastating critique of Campbell’s treatment of the syllogism. The controversy is very ably treated in Ray E. McKerrow”s “Campbell and Whately on the Utility of Syllogistic Logic,” Western Speech Communication 40 (1976): 3–13. 2. Van Leeuwen traces this discussion of certainty as it developed in the context of religious polemic to its migration into the work of the Royal Society and in the thought of scientists, including John Wilkins, Joseph Glanville, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. See also Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 3. Chillingworth is involved in a controversy initiated by Matthias Wilson, who, writing under the alias of Edward Knott, wrote a tract arguing that Protestantism, without the authority of the Papacy and Church Councils, was not a reliable way for the faithful to achieve salvation. John Tillotson’s is the author of Rule of Faith . . . (1666), a response to John Sergeant’s Sure Footing in Christianity, which, as its title suggests, maintains the need for an infallible authority in matters of faith and morals. See Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630–1690 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 15–48. Suderman points out that Campbell recommended the “excellent Chillingworth” in his Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence (Boston: W. Wells and T. H. Wait, 1810), and that he referenced Tillotson in his Dissertation on Miracles, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell (1719–1796) and The Aberdeen Enlightenment (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1996), p. 112, note 3. 4. This point does not accord well with what Campbell says in a Dissertation of Miracles where he argues that testimony to an event that violates what we take to be the normal course of nature should be believed if the witnesses are credible, numerous, and so forth. 5. The view that the mind takes more satisfaction from expected probability or verisimilitude than it does from truth that is counter to expectation is a commonplace in French neoclassical criticism. See Warnick, The Sixth Canon, 48–49.

CHAPTER 5. IMAGINATION, “RESEMBLANCE,” AND VIVACITY

1. Sections of this chapter were published as “On Reading George Campbell: “‘Resemblance’ and ‘Vivacity’ in the Philosophy of Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 17 (Summer, 2000): 321–42. 2. Jean Hagstrum demonstrated that Renaissance editions of Horace’s Art of Poetry mistakenly dropped a colon from the phrase so that it read “ut pictura poesis erit”

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rather than “ut pictura poesis: erit qua.” Horace was then translated to be writing “a poem will be like a painting” rather than “it will sometimes happen that a poem,” and so forth (Hagstrum 1958, 60). Essays by David Marshall, “Ut pictura Poesis,” in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed., H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Niklaus Rudolf Schweizer, The Ut pictura poesis Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England (Frankfurt: Herbert Lang, 1972) are also helpful. 3. For an analysis of enargeia in Cicero, see Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the Word in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 88–104. See also Dennis R. Bormann, “Enargeia: A concept for all Seasons,” Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences 4 (August 1977): 155–59, though this article appears to confuse enargeia and energeia, at least in its discussion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, wherein there is no mention of enargeia. For a helpful discussion of ekphrasis, a related but more specialized figure associated with descriptions of pictures (such as Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles), see Murray Krieger and Joan Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), especially pp. 67–90.

CHAPTER 6. SECURING BELIEF BY ENGAGING THE PASSIONS

1. Sections of this chapter were published as “Campbell on the Passions: A Rereading of the Philosophy of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (May 1999): 1–15. 2. The relationship between the calm emotions of êthos and the passions are illustrated clearly in Pulpit Eloquence, Lecture XI. Campbell is discussing attempts to excite the passions in commendatory sermons, which might begin by prompting admiration and end in love: There is a near affinity between the moral sentiments, with the emotions they occasion, and the passions and affections of the mind. The gradation is perfectly smooth and natural from approbation to admiration, from admiration to esteem and love, from esteem and love of the virtuous and praiseworthy, to detestation and abhorrence of the contrary dispositions, and from these to corresponding desires and aversions. The orator has only to take the advantage of this gradation, and that frame of spirit which the whole scope of the discourse was calculated to produce. (Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence, 318–19) 3. See Paul G. Bator, “‘Principle of Sympathy’ in Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric,” QJS (November 1982): 418–24 for a discussion of the place of sympathy in the rhetorical theorists of the eighteenth century, including Campbell. 4. Hume writes, “When any affection is infus’d by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection” (Treatise II. i. xi: 367–68).

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1. While Campbell’s seeming indifference to Scots is understandable given the politics of his own time and place, it is increasingly difficult to justify within the context of our ours. If the universities in the eighteenth century fostered a standard “London” English, today they are the place where efforts to retain and recover elements of Scots are most evident. The impetus behind this movement, part of a larger movement on behalf of ethnicity, is suggested by the words of the Scottish poet recognized as the leader of the effort on behalf of Scots, Hugh MacDiarmid (quoted in Kay 1986): Tae be yersel and tae mak that worth bein Nae harder job tae mortals has been gien. (20) 2. For a more complete discussion of Campbell’s philosophy of language, see Ulman, Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions, pp. 94–106. 3. The rest of Book II concerns perspicuity, which is discussed in the chapter on style in this study.

CHAPTER 9. CAMPBELL’S “OTHER” WORK

1. Latitudinarians identified a relatively few doctrines as essential for Christians and urged toleration on beliefs that they regarded as not essential to salvation. They recognized various orders of certainty and probability and argued for weighing the evidence on disputed matters; see chapter one and Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). 2. This is the approach Locke took in identifying criteria for judging a miracle, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1959), IV: 15, 365–66. See also R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981), 61. 3. Campbell’s condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church does not extend to Roman Catholics. Campbell regards Roman Catholics as victims of the Church’s obscurantism and agues in his “An Address to the People of Scotland upon the Alarms That Have Been Raised in regard to Popery” (discussed in chap. 9) for toleration. 4. See, for example, the Monthly Review 35 ( July 1801): 261–73; and 35(1801): 391–98; see also Critical Review 33 (August 1801): 429–36; and 33 (October 1801): 196–206. 5. Campbell cannot truly claim to be a pioneer in this regard: Medieval manuals on the art of preaching draw heavily on Cicero. 6. I refer to the common complaint that POR chapter VII, “Of Men in General” is long, while chapter VIII of “Men in Particular” is short, which has prompted the conclusion that Campbell’s basic approach takes him away from what is, from our perspective, rhetoric’s unique situatedness. (See Weinsheimer, for example.) This criticism

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is just; however, we should not conclude from it that Campbell was unaware that rhetoric is effective only if adapted to the particular audience and occasion, as his clear from POR chapter IX and from Pulpit Eloquence. 7. These manuscripts are held by the Aberdeen University Library. Suderman lists their numbers as AUL MS 649, 651, 652, 653, 654, 655 (Suderman, 83–84).

CHAPTER 10. REVIEW OF THE SCHOLARSHIP AND CONCLUSIONS

1. The similarity of my argument to O’Rourke’s was brought to my attention by Glen McClish, whose article on the Ciceronianism embodied in Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, concludes in a similar vein: “In fact, our history of the rhetoric of this period will be incomplete until we better understand the amalgamation of its diverse traditions and elucidate the ways in which the eighteenth-century modes of thought and their precursors compete, combine, and recombine with ever-increasing complexity” (1998, 21).

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References

Agnew, Lois. “The ‘Perplexity’ of George Campbell’s Rhetoric: the Epistemic Function of Common Sense.” Rhetorica 18 (2000): 79–101. Alston, R. C. A Bibliography of the English Language. Leeds: E. J. Arnold and Sons, 1965. Aristotle. Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford, 1991. ——— . De Anima (on the Soul). Trans. J. A. Smith. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon, 533–603. New York: Random House, 1941. ——— . Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thomson. London: Penguin, 1955. Addison, Joseph. Essays in Criticism and Literary Theory. Ed. John Loftis Northbrook. Illinois: AHM Publishing, 1975. Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum With Other Parts of The Great Instauration. Trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson. Chicago: Open Court, 1994. ——— . De Augmentis Scientiarum. The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. Boston: Taggard, 1869. Bator, Paul G. “‘Principle of Sympathy’ in Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech (November 1982): 418–24. Baugh, Albert C. A History of the English Language. 2d ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957. Berlin, James A. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Bevilacqua, Vincent. “Campbell, Priestley, and the Controversy Concerning Common Sense.” Southern Speech Journal (1964): 79–98. ——— . “Philosophical Origins of George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Speech Monographs 32 (1965): 1–12.

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Index

Boyle, Robert, 156n Brown, William Laurence, 13 Bryan, W. F., 90, 96 Burns, R. M., 10, 158n Butler, Joseph, 76 Butler, Samuel, 44–45

Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 8, 16–19, 22 Act of Union, 6, 90 Addison, Joseph, 27, 66–69, 95, 108 Address to the People of Scotland upon the Alarms That Have Been Raised in regard to Popery, An, 125, 158n Agnew, Lois, 136 Alston, R. C., 96 analogy. See evidence animation (stylistic), 88, 103, 105, 108–10 argumentative sermons, 119 Aristotle, 1, 4, 18, 34, 38, 47, 75–76, 79–80, 89, 104–5, 118 association of ideas, 21–22 Bacon, Sir Francis, 3, 15, 17–18, 35–37, 40, 50–51, 91 Bator, Paul G., 157n Beattie, James, 8 beauty. See imagination bellestristic rhetoricians, 128–30, 137 Berlin, James A., 127, 132–33 Bevilacqua, Vincent, 2, 153n, 155n Bitzer, Lloyd F., 1, 65–66, 130–31, 153n, 154n Blair, Hugh, 15, 118, 128 Bolingbroke, Lord Henry, 45 Bormann, Dennis R., 2, 65–66, 130–31, 153n, 155n, 157n Boswell, James, 11–12

Campbell, Colin (father), 5–6 Campbell, George Aberdeen Philosophical Society, participation in, 8–10 birth and education, 5–8 as principal at Marischal University, 8 as professor of divinity, 12–13 Theology Club, 7 Campbell, Grace Farquharson (wife), 8 Campbell, Margaret Walker (mother), 6 Carter, Jennifer J., 153n, 155n Cassirer, Ernst, 154n certainty, 52, 156n chance. See evidence Chesterfield, Lord, 159n Chillingworth, William, 51, 156n Cicero, 1, 34, 47–48, 67, 103, 105, 109, 118–19, 137, 157n clubs, 16 Cohen, Herman, 155n Cohen, Murray, 97–98 commendatory discourse, 148–49 common sense, 25, 56, 136 composition, of lectures, 143–44 compositionists, 132–36

171

172

Index

Connors, Robert J., 127, 132–33 consciousness. See evidence controversial sermons, 119, 147–48 Crawford, Robert, 90 Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (Dubos), 108 criticism, verbal, 94–96 Cronkhite, Gary Lynn, 131 Crowley, Sharon, 132, 134–35, 155n Daston, Lorraine, 60 Declaration of Independence, 122 deduction, 50, 54, 56 Deists, 111–12 De l’art de parler (Lamy), 155n demonstration, 50, 61–62 demonstrative sermons, 119 Demosthenes, 137 Dictionary of the English Tongue ( Johnson), 98 Discourses Addressed to the Understanding, the Imagination, the Passions, and the Will (Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence), 141–43 dispositions. See passions Dissertation on Miracles Campbell’s writing style, 1 Hume’s ideas, relationship to, 10 Philosophy of Rhetoric, relationship to, 111–16 Dolph, Phil, 129 Dryden, John, 98, 107 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 26, 108 Dunbar, James, 8 Ehninger, Douglas W., 127–29 emotions. See passions Empiricism, 3,18–19, 31, 83–86 enargeia. See ut pictura poesis Enfield, William, 11 English, standard, 90, 94 Enlightenment, 26, 30–31, 34–35 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 10, 154n enthymeme, 49, 82 Essay on Miracles (Hume), 111–15 Ethos, 80, 86–87

evidence analogy, 58–59 chance, 59–60 common sense, 56 consciousness, 55 deductive, 54, 56 demonstration, 61–62 intuitive, 53–55 moral, 56–58 scientific, 56 testimony, 59 evidentia. See ut pictura poesis experimental method, 50–51 explanatory sermons, 119, 144–47 faculties. See also passions imagination, 21, 23, 40, 141–43 memory understanding, 40, 141–43 will, 40, 44, 47 faculty psychology, 35, 40–43 Farquhar, John, 8, 72 Fénelon, François, 118 Figures Apostrophe, 109 antonomasia, 107 climax, 109 correction, 109 exclamation, 109 metonymy, 107 synecdoche, 107 vision, 109 Four Gospels, 13 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 158n Gerard, Alexander, 8–9, 27–29, 39–40, 41–42, 76 Glanville, Joseph, 156n Gordon, Thomas, 8 grammar, 95–100 Gregory, John, 8 Hagstrum, Jean, 156–57n Halloran, S. Michael, 137 Happy Influence of Religion on Civil Society, The, 9, 124 Harris, James, 97

Index Hobbes, Thomas, 76–77, 156n Holcomb, Kathleen, 43–44, 155n Home, Henry, 15 Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 49–50, 129, 154n, 155n Hudibras (Butler), 44–45 Hume, David 1, 3, 9–11, 15, 19–24, 40, 67–70, 73, 77–78, 81, 110–15, 130–32, 154n, 157n humor, 43–47 Hutcheson, Francis, 15, 27, 76, 121 imagination beauty, 66–67 belief, relationship to, 70 eighteenth century views of, 66–71 faculties, 21, 23, 40 novelty, 66–67 sublime, 41, 66–67 Importance of the Study [of Rhetoric], and Objections Answered (Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence), 139 impressions and ideas, 20–21 Inquiry into the Human Mind, An (Reid), 24 intuitive. See evidence Johnson, Nan, 132, 134, 155n Krieger, Joan, 157n Krieger, Murray, 157n Lamy, Bernard, 155n language, Campbell’s theory of, 92–93 Latitudinarianism, 9, 112 Lectures on Ecclesiastical History (LEH) Philosophy of Rhetoric, relationship to, 116–17 publication of, 1, 12 Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence (LPE) Philosophy of Rhetoric, relationship to, 117–21 publication of, 1, 7, 12 Lectures on Systematic Theology Philosophy of Rhetoric, relationship to, 116–17 publication of, 12

173

Leechman, William, 155n LEH. See Lectures on Ecclesiastical History Leonard, Sterling Andrus, 96, 100–1 lively idea. See vivacity Locke, John 1, 3, 16, 18–19, 33–34, 53, 90–92, 154n, 158n logic, 49–63 Lowth, Robert, 96–98 LPE. See Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence MacDiarmid, Hugh, 158n Mandeville, Bernard, 76 Marshall, David, 157n McClish, Glen, 159n McIntosh, Carey, 96 McKerrow, Ray E., 156n Metaphor. See figures Millar, John, 15 Miller, Thomas, 132, 135–36 Milton, John, 95 mimesis, 26–27 Mohrmann, G. P., 130–31, 154n moral certainty, 50–53 Mossner, Ernest C., 154n Nature, Extent, and Importance, of the Duty of Allegiance, The, 122 Newton, Isaac, 15–16, 156n Nisbet, H. B., 157n North, Stephen, 136 Ogilvie, William, 8 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 138 O’Rourke, Sean, 137, 159n passions, 22–23, 42–44, 47, 76–88, 108–10, 118–19, 141–43 Pastoral Care (Gerard), 155n pathetic sermons, 119, 149–51 pathos, 80 Peacham, Henry, 33 Perelman, Chaim, 138 perspicuity, 103 persuasion, 42, 78–88 persuasive sermons, 119, 149–51 Petrus Ramus, 128

174

Index

Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR), reception and reviews, 11–12 Pittock, Joan H., 130, 153n, 155n Plato, 49 Pope, Alexander, 45–46 preaching, 37, 121–25 Priestley, Joseph, 99, 154n probabilistic reasoning. See moral certainty pronunciation, 141 Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue (Swift), 98 purity, 95, 103–4 purposes of discourse, 39–40 Quintilian, 1–3, 47–48, 67, 69–71, 74, 79–80, 87–89, 100–1, 103–5, 109, 118, 138

scientific. See evidence Scots English, 90 Scottish Anglicans, 52, 122, 125 Scottish Enlightenment, 15–16 sentiment, 139–40 Sergeant, John, 156n sermons. See preaching seven circumstances, 80–84 Shaftesbury, Lord, 76, 121 Shakespeare, William, 107–8 Shapiro, Barbara J., 156n Skene, David, 8 Skene, Gregory, 8 Smith, Adam, 11, 15, 27, 30 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 123 Spirit of the Gospel A Spirit Neither of Superstition Nor of Enthusiasm, The, 122 standard English, 90, 94 Stewart, John, 8 Stoic philosophy, 136 style, 103–10 sublime. See imagination Success of the First Publishers of the Gospel: A Proof of Its Truth, The, 123 Suderman, Jeffrey Mark, 2, 5, 111, 117,153n, 156n, 159n Swift, Jonathan, 45, 95, 98–99 syllogism, 49–50 sympathy, 79–80, 84–88

Rape of the Locke (Pope), 45–46 Rasmussen, Karen, 131 reason, 76–78 reflex sense, 42, 48 reflex view, 42, 28 Reid, Thomas 1, 8–9,16, 24–26, 56, 114–15, 130–32, 153n, 154n resemblance theory of rhetoric, 4, 31, 63, 65, 68–74, 84, 85, 88, 106 Revelation, 111 Reventlow, Henning Graf, 158n rhetoric Campbell’s history of, 35–37, 47 eloquence, 38–39 Enlightenment attitude, 33–34 Renaissance and, 34–35 ridicule, 43–47 Robertson, William, 15 Rollin, Charles, 118 Roman Catholicism, 51–52, 122, 125 Rorty, Richard, 62, 154n Rose, William, 11 Ross, John, 8 Royal Society, 50, 91, 156n

tekhnê tradition, 4, 33,137 testimony. See evidence Tillotson, John, 51–52, 156n Toulmin, Stephen, 154n Trail, William, 8 Traill, Robert, 8 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 19–20, 67–68, 154n, 157n Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 153n Tropes. See figures Turnbull, George, 7

Schiappa, Edward, 2 Schweizer, Niklaus Rudolf, 157n

Ulman, H. Lewis, 2, 89, 99, 153n, 158n understanding. See faculties

Index universal grammar, 94 usage, 89–101 ut pictura poesis, 67–69 Van Leeuwen, Henry G., 51, 156n Vasaly, Ann, 157n vivacity, 3, 65–74,103, 105–8 Warnick, Barbara, 27, 129, 155n, 156n Weinsheimer, Joel, 136, 155n, 158n

175

Whatley, Richard, 128, 156n Wilkins, John, 52, 156n will. See faculties Wise Club. See Aberdeen Philosophical Society wit, 43–47 Withrington, Donald J., 153n Wood, Paul B., 6 Young, Richard, 132

SUNY series, Rhetoric in the Modern Era Arthur E. Walzer and Edward Schiappa, editors

List of Titles Chaim Perelman—Alan G. Gross and Ray D. Dearin