Rhetoric

At the center of the Clouds Aristophanes stages a debate between two personified figures, the Just Argument and the Unjust Argument, who represent between them two rival ways of teaching the art of speech. The Just Argument speaks for the old Athenian education, in which young men were trained in the songs of their fathers, in respect for their elders, in modesty, in simple food and cold baths, and in a rhetoric which was inseparable from the virtues it was used to express. The Unjust Argument speaks for the new education offered by the sophists and taken up, in Aristophanes' caricature, by the Thinkery of Socrates. This new rhetoric is a tool without a master, a set of techniques by which any position can be defended and any position attacked, a method in which the old distinction between what is true and what is merely plausible has been given up.

The debate is conducted in terms which leave the reader in no doubt as to what Aristophanes thinks. The Just Argument begins with the greater dignity and with the clear approval of the chorus, but the Unjust Argument, by a series of clever appeals, shows that even the gods have committed what the Just Argument condemns as shameful, and draws from this the conclusion that the old standards of decency were merely customs and not binding truths. The Just Argument retires in defeat. What the play shows, in placing this defeat upon the comic stage, is that the new rhetoric is dangerous precisely because it can win. It is not a bad rhetoric in the sense of a rhetoric which fails of its object. It is a rhetoric which succeeds, and which in succeeding overthrows the moral framework within which the older rhetoric had made sense.

The questions raised here belong to several of the neighboring ideas. The relation of rhetoric to the moral formation of the young belongs to the chapter on Education; the relation of rhetoric to philosophical argument belongs to the chapter on Philosophy, where Aristophanes treats the two as scarcely distinguishable; the general question of whether a technique of persuasion can be taught apart from a commitment to the truth belongs also to the chapters on Truth and on Opinion. What is peculiar to the idea of Rhetoric itself is the display of a case in which the teaching of speech has been deliberately separated from the teaching of virtue, and in which the result of the separation is that the arguments for the virtues can be defeated by arguments of a kind the virtuous speaker would not know how to use.

Plato takes up the same opposition in the Gorgias, where Socrates distinguishes the art of rhetoric as practiced by the sophists from the true art of persuasion which serves justice, and the Aristophanic framing of the problem is plainly in the background. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, will try to answer the comic poet's charge by treating rhetoric as a morally neutral faculty whose goodness depends on the goodness of the speaker, and whose proper use is in the service of truth, even though its techniques can be turned against it. The comic poet's objection is not dissolved by these answers, and returns in every later period in which the teaching of eloquence has been felt to be in tension with the teaching of moral character.

In the Gorgias, Socrates puts to a teacher of rhetoric the question of what the art is and what it produces. Gorgias holds that rhetoric is the greatest of human powers, since it enables the speaker to persuade the judges in the courts, the senators in the council, and the citizens in the assembly, and since in a contest for public office the rhetorician would prevail over a man of any other profession. Socrates asks whether persuasion belongs to rhetoric alone, or whether every art persuades men of what it teaches, so that arithmetic would be an artificer of persuasion no less than oratory. The distinction he then introduces between knowledge and belief allows him to say that persuasion is of two sorts, one which is the source of belief without knowledge and one which proceeds from knowledge. Gorgias is willing to limit rhetoric to the sort which gives belief only. The rhetorician, on this admission, does not instruct the assembly about things just and unjust, but creates beliefs about them.

The comparison with cookery follows from this. As cookery aims at pleasing the palate without regard for the health of the body, so rhetoric, on the account Socrates gives to Callicles, aims to delight without any consideration of what is good for the soul or for the state. Both are called shams or simulations of the genuine arts, medicine and politics, which aim at the good rather than at pleasure. Socrates does not maintain that no other rhetoric is conceivable. He asks Callicles whether he knows orators who aim at what is best and seek to improve the citizens by their speeches, and he grants that on such an admission rhetoric would be of two sorts, the one mere flattery and disgraceful declamation, the other noble and directed to the training of the souls of the citizens. What he presses is whether any rhetorician of the second stamp can be named.

The Phaedrus approaches the same question from the side of the soul rather than of the state. If speech is to be fitted to hearers, then whoever teaches rhetoric must give an exact description of the nature of the soul and of the mode in which it acts and is acted upon; having classified men and speeches and their kinds and affections, he must be able to tell the reasons of his arrangement, and show why one soul is persuaded by a particular form of argument and another is not. Rhetoric so understood is called the art of enchanting the soul, and it is not confined to courts and public assemblies. Whether the art is a good or an evil thing turns, on this account, on whether the speaker is required to know the truth about the matters spoken of as well as the nature of the person he addresses. To engender probabilities in the minds of the many by the likeness of the truth, Socrates says, it is necessary to know the truth.

The two dialogues leave rhetoric divided rather than condemned without remainder, and the division they propose is taken up in different ways by later writers. Aristotle undertakes to describe the art without deciding against it in advance, and treats it as the counterpart of dialectic. Bacon objects that it was an injustice in Plato, springing from a just hatred of the rhetoricians of his time, to regard rhetoric as a voluptuary art resembling cookery, since speech is more conversant in adorning that which is good than in coloring that which is evil. The question whether persuasion can be joined to knowledge, and the related question of how far probability may stand in the place of demonstration, are treated more fully under the ideas of Dialectic and of Opinion.

Aristotle opens the Rhetoric by setting the art beside dialectic. Neither rhetoric nor dialectic, he says, is the scientific study of any one separate subject; both are faculties for providing arguments, and both are concerned with arguments which fall short of demonstration, with matters of opinion about which something probable can be said on either side. The difference between them lies in the situation of the speaker. The dialectician carries on a dispute in which two individuals may be privately engaged; the rhetorician addresses an audience, and seeks from that audience not agreement merely but action, or a decision to act, or the sort of approval which, charged with emotional force, has practical significance. The duty of rhetoric, as Aristotle states it in summary, is to deal with such matters as men deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide them, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

The divisions of the art are determined by the kinds of oratory, and these in turn by the types of audience addressed. Of the three elements in speech-making, speaker, subject, and person addressed, it is the hearer who determines the speech's end and object. A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events, and those who merely judge the orator's skill are observers; hence oratory is political, forensic, or ceremonial. Political speaking urges men to do or not to do something, and aims at establishing the expediency or the harmfulness of a proposed course of action. Forensic speaking attacks or defends, and aims at establishing the justice or injustice of some action. Ceremonial oratory praises or censures, and aims at proving a man worthy of honor or the reverse. The three kinds are also distinguished by their relation to time, the political orator being concerned with the future, the party to a lawsuit with the past, and the ceremonial orator with the present.

Setting aside the use of witnesses and documents, which lies outside the art, Aristotle divides the strictly artistic means of persuasion into three. Persuasion depends on the personal character of the speaker, on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind, and on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. From this he concludes that rhetorical skill consists in the ability to reason logically, to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and to understand the emotions, their causes, and the way in which they are excited. The art therefore requires more than training in grammar and logic; it requires the study of ethics and psychology. The third book, which treats the ordering of an oration into proem, statement, argument, and epilogue, and the choice of words and figures of speech, indicates that problems of style are common to oratory and poetry and to other types of discourse as well.

Later writers on oratory, Cicero and Quintilian among the ancients, Campbell and Whately among the moderns, extend this analysis in certain directions without departing far from the framework it sets up. Even those who reject Aristotle's authority in logic and natural philosophy follow him on oratory, as Hobbes does, or approve his treatment of it, as Bacon does, who calls rhetoric a science excellently well labored and finds in the accepted tradition no serious deficiencies. By another measure the treatise may be judged incomplete. Because it confines itself almost entirely to oratory, it leaves nearly untouched the wider question of eloquence in every sort of discourse, the question Augustine takes up in On Christian Doctrine when he considers how a meaning once discovered is to be made known. That wider question belongs to the ideas of Language and of Poetry.

Aquinas treats the art of speech not as a separate discipline but under the head of the graces given for the good of others. In the Summa Theologica he asks whether the grace of speech, the gratia sermonis, is rightly numbered among the gratuitous graces, and he answers that it is ordered to the usefulness of the faithful, being given for the instruction of others rather than for the sanctification of the one who has it. Preaching thus stands where two orders meet. As an act of the Church it depends upon grace; as an act of speech it remains subject to the ordinary conditions of persuasion, which require that the speaker fit his discourse to those who hear it, choose images by which doctrine may be made intelligible, and move the will as well as inform the intellect. Aquinas finds no opposition here, since grace works through the natural capacities it does not destroy.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas allows that the character of the speaker is among the means by which an audience is moved, but he places that means in a different setting. In the order of the ministry the holiness of the preacher is not merely an advantage in persuading; it is a condition of the office. A man who teaches what is true and lives otherwise weakens his own teaching, since the hearer judges, and not unreasonably, that one who does not act upon what he says does not himself believe it. The saying of Gregory the Great that the life of the preacher is his first sermon is cited to this effect. How far the moral character of a speaker bears upon the worth of what he says is a question treated more fully under the ideas of Virtue and of Prudence.

A further question concerns whether the art of speech is consistent with the simplicity of the Gospel. Some held that Scripture is its own best advocate and needs no ornament, and that the preacher who borrows the devices of the orator has already conceded too much. Aquinas does not take this view. The truths of faith are addressed to all men, including those who cannot follow abstract argument, and the preacher who uses examples, parables, and appeals to the affections makes those truths available to hearers who would otherwise be shut out from them. Christ himself taught in parables. Augustine had argued in much the same direction in the fourth book of On Christian Doctrine, where he disclaims any intention of laying down rules of rhetoric and wishes merely to engage the art on the side of truth, teaching what is right, refuting what is wrong, conciliating the hostile, and rousing the careless.

This treatment of sacred eloquence became the standard framework for preaching in the Latin Church, and it holds together two things which had been opposed: the demand that the speaker know and love the truth, which is Plato's, and the account of the technical means by which an audience is moved, which is Aristotle's. Whether the art can be subordinated in this way remains in dispute. Hobbes, writing after the religious wars of the seventeenth century, counts the eloquence of preachers among the causes of civil confusion, and would place the regulation of public speech with the sovereign rather than with the conscience of the speaker. The relation of preaching to the teaching office of the Church is treated under the idea of Religion.

The Shakespearean treatment of rhetoric is given in one scene above all others, the funeral oration of Mark Antony in the third act of Julius Caesar, which for centuries has stood in the English-speaking tradition as the standing instance of the power of public speech. Brutus has spoken first, in plain prose, and has offered the assembled citizens a justification of the assassination which they have accepted. Antony then mounts the rostrum, having asked leave to speak only in praise of the dead, and in the space of a long oration turns the same citizens against the conspirators. He produces the body and the will, he appeals to pity, he repeats the phrase "honorable men" until it has been emptied of the sense Brutus had given it, and he withdraws the assertion of any intention to rouse them until the assertion has become its opposite. The scene is a showing of what rhetoric, at the height of its power, can do when it has understood its audience.

The analysis implicit in the scene recalls the philosophical treatments of rhetoric from Plato and Aristotle. Plato in the Gorgias had distinguished the rhetoric which serves the truth from the rhetoric which serves the speaker's end and had warned that the second is the more common case; Aristotle in the Rhetoric had given a technical account of the means by which the passions of an audience could be moved and had allowed that the rhetorical art was legitimate so long as it served the ends of justice. Shakespeare's Antony is a case that fits neither schema neatly. He is serving an end which, within the world of the play, the reader is not required to judge either as wholly just or as wholly criminal, and he is serving it by means which are at once deceptive in their presentation of themselves and precise in their handling of the passions they mean to excite. The play does not offer a judgment on whether Antony's rhetoric is to be condemned. It shows only that such a rhetoric is possible, and that the state which does not understand it stands at the mercy of the first man who does.

The broader rhetorical concerns of the plays are not confined to this scene. The battlefield speech of Henry before Agincourt, the self-presentations of Richard III, and the speech of Coriolanus standing on his wounds in the forum are each treatments of the problem of how a man ought to speak to those whose support he requires. The philosophical questions raised belong to the treatments of Language, of Opinion, and of Democracy, and are discussed under those heads. What Shakespeare contributes to the idea of Rhetoric is the showing of the art in its full operation, in scenes which have remained for the whole later tradition the cases against which the philosophical treatments must be measured.

Hobbes, who held that the passions of the multitude are more easily moved by eloquence than governed by reason, drew from the Shakespearean showings the lesson that the sovereign must have the power to suppress the kind of speech Antony delivers. Locke, who wrote of rhetoric with scepticism in the Essay, nonetheless permits it a place when it is subordinate to plain discourse, a position the Antony scene is in some sense designed to test. The later treatments in the Federalist and in Mill take up the same questions under the conditions of representative government, where the power of speech over the multitude is no longer to be suppressed but must be trusted to the judgment of those who hear it.

Hobbes treats speech among the natural faculties of man and treats oratory as a problem of the commonwealth. In Leviathan the use of words is to register the consequences of our thoughts and to communicate them, so that a chain of reasoning may be checked by another man; the abuses of words follow when they are used inconstantly, or metaphorically, or to grieve one another. Metaphors and senseless and ambiguous words he compares to ignes fatui, and reasoning upon them to wandering among innumerable absurdities. What he calls exhortation and dehortation is counsel accompanied with signs in him that gives it of vehement desire to have it followed, and it is this vehemence which, in his account, makes public speech an instrument of faction rather than of deliberation. He had lived through the civil wars, and he assigns to the eloquence of preachers and of parliamentary men a considerable share in the disorders of that time.

The account of language in the fourth chapter makes reasoning a kind of reckoning. Names are imposed by agreement, definitions settle them, and reason proceeds by the adding and subtracting of the consequences of names. Where the first definitions are ill-settled, error gathers through every step that follows, as in an account cast up from false figures. Hobbes does not deny that eloquence is effective. He denies that its effectiveness has any connection with truth, since the orator succeeds by moving the passions, and the passions of a multitude tend toward violence. The same faculty which enables one man to lay open the reasons of a course of action enables another to make things appear greater or less than they are, and the hearer who cannot follow the reasoning is left to be moved by the appearance.

The position is more severe than Plato's in one respect. Plato leaves open a rhetoric joined to knowledge, an art by which the citizens might be made better; Hobbes assigns the work of holding a commonwealth together not to persuasion but to the sovereign power, to the clarity of the laws and the certainty with which they are enforced. Peace is the effect of a common power able to overawe men, not of speeches well made. This does not lead him to neglect the study of oratory. He translated Thucydides, whose speeches he admired, and he prepared a digest of Aristotle's Rhetoric for the use of students. What he rejects is the claim that civic eloquence can perform the office he assigns to sovereignty.

The suspicion of figurative language which Hobbes states here became a standing feature of the empiricist tradition. Locke extends the attack in the Essay, where the whole artificial and figurative application of words is set down as an instrument of error and deceit. Hume takes the passions more seriously as the springs of action while keeping the doubt about the orator's pretension to truth. Against this line stands Bacon, who holds that the duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will, and that rhetoric can no more be charged with the coloring of the worse part than logic with sophistry. Whether words can be fixed by definition, and how far ordinary discourse admits of such fixing, is treated under the idea of Language.

Locke's discussion of rhetoric occurs in the third book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the chapter on the abuse of words, and it is governed by the purpose of that book, which is to show how far the imperfection of language stands in the way of knowledge. Words signify the ideas in the mind of him who uses them, and they are abused when they are used without clear ideas annexed to them, when they are applied inconstantly, or when they are made to stand for more than the speaker has determined. Figurative speech is treated as an abuse of this kind. In discourses where we seek pleasure and delight rather than information and improvement, Locke allows that such ornaments can scarce pass for faults. But where truth and knowledge are concerned, he holds that the artificial and figurative application of words serves only to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and so mislead the judgment.

The distinction between wit and judgment, drawn earlier in the Essay, lies behind this verdict. Wit consists in the assembling of ideas which have any resemblance or congruity, and in putting them together with quickness and variety; judgment consists in separating carefully ideas wherein the least difference can be found, so that one is not misled by similitude. Metaphor and allusion belong to wit. They please, and the pleasure they give is one reason why, as Locke remarks, eloquence has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. The pleasure is not evidence. A resemblance which delights the fancy may answer to no agreement among the things themselves, and the hearer who has been pleased has not on that account been informed.

The remedy Locke proposes is not the suppression of speech but the discipline of the speaker's own thought: to use no word without an idea, to make the idea determinate, to keep the same word to the same idea, and to declare the meaning where the word is likely to be doubted. Writing after the same civil disorders which shaped Hobbes, Locke shares the view that confusion in words breeds confusion in affairs, though he looks for the correction in another quarter. Hobbes would have the sovereign settle definitions; Locke leaves the settling with each man who undertakes to judge for himself. How this bears upon his account of toleration and of the limits of civil authority is treated under the idea of Liberty.

Locke's chapter furnished the eighteenth century with much of its language for depreciating eloquence, and it stands near Descartes' remark that those who reason most strongly and arrange their thoughts most clearly have the best power of persuasion though they have never learned rhetoric. Hume keeps the doubt while insisting that sentiment has a legitimate office in moral and aesthetic judgment. Kant carries the objection further, holding that oratory taken as the art of persuading by a beautiful semblance deserves no respect. Whether words can be made to answer exactly to ideas, so that the office Locke assigns to definition could be discharged, is treated under the ideas of Language and of Definition.

Hume's bearing on the idea of rhetoric follows from his account of the springs of action. Reason discovers relations among ideas and matters of fact; it does not of itself move the will. The statement that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions is not a denial that men reason about what they do, but a claim about the office reasoning performs in the production of action. If the account is correct, the orator's address to the affections is not an intrusion upon a process otherwise rational. It engages the faculty by which men are actually moved, and the rules of rhetoric which concern the passions have then the same standing as the rules which concern argument. Hume holds further that the passions have a regular mechanism, susceptible of as accurate an inquiry as the laws of motion, so that the study of them is not left to the orator's guesswork.

In the essay Of Eloquence Hume compares ancient with modern oratory and finds the modern inferior. Demosthenes and Cicero produced effects which no speaker in a modern assembly attempts, and Hume assigns the difference partly to the greater regularity and coolness of modern manners, partly to the multiplication of laws and precedents which has made forensic speaking a technical business, and partly to the party divisions under which men listen less to the speaker than to the side he represents. He does not treat the change as pure gain. The decline of the vehement style has removed certain abuses, but it has also removed a power which had its use in free states, and Hume observes that the modern preference for good sense over passion may have been carried further than the subject requires.

That sentiment is the ground of judgment does not, on Hume's account, leave judgment arbitrary. The essay Of the Standard of Taste holds that among the various sentiments which men entertain of the same work some are to be preferred, and that the standard is found in the joint verdict of critics who unite delicacy of perception with practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense. The same conditions may be extended to eloquence. A speech which raises feelings answering to nothing in its subject differs from one which raises feelings the subject warrants, and the difference is discernible by a qualified judge though not by every hearer. Hume does not himself state the rule for oratory, but the materials for stating it lie in his account of taste.

Hume leaves the tradition with a question rather than a settlement. Kant grants that judgments of taste rest upon feeling, but he seeks a ground for their universality which sentiment by itself cannot supply, and he is harsher than Hume upon oratory. The authors of The Federalist, writing to persuade a divided public, proceed upon assumptions close to Hume's, addressing the interests and apprehensions of their readers together with their reasons, and saying so at the outset. Whether feeling can serve as a standard in matters of art is treated under the idea of Beauty, and the account of the passions themselves under the idea of Emotion.

Kant's judgment upon oratory appears in the Critique of Judgment, in the section where the fine arts are divided and compared. He counts rhetoric and poetry as the arts of speech, and assigns the higher place to poetry. Rhetoric, taken to mean the art of persuading by a beautiful semblance rather than mere excellence of speech, he calls a dialectic which borrows from poetry only so much as is needed to win over men's minds to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge for themselves. The objection is not that the orator's effects are weak. It is that they are produced upon hearers whose judgment has been forestalled, so that the assent obtained is not properly the hearer's own. Poetry, which announces itself as a play with semblance and makes no claim to be believed, escapes the charge for that reason.

The objection connects with the doctrine that every rational being is to be treated as an end and never merely as a means. An audience worked upon by devices which pass around its reason is being used rather than addressed. Kant's complaint therefore differs from Plato's, though it arrives at a comparable severity. Plato asks whether the orator knows what is just, and finds rhetoric wanting because it produces belief without knowledge; Kant asks what the orator does to those who hear him, and finds it wanting because it produces assent without judgment. A speech may be true in what it asserts and still, on Kant's account, be an offense against the hearer, if the means by which it gains assent are not the means by which the hearer might have arrived at it himself.

An exception is made for what Kant calls mere excellence of speech, which is clarity and force in the expression of thought. He raises no objection to speaking well, only to speaking well in order that the hearer may be won before he has considered. The distinction follows the pattern of the moral philosophy, where an action conforming to duty is distinguished from an action done from duty, and where the worth of the act lies in the principle from which it proceeds rather than in the effect it produces. Whether the line between the force of an argument and the force of its presentation can be drawn as sharply as this requires is a question the tradition has continued to press, and it belongs also to the discussion of style under the idea of Language.

Kant states the case against oratory in the most uncompromising modern form, and he states it in terms the earlier discussion had not employed. Mill accepts a good deal of the concern about persuasion which the hearer cannot resist, and yet holds that the remedy lies in the freedom of discussion rather than in any restriction of speech, since an argument which can be answered does less harm than one which cannot be raised. Tocqueville describes the same difficulty arising where no censor operates at all and the pressure comes from the opinion of the majority. The relation between the autonomy Kant defends and the conditions under which men deliberate in common is treated under the ideas of Liberty and of Duty.

The papers collected as The Federalist were written to persuade the people of New York to ratify the proposed constitution, and their authors are explicit about the rhetorical conditions under which they write. Hamilton observes in the first paper that the plan offered affects too many particular interests and innovates upon too many local institutions not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth. Arguing for political principles, he says, is not like teaching geometry, whose objects are entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart. He expects that a torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose in the debate, and he says so before he begins to argue.

What follows from this admission is a particular management of the speaker's own character. Hamilton allows that the opponents of the Constitution may be actuated by upright intentions, and that their opposition may spring from sources blameless at least, if not respectable, the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears; so numerous and so powerful are the causes which give a false bias to the judgment, he writes, that wise and good men are often found on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude. He puts his readers on guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence their decision by impressions other than those which result from the evidence of truth. His motives, he says, must remain in the depository of his own breast; his arguments will be open to all and may be judged by all. This is the element Aristotle places among the means of persuasion under the head of character.

The papers also illustrate the problems of arrangement and style which arise in a long argument addressed to readers who will not follow a chain of reasoning indefinitely. The numbers are short, each takes up a single head, and the whole is disposed so that objections are met in their turn. The tenth paper proceeds from a definition of faction to the two ways in which its causes might be removed and the grounds for rejecting both, and thence to the control of its effects in an extended republic. The reasoning is set out in a manner which allows a reader to hold each step in view, and the conclusions are supported by appeals to interest as well as to principle. The design of institutions to answer the defects of human nature is treated under the ideas of Government and of Constitution.

The Federalist has been read since as a model of political argument, and it stands in the tradition as an instance of what Aristotle describes rather than as a treatise upon it. Tocqueville, coming half a century later, examines American public speech as a product of democratic conditions, and notes tendencies which the ratification debate did not display. Mill approaches the same conditions from another side and holds that the collision of opposed opinions, of the kind that controversy provided, is the circumstance under which an opinion can be held with understanding rather than by habit. Whether the deliberative conditions of 1788 can be reproduced under ordinary politics is a question these later writers raise and do not settle.

Mill's bearing on the idea of rhetoric is indirect, since the second chapter of On Liberty is concerned with the liberty of thought and discussion rather than with the art of speaking. His argument is that the silencing of an opinion is an injury whatever the opinion may be. If it is true, men are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If it is false, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception of truth which is produced by its collision with error. And since a received opinion is seldom the whole truth, the opinion suppressed commonly holds some portion of it which the prevailing view lacks. The argument rests not on the value of any particular speech but on the conditions under which an opinion can be known to be worth holding.

This shifts the question the earlier tradition had asked. Plato asks whether the orator knows the truth, and Kant whether he respects the hearer's judgment; Mill asks under what arrangements the hearer is in a position to judge at all. He shares the dislike of persuasion which cannot be answered, but he does not conclude that the remedy is to restrict what may be said. The remedy is that whatever is said may be answered. In a discussion open on all sides, an argument which will not bear examination is exposed by examination, and an appeal to feeling is met by an appeal to other feelings and to fact. Mill does not undertake that truth will prevail. He holds that it has advantages in an open contest which it does not have in a closed one, and that the loss from suppression falls on those who agree with the censor as well as on those who do not.

He also describes a condition in which the forms of free discussion survive without the substance. Where an opinion is not contested, it comes to be held as a dead dogma, professed from habit and not from any perception of its grounds. The man who holds a true opinion and has never had to defend it cannot state the reasons for it, cannot meet the objections to it, and does not know which parts of it are essential and which incidental. On this view the exercise of speech against a received opinion performs a service even when the speech is bad, since it obliges those who hold the opinion to consider what they hold. The absence of legal censorship is no security here, for the weight of social opinion can silence dissent as effectively as any law.

Mill's argument became the standard ground for the legal protection of speech in the English-speaking countries. Tocqueville had already described in America the condition Mill fears, a society in which the law forbids no opinion and the weight of the majority discourages the utterance of any that is unusual. Taken together the two accounts state the modern form of the problem. The ancient question was whether the orator may be trusted; the question these writers put is whether the audience stands where it can hear and weigh what is said. How discussion bears upon the discovery of truth is treated under the ideas of Truth and of Opinion.

Tocqueville's observations on public speech belong to a larger inquiry into the effects of equality upon language and upon the arts. In aristocratic communities, he holds, a small body of men educated alike and reading the same books keeps the language settled, since words retain their meanings within a company that is closed. Where conditions are equal and every man reads and writes, no authority fixes usage, and language becomes unsettled. Democratic speakers prefer general and abstract terms, which allow them to comprehend many things in few words and spare them the labor of examining particulars. Men whose language is as vague as their thought, Tocqueville remarks, often use a word in a sense different from its original meaning, and the hearer supplies what he pleases.

The explanation offered is drawn from the social condition rather than from any failure of talent. Where citizens are nearly equal, no speaker can claim authority from birth or station, and he must appeal to what all are supposed to share. Abstract terms answer this purpose because they exclude no one and commit the speaker to little. Tocqueville notes that American political language abounds in expressions concerning liberty, the people, and the future which sound considerable and determine nothing. He does not present this as dishonesty. It is the manner of speech which equality of conditions makes natural, and it has its counterpart in the taste for general ideas which he discusses in the same volume, a taste which affects the writing of history and the pursuit of the sciences as well as the conduct of politics.

A second observation concerns the freedom of speech itself. Democracy multiplies the number of speakers and secures their legal right to speak, and yet Tocqueville says he knows of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. The majority has no need to imprison the dissenter. It leaves him at liberty and withdraws from him the regard of his fellow citizens, so that he is not punished but abandoned. The pressure works upon opinion before it is uttered, and its effect is less that false opinions are expressed than that unusual ones are not.

Tocqueville brings the discussion to a point the earlier writers had not reached. Plato asks whether persuasion can serve truth, and Kant whether it respects the hearer; Tocqueville asks what kinds of speech a given social condition permits and encourages, and treats the manner of oratory as one among the many things that equality alters. Mill takes up the same problem in On Liberty, where the tyranny of prevailing opinion is held to be a graver danger to discussion than the censorship of governments. How manners and social condition bear upon the arts is treated under the ideas of Democracy and of Custom and Convention.