ABSTRACT

In the preface to the Elements of Rhetoric, Richard Whately lists the advantages gained by students of rhetoric, including the ability to detect “sophistical tricks” and to appreciate “sound, honest, manly eloquence” (1828/1963, pp. xxxix, xl). That is not a new rhetorical move, of course: Aristotle makes similar claims in On Rhetoric (1991, 1355a). What is intriguing, however, is Whately’s next claim: “I may add, that I have in one place … pointed out an important part of the legitimate art of the orator, in respect of the minds of his hearers, as coinciding exactly with the practice of a wise and good man in respect of his own mind” (1828/1963, p. xli). Anyone familiar with the attribution of logic as the “art of thinking” in Western philosophy since Aristotle, with Whately’s own predilection for logic, or with his specific proposal to “[consider] Rhetoric … as an off-shoot from Logic” (1828/1963, p. 4) might assume that Whately is referring to a method of reasoning or logical argumentation. It is surprising to note, then, that Whately is here pointing out the opening of part 2 (“Of the Address to the Will, or Persuasion”), in which he justifies “the address to the Feelings or Active Principles of our nature” (1828/1963, p. 180)—the use of pathos. In the referenced passage, Whately applies a practical ethics based on Scottish moral sense philosophy and Christian doctrine to a description of rhetoric reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s faculty psychology. This chapter describes the conceptual bridge built by Whately between a Baconian psychological description of rhetorical function and the Scottish moral sense philosophy that attempts to explain ethics in terms of faculty psychology.