ABSTRACT
In rhetorical criticism, as in rhetorical creation, form is separably viewed largely in order to assess its operational intentionality; that is, form can be thought of as a "doing" quite apart from stated intentions. Humanist rhetoric never quite recovered—if not from the onslaughts of the Ramists, then from what the Ramists reflected: the rise of confidence in the contemplative intellect, in the availability of truth, and in the forms of certainty. The Ramists disintegrated humanist rhetoric but, paradoxically, reintegrated discursive form with discursive content, for a different, nonhumanist epistemology was at work. Ramists leaned much more heavily on man's intuition, and consequently relied much more on axiomatic presentation—that almost skeletal coldness whereby words are framed into true statements, and then arranged methodically. For the humanist Thomas Wilson, rhetoric is a field of activity, encompassing invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery. Emotion—an essential, for John Donne as for all humanists, of rhetorical dispositio—was irrelevant to Ramist thought.
