means of instruction. This is Plato's way of saying that any method of attempting to persuade multitudes must suffer from the very fact that it is a multitude which is addressed, and that the best of rhetoric is unequal to philosophic discussion.

7. The rhetorician will have such a high moral purpose in all his work that he will ever be chiefly concerned about saying that which is "acceptable to God." Rhetoric, then, is not an instrument for the determination of scientific truth, nor for mere persuasion regardless of the cause; it is an instrument for making the will of God prevail. The perfect rhetorician, as a philosopher, knows the will of God.

VIII

De Quincey says that rhetoric has, in general, two connotations : one of ostentatious ornament, and the other of fallacious argument. That part of Plato's attack upon rhetoric which we have considered, largely concerns itself with rhetoric as "ostentatious ornament" (although the two aspects can seldom be completely separated). And it was this attack which led Plato to the constructive theory of the Phædrus. But there was a later assault upon the sophists which concerned rhetoric as an art of fallacious argument.1 The sophists of Plato's earlier dialogues are declaimers and rhetoricians who can overwhelm opponents with long speeches, but they are tyros in the art of argumentation. In the Euthydemus, Sophist, and Statesman, Plato caricatures the imitators of Socrates, who practise argumentation by question and answer, but who resemble Socrates as the wolf does the dog.

The Euthydemus is the earliest known attempt to exhibit a variety of fallacies. In it Plato desired to make clear the distinction between truly philosophical argumentation and that eristical disputation which served no purpose except to display a certain type of cleverness. A young man, Cleinias, is cross-examined by two sophistical teachers of argument, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. They conduct their examination in a spirit of horse-play, and soon have the youth hopelessly confused. Socrates then rebukes them, and offers to examine Cleinias in a truly philosophical fashion. His kindly questions (much more kindly here than in other dialogues, but they serve Plato's purpose in emphasizing the contrast), which lead Cleinias to the conclusion that wisdom is the only good, and ignorance the only

'Henry Sidgwick in his essays on the sophists was the first to point out this distinction. See his Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and other Philosophical Lectures and Essays. For a discussion of Sidgwick's essays, see Sir A. Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, Essay 2.

evil, are an example of the way in which a philosopher conducts an argument for the enlightenment, and not the confusion, of youth.

Having distinguished the philosopher from the sophistical teachers of fallacious argument, Plato in an epilogue contrasts the philosopher and the orator-statesman. Here Plato is probably thinking of Isocrates and his "philosophy," which was a mixture of rhetoric and politics. Philosopher-politicians and speech writers, Socrates is made to say, imagine themselves to be a superior sort; they think they have a certain amount of philosophy, and a certain amount of political insight; thus they keep out of the way of all risks and conflicts and reap the fruit of their wisdom. Socrates asserts, however, that philosophy and political action tend to such different ends that one who participates in both achieves little in either. The Isocratean ideal of the orator-statesman, which had so great an influence upon Cicero, was objectionable to Plato for at least three reasons. first place, the true statesman was a philosopher rather than an orator; he ruled arbitrarily through his wisdom rather than through persuasion. Secondly, if the statesman was forced to stoop to the use of oratory, it was to be clearly understood that oratory was a subordinate instrument. The ideal of the orator-statesman only helped to confuse the superior art of politics with rhetoric. Thirdly, the orator-statesman falsely imagined that the ideas which he used in the persuasion of the public constituted his philosophy; whereas in reality he was so tied to particulars in all his speaking and thinking that he never approached the wisdom of the true philosopher.

In the Euthydemus, then, we have pictured a later development of the older sophists. Imitators of Socrates had appeared who taught the art of argumentation for pay: Isocrates had enlarged and dignified the instruction of the rhetoricians by allying it more closely with pan-Hellenic politics, and had become much more popular and successful than Plato. Plato insists that true philosophy is a different sort of thing, and indulges in caricature and satire to make it evident. In the Sophist, we have an abstract and methodical discussion of that which is dramatically pictured in the Euthydemus. Plato planned a trilogy of dialogues, the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Philosopher, in which the man of the world and the man of wisdom should be contrasted. The Philosopher was never written, but from the Sophist and the Statesman we get the Platonic discussion of the false art of argumentation known as eristic.

The sophist, in the dialogue of that name, is discovered by a preliminary study of the angler, which suggests a method of search, and also furnishes an implied analogy, for the sophist is found to be a fisher of men who finally destroys them. By a series of homely figures the sophist is revealed in his various aspects. He is (1) a paid hunter after youth and wealth, (2) a retail merchant or trader in the goods of the soul, (3) he himself manufactures the learned wares which he sells, (4) he is a hero of dispute, having distinctly the character of a disputant, (5) he is a purger of souls who clears away notions obstructive to knowledge. In the last-named characteristic, Plato seems about to admit that the sophist serves a great educational purpose, for he has previously admitted that "refutation is the greatest and chiefest purification." But the sophist, as the supposed minister of refutation, is related to the real purger of souls as "a wolf, who is the fiercest of animals, is to the dog, who is the gentlest." Here Plato does not seem to see that a given logical procedure is as a method essentially the same, whether used by a sophist or a philosopher. For Plato, even the logical nature of crossexamination seems to be changed by the moral nature of the examiner. No sophist ever employed greater fallacies than the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues; yet fallacies in the arguments of a philosopher seemed somehow elevated by their moral purpose. Aristotle followed Plato in this error. Probably no fallacy is more persistent than the judgment of logical method by the standard of moral purpose.

The eristical sophists, as the rhetorical, profess a knowledge which they do not have. They profess that the art of disputation is a power of disputing about all things. Plato puts the sophists in the position of teaching that a mastery of form gives also a mastery of substance. The sophists delight in the discovery that a certain facility in logical method, accompanied by entire unscrupulousness, can make almost any proposition appear to be plausible. With no standard of consistency looking farther than the immediate discus-. sion, method can so arrange any small group of facts, or alleged facts, that any thesis may be made to appear tenable. The sophists seem to teach young men to argue about all things because "they make young men believe in their own supreme and universal wisdom.") They are enabled to do this by their readiness in offering 1 Sophist, 231.

"conjectural or apparent knowledge of all things," as a substitute for truth. They are like painters who profess "by one art to make all things." What the sophist makes is a resemblance, but it is easy to deceive the less intelligent children, by showing his pictures at a distance, into believing that he has the absolute power of making what he likes. In the same way there is an imitative art of reasoning, and by the use of this art, the sophist passes himself off as a philosopher. There are two types of these imitators: the popular orator, who makes long speeches to the multitude and who appears to be a statesman, and the sophist, who teaches argumentation and pretends to be a philosopher.

The Statesman is an attempt, by the same method of division used in the Sophist, to discover the true statesman. Here we have an introductory analogy concerning the weaver. As the weaver has the auxiliary arts of the fuller, the carder, and the maker of the warp and woof, so the statesman has the auxiliary arts of the rhetorician, the general, and the judge. There is always the danger, however, that the rhetorician may be mistaken for the statesman. Politics is the science that tells us when to persuade, and of what; rhetoric merely tells how to persuade. If the rhetoric be a noble rhetoric, however, and does really persuade men to love justice, it may be regarded as a useful instrument in our second-best state, where persuasion is an unfortunate necessity in government. Rhetoric, however, should never lose its instrumental character, and should never aspire to be more than one of the several subordinate arts which the statesman weaves together into the whole which is the state.

In these two dialogues, then, the Sophist and the Statesman, we are warned against the rhetorician, who appears in different guises. In the Sophist, he appears as the dialectician who purges the soul of false knowledge, but he is really an eristical disputant. In the Statesman, he appears as the persuader of the public who is quick to seize power as a demagogue unless he be kept strictly under the direction of the true statesman.

IX

To summarize briefly our whole discussion of Plato: we have shown that his treatment of rhetoric is based upon his feelings 'Sophist, 233, 234.

toward certain rhetoricians, and upon his dislike of the rhetorical tendency of all Athenian life.) Plato never viewed rhetoric abstractly, as an art of composition, as an instrument that might be used or abused; he always considered it a false impulse in human thought. He therefore attacked in published dialogues the more prominent contemporary teachers and the art they professed to teach. The evidence seems to show that the sophists of the earlier attacks were intellectually respectable, and that they made significant contributions to the thought of their time. At the conclusion of his earlier attacks (if we may trust the attempts to arrange Plato's dialogues in approximately chronological order) Plato offers an outline of a reconstructed rhetoric. Here, too, he shows his inability to conceive of rhetoric as a tool; the ideal rhetoric sketched in the Phædrus is as far from the possibilities of mankind as his Republic was from Athens. In later life, a new generation of teachers that patterned its methods after Socrates, aroused the wrath of Plato, and he wrote other dialogues to distinguish the false art of argumentation from the dialectical processes of the true philosopher.

X

In turning to Aristotle,1 we shall be chiefly interested in his relation to Plato. To explain the relation of any one of Aristotle's treatises to Plato is, according to Sir Alexander Grant, almost a sufficient account of what it contains. Familiarity with the Platonic dialogues and their Athenian background, makes it possible to proceed more rapidly with the systematic work of Aristotle upon any particular subject under investigation. It is not our purpose here to present an exposition of the Rhetoric,2 and the preceding discussion should make it possible to condense the account of Aristotle, although his contribution to rhetoric is greater than that of Plato or the sophists.

It is obvious that as Plato's pupil, Aristotle must have had his attention called to those aspects of Athenian life which interested

For translations of Aristotle's Rhetoric, see those by Welldon, London, 1886; Jebb, Cambridge, 1909; and Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. XI, Oxford, 1924. Citations of the Rhetoric in this study are taken from Roberts.

For expositions of the Rhetoric, see E. M. Cope, An Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric, London, 1867; Gomperz, op. cit., IV; Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics, London 1897; and Baldwin, Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic, New York, 1924.