The Art of English Composition (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. OF THE DEPARTMENTS OF EHETOEIC. 35. Rhetoric, as the Art of constructing Discourse, embraces two processes which are in many respects distinct from each other. The one consists in the provision of the thought variously modified as it may be by feeling and the moral state in its proper form, and is founded more immediately on Logic. The other consists chiefly in the provision of the appropriate language, and rests mainly on Grammar as its foundation. The two great' departments of the art of rhetoric, accordingly, are Invention and Style. In many of the most popular treatises on rhetoric in the English language, the first of these processes, invention, has been almost entirely excluded from view. Several causes may be assigned for this deviation from the uniform method of the ancient rhetoricians. The most important one would seem to be the neglect into which logic has fallen; or, perhaps more exactly, the cause is to be found in the hitherto immature and unsettled views of modern writers in this science. Another cause is the change that has taken place in logical science since the times of the Grecian and Roman rhetoricians, which renders their systems of rhetorical invention, founded as they were, to a great extent, on their peculiar logical views, inapplicable to present modes of thought. Their system of topics is thus, for this and other reasons, wholly onsuited to our times. The art of invention, moreover, is more essentially modified than style by the particular department of oratory or the kind of discourse to which it is applied. Hence the ancient systems of invention which were constructed in strict reference to the modes of speaking then prevalent, are ill- adapted to present use. The systems of Cicero and Quin- tilian, for example, are for ...