Forensic Oratory; A Manual for Advocates (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 II. OF THE LIMITATIONS OF ORATORY. 7. Oratory can Employ only Noble Ideas and Emotions. In its employment of ideas and impulses oratory is limited by its own nature, and by the intellectual and moral characteristics of its auditors. True oratory counts among its lawful weapons only those noble impulses which are born of just and excellent ideas. With the base passions which are the progeny of low and sensuous ideas it has no sympathy, no common aim. It recognizes that the emancipation of the will from the latter and its entire subjugation to the former is the one object of the discipline of life, and the sole ultimate benefit which social forces can confer upon mankind. Itself the most potent of these forces, it can never, for the sake of temporary ends, promote the sovereignty of passion, or urge the will toward vicious or degrading actions. This is especially true of forensic oratory. The advocate is the minister of the law, the instrument and guardian of justice. In his assertion of the right, in his defence against the wrong, passion is always his antagonist, and not his ally. So far from evoking it that he may trade upon the baseness of his hearers, it is his duty to deliver them, at least for the time being, from its thraldom, that with unclouded minds they may perceive the truth, and with unfettered wills may zealously pursue it. 8. Oratory can Employ only Ideas Suited to the Hearers. The intellectual and moral characteristics of its hearers narrow still further the resources of oratory. An audience is not a group of empty vessels into which the orator can pourhis thought, certain that it will there retain its purity and power. On the contrary their minds are occupied already with ideas which form a solvent for every new idea that may be pre...