ONT Re: Verities Of Likely Stories
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VOLS. Note 10
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| Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means
| of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. This is the function of
| no other of the arts, each of which is able to instruct and persuade in its
| own special subject; thus, medicine deals with health and sickness, geometry
| with the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic with number, and similarly with
| all the other arts and sciences. But Rhetoric, so to say, appears to be able
| to discover the means of persuasion in reference to any given subject. That is
| why we say that as an art its rules are not applied to any particular definite
| class of things.
|
| As for proofs, some are inartificial, others artificial. By the former
| I understand all those which have not been furnished by ourselves but were
| already in existence, such as witnesses, tortures, contracts, and the like;
| by the latter, all that can be constructed by system and by our own efforts.
| Thus we have only to make use of the former, whereas we must invent the latter.
|
| Now the proofs furnished by the speech are of three kinds.
| The first depends upon the moral character of the speaker,
| the second upon putting the hearer into a certain frame
| of mind, the third upon the speech itself, in so far as
| it proves or seems to prove.
|
| Aristotle, "Art of Rhetoric", 1.2.1-3.
|
| Aristotle, "The 'Art' of Rhetoric",
| John Henry Freese (trans.), in:
|'Aristotle, Volume 22', G.P. Goold (ed.),
| William Heinemann, London, UK, 1926, 1982.
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