“A Peculiar Power of Perception”: Scottish Enlightenment Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic of Language

This dissertation is an inquiry into the ways rhetoric, as the study of the art of language use, and literature, as the art of written language, were coherently theorized in Enlightenment Scotland to articulate the complex nature of language and its inherent relationship to the human mind and its faculties. The chapters contained in this manuscript dissertation are previously published studies in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theory, examining the multiple and sometimes contradictory legacies of this important body of work on language pedagogy, philosophy of mind and language, and political theory. These studies offer new grounds for examining the legacies of Scottish rhetoric, amongst them the creation of a new aesthetic of language arising from the moral sentiments tradition.

viii work in rhetoric and language theory. 1 Smith's work stands at the forefront of a more widely encompassing rhetorical vision; even so, the present state of scholarship contains the need for a literary-minded critique of his rhetorical and moral thinking. It is Smith's "peculiar power of perception" -the moral sense -that must be accounted for within aesthetic judgment in order to create compelling grounds for a new literary critique.
In this spirit, the dissertation is an inquiry into the ways rhetoric and literature were coherently theorized in Enlightenment Scotland to articulate the nature of language and its inherent and complex relationship to the human mind and its faculties. As an overarching program of research, the three chapters contained in this dissertation are distinct and free-standing studies in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theory, examining through three different lenses the multiple and sometimes contradictory legacies of this important body of work on language pedagogy, philosophy of mind and language, and political theory. All three chapters taken together conscientiously seek to build a comprehensive interdisciplinary understanding of this area of the Scottish Enlightenment in order to contribute to a stable platform from which, in future work, I can critically approach the new aesthetic of Enlightenment vernacular poetry. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers produced not only seminal works of rhetoric and philosophy, but also a new literary aesthetic, and practices of reading and writing whose influences still reverberate within our modern academic disciplines. This same movement also created the modern academic 1  ix disciplines as discrete fields, and much of the intellectual work contained herein is a re-conceptualization of the disciplinary unity required to approach eighteenth-century rhetoric and literature with the degree of interconnectedness and interdisciplinary cohesion within which it was formed. Scottish rhetoric cogently theorizes the nature of language and its constitutive relationship to the human faculties. Most particularly, Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric postulates the connection between moral, social, and language practices: an understanding of the moral properties of language is essential to forming a critique of Scottish Enlightenment literary productions that apprehends this basis of their innovative aesthetic. The Scottish belles lettres tradition most frequently characterizes the relationship between eighteenth-century Scottish moral sentiments theory and language theory. But as these chapters demonstrate, often the historical narrative of belles lettres contains retrospective mischaracterization of both "taste" and the moral sentiments theory. What has lingered in the word belles lettres is the more nineteenth-century sense of moral and social obligation contained within the reading practices of belles lettres, what has been made explicit is more twentieth-century argument connecting belletristic language practices, social mobility, and elitism.
Eighteenth-century rhetoric has a long-standing critical connection to belles lettres, and this is a perfectly appropriate starting point to a conversation about literature and rhetoric in the eighteenth century. Yet the conversation must extend past this, and not as much work has been done to examine the critical philosophical and theoretical configurations between literary productions, rhetoric, and belles lettres. The legacy of belles lettres extending into the study of nineteenth-century literature is welldocumented also, but like the other disciplinary areas addressed in the works included xii roundly rejected the pedagogical products of bellestric literary practices, namely "current-traditional" rhetorical teaching and positivistic literary criticism. As a part of this rejection, it was argued that "current-traditional" rhetoric 2 and positivist criticism seem to share the Ramistic separation of invention from rhetoric. Based on this shared separation, twentieth-century rhetorical history argues for the connection between Scottish rhetoric and Ramism, even though by the eighteenth-century Ramism as a movement was long-since forgotten in Scottish universities. As an alternative to this narrative, this chapter points out that the key rhetorical concept of "taste" within the work of Blair and the Scottish rhetoricians is not a function of the dyadic relationship between logic and language. It is rather a mediating faculty between the senses, imagination, and reason. The Scottish theory of "taste," is, in fact, a close philosophical relative to C.S. Peirce's semiotic theory. Peirce acknowledged his debt to Scottish common-sense Enlightenment thinkers, and this chapter examines Peircean semiotic theory's use of Scottish rhetoric, thereby offering a re-reading of the ideological linkages between Ramism, Scottish rhetoric, and eighteenth-century language practices. Both the rhetorical theory of "taste" within language-use and Peirce's theory of "semiosis" within the structures of signification employ methods that are remarkably similar in function and outcome. Both methods unite logic and rhetoric within a flexible method that encompasses personal and social invention, multiple levels of mediation of perception, and also a real world within which they create. A careful analysis of the overlaps between these two methods, in addition to the historical and philosophical connections between Peirce and Thomas Reid 2 See Manuscript Two, pp 51-53, for a full discussion of this term. xiii provides good grounds to re-evaluate the ideological connection between Ramism, Scottish Common Sense's theorization of taste, and American composition's "currenttraditional" rhetoric.
The final chapter of this dissertation is an article that was awarded the George Elder Davies Prize for best graduate student paper at the Princeton Theological Seminary Bicentenary Celebration Conference at the Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy and was subsequently published in the Journal of Scottish Philosophy (Vol.11, 2013, Issue 2: 213-228). Entitled "Common-Sense Rhetorical Theory, Pluralism, and Natural Law Theory," this article offers a close examination of the philosophy of language in Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric as well as Blair's concept of taste and Alexander Bain's theory of the "doubleness of language" 3 in order to articulate (more fully here than in the previous chapters) the ways in which Scottish rhetoric conceives the epistemic 4 functions of language. This chapter argues that Scottish rhetoric does not see rhetorical knowledge as permanent and stable but rather as a conditional exchange between the rhetor and her audience, which is one of the arts constitutive to human nature itself. Because of the inherent sociability of all of the human faculties of language, from which reason is derived, moral consensus is a key area of concern. As all of the higher faculties of man operate contextually, education and civil institutions take on a moral function as well. And finally, on account of the praxis of rhetorical personal and civic taste, this chapter suggests that Scottish xiv Enlightenment rhetoric offers a tool necessary for the continuance of a pluralistic society. For pluralism to function there must be a means of achieving conditional forms of moral consensus, and the Scottish rhetors of the eighteenth century were deeply invested in meeting this need within their own Enlightenment milieu.

Conclusion
The Scottish Enlightenment discovered ways of theorizing language that are resonant in what are today widely divergent fields, from political theory to theories of cognition, and that Scottish Enlightenment thinking offers a profoundly relevant understanding of the ethical and moral dimensions of language learning and language use. Eighteenth-century Scotland gives us an example of the kinds of development possible when the disciplines operate in an open and cooperative manner, united under the practice of the most ancient discipline, rhetoric, and a most fundamental inquiry, language-use. In our own modern iterations of deliberative democratic discourse, we would do well to look again at this moment of rhetorical flourishing.

Preface
The following manuscript was written in 2013 after I was asked to prepare and edit a volume on Scottish rhetoric for the Library of Scottish Philosophy, and it was commissioned by the Center for the Study for Scottish Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary. My volume is number 16 in the series. The series is meant to help expand and make accessible more of the Scottish philosophical tradition than just the major writings of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Philosophy of Rhetoric is unique in that it offers readings that connect the philosophical tradition with the rhetorical textbooks produced under its influence.
Included in this dissertation is the short "Introduction" to the volume.
The eighteenth-century primary texts to which this manuscript refers are as follows, in alphabetical order by author: Bain

TEXT Scottish Rhetoric and Scottish Philosophy
The Scottish contribution to the creation of modern Western institutions is one of the most surprising chapters in the history of modernity. It is counterintuitive to suppose that such a small and low profile country should be the source of philosophical innovations that forged the conceptual foundations of political, social, psychological, educational, and economic systems still functioning today. It may also seem counter-intuitive to regard the oft-forgotten discipline of rhetoric as central to the philosophical practice that produced these foundations. So in imagining a volume on the Scottish Philosophy of Rhetoric, it may appear overambitious to link the Scottish philosophical tradition to the Scottish rhetorical texts so closely, especially since the Enlightenment rhetorical tradition, particularly when viewed from the perspective of writing and reading pedagogy, is often seen as simply an obtuse and dated addendum to the main philosophical tradition.
On the other hand, within rhetorical history, the eighteenth century is widely regarded as the central nexus of the development of many modern conversations about language, language-learning, social and cognitive development through language, semantics, linguistics, discourse theory, and civic participation. Further, any consideration of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rhetoric must focus on the contributions of Scottish writers and professors such as George Campbell and Hugh Blair. The selections in this volume have been chosen in order to show readers both why the Scottish contributions to rhetoric are important for those conversations, and also how essential their place is in the Scottish philosophical tradition.
To whom amongst the many eminent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers should we look first for the key texts of Scottish rhetoric? Rhetoric, though a subject of widespread interest at that time, is hard to confine within any one discipline, as indeed it continues to be. Linda Ferreira-Buckley, describing the broad state of eighteenth-century rhetoric, points out that 'then, as now, "rhetoric" is an expansive phenomenon and a slippery term. Understanding the eighteenth-century requires looking beyond disciplinary boundaries that may have come to seem natural'. 5

Rhetoric and Logic in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
In the classical tradition, rhetoric is one of the three cornerstones of a basic education in the liberal arts, the trivium, which consisted of logic, rhetoric, and grammar. The study of rhetoric, defined by Aristotle as the 'ability to see, in each particular case, the means of persuasion', 6 was since ancient times considered a first order in education; it 6  This is an important distinction, relative to the Scottish philosophy of rhetoric as well.
The art of rhetoric must not be confused with the products of rhetorical arts. 7 Howell, Wilbur Samuel, Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971;and Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700,Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956 generalities. The discipline of logic, therefore, needed to be reformed. Now, Alexander Broadie argues that 'in the forefront of this discussion on logic in the mid-eighteenth century' and 'pressing for debate toward further modernization of the discipline' 8 was none other than Thomas Reid. Reid is much better known for his development of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, dealing with the more abstract branches of epistemology and philosophy of mind, but it is important to note that, like many of the thinkers included here for their important work in rhetorical theory, he was as wellversed in science and mathematics as in philosophical inquiry. This is essential to understanding the motivation for the rhetorical innovations he, like others, advocated.
In fact, the relation of logic to rhetoric and the concern with science is essential to understanding the particularly Scottish Enlightenment crafting of the 'science of man': that is, the application of the new scientific method to the study of the human mind and its products. First amongst the particular, observable phenomena produced by the mind is, of course, language. And here we can see, from a methodological point of view, the need for and keen interest in a new rhetorical theory.
Rhetoric in the classical tradition was concerned primarily with persuasion, but it became a key method of inquiry in the new science of man. It was seen as a tool for analysing the faculties of the mind that are observed in the processes of knowing, or coming to a belief or understanding.

Themes in Scottish Rhetoric
Several hallmarks of Scottish rhetoric need to be highlighted, so that the reader may critique and compare their development in the readings that follow. The list is neither exhaustive nor definitive, but six themes-the rhetor's necessary orientation to the good, rhetoric as a moral art, the exploration of taste, the foundations of literary criticism, rhetoric as a means of personal improvement, and advocacy of simple style-provide a good guide to the rich and innovative Scottish contribution to an 9 A word might be said here also of the exclusion of John Witherspoon and his contemporary Scots in America. While Witherspoon was born and educated in Scotland, and is thus a product of the Scottish rhetorical tradition, his own rhetorical writings were written in and for the American context. For this reason they are better regarded as founding documents of the American rhetorical tradition.
ancient and complex discipline.
The first consistent theme found in Scottish rhetorical theory is that effective rhetoric is intimately connected to the rhetor's own orientation to the true and good.
Persuasion, and the creation of what is moving and pleasing to properly formed taste, is possible only when it is generated by one whose own moral and intellectual tastes have been properly formed. This follows Ciceronian rhetoric, along with Quintilian's teaching that rhetoric is the 'good man speaking well'. In addition, however, it reflects the new territory that rhetoric occupies in its relation to the scientific method and experiential knowing. Scientific thinking is also concerned with what is true, even if its observations and the general laws they generate are probable truths only. Rhetorical skill is thus tied to a posteriori inquiry-the audience judges not only by language and skilled argument, but by what they observe through their own experiences of the speaker. Effective language touches the 'chord, which when struck, the human heart is made to answer' (Blair, Reading XVII argument. It made artistic expression in language its territory, and expanded its attention to other kinds of texts. Rhetoric was no longer simply an art of persuasion that made appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos. It now was the art of creating, and criticizing, language in all its written and oral forms. If the advancement of taste may be considered the third theme, the expansion of rhetoric to all things now considered literary may be counted the fourth.
An impulse to improvement constitutes the fifth notable theme in Scottish rhetoric. Its development as a discipline for the cultivation of taste and criticism was clearly a response to the new philosophy of mind, and its effect on logic and scientific method. But it was the political and social environment of Scotland in the eighteenth century that pushed it from the academy to the cultural centre stage. Scotland's growing political and economic freedom, together with an already well-functioning educational system, facilitated widespread interest in self-improvement for the purposes of personal advancement and civic participation. National improvement was also part of the agenda, because the 1707 Act of Union with England had made the Scots intensely concerned with national and cultural identity and historicity. Rhetoric had a two-fold part to play in this desire for improvement. First, as the discipline of the cultivation of personal taste, it was an aid to personal growth in the polite and civic arts, which in turn was expected to cultivate moral sensitivity. Secondly was a more pragmatic concern with language use as social currency favoured it. Smith was chosen for his public lectures not only for his knowledge of rhetoric and belles lettres and his skill as a teacher, but also for the 'correctness' of his speech and pronunciation. His lectures were considered edifying for his mastery of 'proper' English as well as their content. Though somewhat at odds with the rising interest in Scots Gaelic and national literature, the desire for greater social currency in the English political and economic system led to the avoidance of Scotticisms, and this particular kind of rhetorical 'improvement' was one of the sources of rhetoric's popularity, while the sixth, the advocacy of simple and direct style, is immediately related to it. Rhetoric as it was practised from Cicero on had tended to emphasize specific arrangement and ornate, carefully crafted style, so much so that rhetoric itself had become synonymous with lavish use of figures, tropes, and flowery impenetrability. In addition to meeting the needs of the altered political and economic circumstances of the eighteenth century, the new rhetoric promoted a plain and simple style in response to the changing religious attitudes. The need was for religious and civil leaders to preach and discourse effectively to wider and more diverse audiences. Those who taught rhetoric at the universities in Scotland knew that many of their students intended to enter the Church or the Law, and that the old style of rhetorical ornamentation was not suited to congregations and juries who no longer came from social and educational stratum.
Howell noted that the earlier rhetoric had followed a 'ceremonial pattern', which was found by successive generations to be perfectly suited to their tastes in a culture dominated by splendid rituals and by elaborate political pageantries of imperial, royal, and aristocratic rule. But the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation on the one hand, and the rise of the parliamentary government, on the other, tended to expose the uselessness of a merely ceremonial rhetoric and to create a thirst for the religious and political discourses that in content would be fully relevant to the facts of the given situation and in form would be simple and easy to grasp. 10 In no place would both of these factors be more strongly at play than in Scotland, and nowhere therefore was the plain style more universally regarded.

The Extracts
Most of the authors included here were contemporaries, and many were intimate friends or close acquaintances. Francis Hutcheson, who opens this selection, along with Henry Home, Lord Kames, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Reid, and to a lesser extent Adam Smith, have not traditionally been included among rhetoricians.
Hutcheson and Reid are more typically read as philosophers and for their wide influence on the Scottish school. For both of these authors, I have selected texts from their philosophical works that demonstrate the bearing philosophy of mind and philosophy of language have in understanding the rhetorical theory that developed under their influence. Hutcheson especially was in many ways a radical thinker. He succeeded Gershom Carmichael at the University of Glasgow, and was later succeeded by Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. He is therefore of the generation immediately prior to the rest of the authors (with the exception of Alexander Bain), and was an important influence on the philosophical milieu in which they were all educated. In his (1725), he offers the outline of a moral and ethical system that can respond effectively to the egoistical challenge presented by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Hutcheson argues that we have, in addition to the external senses, internal senses, among which is a moral sense, a sense of beauty, and a natural sociability. It is within the internal senses that language arises. Arts, including speech and poetry, are apprehended through our internal moral sense, by which we are stirred to participate in, and judge, the passions conveyed via the apprehension of 'universal goodness, tenderness, humanity, generosity… and our relish in beauty, order, and harmony' or their opposites. 'Upon this moral sense', Hutcheson tells us, 'is founded the power of the orator (Reading I).

Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas Of Beauty and Virtue
The audience needs no knowledge of rhetoric to be moved by it, and thus the ethical burden falls upon the rhetor. Hutcheson's fullest treatment of language is from his System of Moral Philosophy (1755) in which he devotes a chapter to 'Our Duty in the Use of Speech'. In this essay (Reading II) Hutcheson describes the moral sense as directed outward; we are interested in the good of others, we derive pleasure from what is good not just for ourselves but for all. At the essay's outset he summarizes language in the moral economy: 'As the power of communicating to each other our sentiments, desires, and intentions is one of the greatest blessings of the human species, so appropriately joined with our social feelings and affections, nature has also implanted a moral feeling in our hearts to regulate this power' (Reading II). It is from this articulation of the ethical nature of speech, and therefore of learning effective speech, that we see Scottish philosophy making language the central human faculty that mediates between the individual (in his senses and capacities), and society.
Hutcheson is often noted for the fact that he was one of the first professors to teach in English, and consciously used his own rhetorical powers to stir an affective response to his teaching. On many of Scottish rhetoric's later themes and hallmarks, then, Hutcheson may be seen as both precursor and initiator.
Reid takes up these concerns from the perspective of moral philosophy. In the first extract I have chosen for this volume, he explains the basis of the principles of 'common sense', those that may be taken for granted in a philosophy of the mind. To Gerard, the key to aesthetic practice, on two levels (Reading VIII). First, a work of aesthetic value is one in which invention is purposefully deployed in directing the 'choice, disposition, and embellishment of its parts'. Second, our ability to see fitness is a chief source of aesthetic pleasure, and therefore the first concern of criticism.
Taste itself is a kind of sensation that supplies us with simple perceptions entirely distinguishable from all that we receive by external sense or reflection. Thus taste is not sensory, or a pure idea; rather, it exhibits a set of perceptions that result from direct perception. The fitness of associated perceptions to communicate their qualities rouses our sympathy, which 'enlivens' our ideas, converting them to passions and in turn affecting taste. The excerpt from his 'Essay on Taste' included here (Reading IX) describes the relation of taste and genius in specifically rhetorical terms. He incorporates into the eighteenth-century discussion on taste, genius, and imagination the classical link between invention and execution.
This concept of fitness is also developed by Lord Kames. Whereas Gerard is concerned with the epistemology of taste, and its implications for the moral and ethical, Kames's Elements of Criticism is concerned with its practical development.
Kames's position within the rhetorical tradition has been contested, and his Elements have rarely been read as rhetorical theory. 11  approach to language development, the subsequent national and regional emphasis on best use (see Reading IV), and his idea that proper style is not one absolute ideal which conforms perfectly to truth or beauty, but rather is that which is most fitted equally to rhetorical exigency and the character of the author (Reading V). In this respect, Smith's rhetorical theory is consonant with his ethical emphasis on the particular and practical as opposed to the general and speculative, which is also intimately tied to his ideas about sympathy and sentiment. 12 Reading VI provides some of Smith's most critical statements of the speculative bent to practical arts, and it is clear that he sees the practice of rhetoric as opening paragraph declares that the improvement of thought, human reasoning 'is not the effort or ability of one, so much as it is the result of the reason of many, arising from lights mutually communicated, in consequence of discourse and writing'. More than merely staking out the rhetorical arts as a primary human, intellectual, and moral concern, he makes rhetoric and the cultivation of critical faculties for the development and judgment of language the key academic discipline. Blair's assertion that clear speaking and writing produces clear thinking is one that has been largely ignored as an Enlightenment idea-and it remains one still hotly discussed in composition pedagogy. I have chosen his chapter on 'Taste' so that readers may see the continuity and differences of Blair's rather practical explanation of it versus the more conceptual discussions in the previous selections. Blair's shadow loomed large on the teaching of rhetoric in the era that followed his own, and it is an interesting question of pedagogy whether or not later interpreters and teachers of rhetoric emphasized the theoretical, productive, or interpretive rhetorical actions outlined in Blair's lengthy textbook.
One of the factors affecting later interpretations of rhetoric was the nineteenthcentury movement towards the empirical study of cognition and learning. The 'science of man' of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers shifted from the 'science' of a proper epistemology, and philosophically-oriented psychology, to empirical, and often experimental, scientific inquiry into the physical workings of the mind and the emotions. At the forefront of this inquiry was Alexander Bain, founder of the journal Mind and an extremely influential academic educator and educational theorist. Bain's body of work is large, but for the purposes of demonstrating the pedagogical implications of the direction his work gave to Scottish rhetoric I have chosen a selection of one of his rhetorical textbooks.
As noted by Ferriera-Buckley at the outset of this introduction, rhetoric is a slippery term. It must, by its nature, encompass theoretical inquiry, but this is always in tension with its equally natural orientation to practice. To give the contemporary reader a proper understanding of Scottish rhetoric in its eighteenth-century development and articulation, and of its inestimably important influence on both the American university and the twentieth-century evolution of academic disciplines in the humanities, the rhetorical theory must be read alongside the pedagogical practices it inspired. The Scottish philosophy of rhetoric is part of the larger philosophical tradition, and it must be acknowledged that the two bodies of work-the philosophies and the rhetorics-are not synonymous. Nor are the texts synonymous with their interpretations and uses, especially as they were taken up in university instruction overseas. The attention that the present writers give to the philosophical and moral importance of what is circumstantial and specific must be seen in critical juxtaposition to the kind of rhetorical improvement with which Scottish rhetoric is most often credited in modern histories (the speaking of polite and proper English, free of possibly misleading regionalisms). Blair's textbooks (which 'went through sixty-two editions, fifty-one abridgments and ten translations in the century after its publication'), 15 and the legacy of Scottish rhetoric in general, has become in many ways coterminous with the self-improving impulse to use standard English on the part of Scottish and American students. James Berlin argues that when Blair's belles lettres tradition matured in American universities, uniting its attention to taste and literacy with the scientific approach to persuasion and human faculties, it proved the ideal discipline for the 'creation of the professional meritocracy consisting of an emerging middle class in the newly-elective nineteenth century American universities '. 16 Following him, the American Compositionists of this century have made it a point to note in their own histories of rhetoric and composition that 'the source of currenttraditional rhetoric 17 is to be found in Campbell, Blair, and Whately'. 18 This thesis has been readily accepted because of the widespread influence of Scottish Common Sense Realism in America at the time, which, it is assumed, provided appropriate grounds for positivist writing practices. However, this simple picture is complicated by the epistemological preference for local and specific language and its social and ethical ramifications as inductive evidence, the movement from classical languages to English vernacular that the Scottish rhetoricians promoted, and new works written in the Scottish dialects that they sponsored. 19 These are just a few of the dimensions that a new inquiry into Scottish 16 Berlin, p. 8.
17 Current-traditional pedagogy is the turn from rhetorical instruction to 'composition' instruction. It teaches writing from the standpoint of an ideal final product: the essay composed strictly to answer its ends, with close attention to spelling and grammar.
Current-traditional pedagogies teach a definitive 'right' writing final product, which is perfectly attuned to the needs of the audience (as explained in terms of cognitive or psychological science). 18 Ibid. 19 Blair personally sponsored the works of James McPherson and Robert Burns among others.
philosophy and rhetoric in its eighteenth-century context might profitably explore.
This would offer an enhanced historical understanding, as well as providing a novel way of approaching many of the current debates on the practice and politics of language use. The selections offered here uncover many rhetorical issues that are not only still relevant to today's academic and political climate, but still very much alive in discussion, scholarship, and query.

Works Cited
Aristotle The following manuscript examines the methodology of Ramus' separation of logic and dialectic within rhetorical pedagogy, and examines the multiple trajectories of these legacies within eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Scottish and American rhetoric and philosophy of language. Looking at the history of the belles lettres tradition, and its concomitant theorization of "taste," this manuscript complicates the accepted history of bellestric rhetoric as solely the eighteenth-century grounds of "current-traditional rhetoric." It offers a further development in the semiotic method of Charles Sanders Peirce, demonstrating that "taste," in its fully theorized place in Scottish rhetoric and moral sense theory, is a methodological predecessor to Peircean semiosis.

Preface
The following manuscript is a chapter from a volume of collected essays on the work and influence of Petrus Ramus (1515-1572), a sixteenth-century rhetorician, logician, and pedagogical innovator whose influence on early modern education was profound, if little understood or regarded. Written largely in response to the challenges put forward for Walter Ong, SJ., and Mordechai Feingold, the volume from which this chapter is extracted revisits the history of Ramus's influence across many subjects and in many diverse places, offering an interdisciplinary work of Perhaps, if we include both current-traditional rhetoric and pragmatic rhetoric as branches of the Ramistic tree, we may find that his influence, like his method, took on dichotomous overtones among his later disciples.

Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Background and History
The field of Composition and Rhetoric has had multiple and altering historical frameworks, and the past two decades have seen an active re-engagement with the process of defining its history and ideological debts. Within this redefinition, however, there is one historical narrative that has achieved a cohesive stance. Largely unchanged and unchallenged is the idea that the belletristic tradition of reading and … truth in written discourse is conceived in exclusively empirical or rational terms, with persuasion relegated to oral discourse. The writing class is to focus on discourse that deals with the rational faculties: description and narration to be concerned with sense impression and imagination...exposition with setting forth the generalised ideas derived from sense impression and understanding, and argument with understanding leading to conviction. 22 Within this approach rhetoric is a form of criticism, teaching the centrality of transmitting the rational as it communicates reality, with a final pedagogical concern for correctness in speech and writing. Because of its philosophical assumption that there is not only a real world but that it can be communicated, it is a fundamentally epistemologically positivistic form of teaching composition, entirely focused on error correction and universalised literary form. Current-traditional rhetoric, at its most 21 Daniel Fogarty, Roots for a New Rhetoric (New York, 1959). 22 James A. Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985(Carbondale, Illinois, 1987, p. 8. practical, is a method of teaching reading and writing that concerns itself primarily with the mechanics of language use in a manner suited to fulfilling basic skills acquisition in required courses. James Berlin calls it the 'triumph of the scientific and technical world-view' in the writing classroom, which was created within the confines of newly developing elective American universities to address the needs of the emerging meritocracy of American society. 23 As it emulates a scientifically positivist outlook on knowledge, it is also readily amenable to being methodised, with the result that generations of writing courses and textbooks systematically teach writing as a process of error correction and formulaic discourse representing differing modes of communicating reality (exposition, narration, description, etc.) in a methodologically logical manner.
The results of these teaching methods were widely criticised for making compositional teaching the drudge work of academia, for using rhetoric merely as a managerial tool of style and correctness, and for transforming reading and writing into instruments of hierarchical criticism (as good and bad writing can be judged using logical and transferable methods of correctness and conformity). As more sociallyepistemic views of reality and language became widespread, positivism lost its shine, and the American university faced a multicultural and multi-discoursed student body that was not adaptable to a method developed by and for an elite meritocracy.

Rhetoric, Ramus, and the Scottish Common-Sense School
Current-traditional rhetoric is strongly linked, by both its historical predecessors and its pedagogical results, with the practice of objective criticism. As many literary historians have argued, literary criticism as we know it is a descendant of the movement of Belles lettres that originated in Scotland in the eighteenth century, also closely affiliated with the Scottish Common Sense School. 24 Scottish Common Sense Philosophy is one whose eighteenth-century thinkers had as a first premise that the human mind can perceive truths that are self-evident, perceptions that are prior to reason, education or experience, and common to all persons. To a large extent the Scottish Common Sense position arose from Thomas Reid's (1710Reid's ( -1796  and Berkeley. For Reid, the sceptical empiricist's claim that one can't infer the existence of anything else from the impressions and perceptions of one's own mind is utterly unsatisfactory: "upon this hypothesis, the whole universe about me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and relations, all things without exception, which I had imagined to have a permanent existence whether I had imagined them or not, vanisheth at once." 25 What he calls "common sense" falls not into the category of reason, but of "first principals," of which he argues that "the evidence of sense, the evidence of memory, and the evidence of the necessary relations of things, are all distinct and original kinds of evidence, equally grounded in our constitution." 26 Deeply realist, then, the notion of "common sense" formed a position that could account for a world that exists in common whether a human mind acknowledges it or not, but whose existence, principals, and concepts are accessible to all. This philosophy appealed greatly to those in the Scottish universities who were unwilling to accept the implications of scepticism, most particularly upon religious principals. What I am here calling the Scottish Common Sense School are those 18th century thinkers and teachers who used Common Sense philosophy to ground their work in all areas. One of the areas of the greatest success, and longevity, of Common Sense thinking was that of rhetoric. Of the three Common Sense rhetoricians noted above, by far the most influential in the United States was Hugh Blair, whose Rhetoric and Belles lettres alone went through over 50 re-printings, and was still being assigned as a class text as late as 1911. 29 The influence of Blair's profession of Common Sense realism is often used as an indication of his positivistic view of the rhetorical arts, and the subsequent 27 James Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality. 28  … prefers the discursive movement from generalisation to specification; it concentrates on expository discourse; it recommends that the inventional scheme devised for exposition be used in any discursive situation; and it translates invention out of the originating mind and onto the page. In other words, this rhetoric assumes that the process of invention can be graphically displayed in discourse. 44 Clearly there is a profound philosophical and logical relationship between the currenttraditional practice of teaching the arts of language and Ramus' logical method. knowledge rather than its generation,' she argues that it was a later development to find a method that was suited to invention. 45   tells us, 'to Ramus it was not the picture in the mind that was true, but the rule of logic that "ensures that all the precepts displayed…are true,"' 52 which is the formulation of Peircean metaphysics as well. 53 Peirce declares that the method of pragmatic logic 'requires that in reasoning we should be conscious, not only of the conclusion, and of our deliberate approval of it, but also of its being the results of the premise from which it results, and furthermore that the inference is one of a possible class of inferences which conform to one guiding principle.' 54 Here is a flexible methodology, like Ramistic method, based on a logical system that consists of a process of seeing the effects of precepts forward and backward. Peirce's explanation of syllogistic logic thus imitates Ramus closely. 55 The third, or the interpretant in 52 Ibid.,p. 43. 53 Peirce has this to say: 'It is certainly very doubtful whether a conclusion -as something existing in the mind independently, like an image -suddenly displaces two premises existing in the mind in a similar way. But it is a matter of constant act from the conclusion and say that it is true. Something, therefore, takes places within the organism which is equivalent to the syllogistic process.' Charles Sanders Pierce, 'Some Consequences experience, that if a man is made to believe in the premises, in the sense that he will also be ready to of the Four Incapacities', The Essential Peirce,vol. 1, Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Critical Common-Sensism', The Philosophical Writings of Peirce,ed. Buchler,at p. 293. Reference to an interpretant is rendered possible and justified by that which renders possible and justifies comparison. But that is clearly the diversity of impressions. If we had but one impression, it would not require to be reduced to unity, and would therefore not need to be thought of as referred to an interpretant, and the conception of reference to an interpretant would not arise. But since there is a manifold of impressions, we have a feeling of complication or confusion, which leads us to differentiate this impression from that, and then, having been differentiated, they require to be brought to unity. Now they are not brought to unity until we conceive them together as being ours, that is, until we refer them to a conception as their movement of the general to the singular is the philosophical result, or the cause (I am not certain which came first in Ramus' thinking) of his inversion of inventio and dispositio, as he considered it more natural to logic to proceed from the topics of discourse to their arrangement, which also respects the order of hierarchical necessity.

Charles Sanders Peirce and the Scottish Common-Sense
Ramus says that: 'there are two universal, general gifts bestowed upon man, Reason and Speech; dialectic is the theory of the former, grammar and rhetoric of the latter.
Dialectic should therefore draw on the general strengths of human reason in consideration of their subject matter…' 58 Because Ramus gives into dialectic the language arts of invention, arrangement, and memory, he produces in his followers (who used language for truth-telling) a method of objective-truth derivation: language can be used to represent real things, as it is distilled from our logical apprehension of real generals and real specifics. It is precisely this inversion, then, that makes the aim of Ramus' method testing the truth in language, as opposed to the aim in classical rhetoric of finding the probable.
Pragmaticism, however, does deal precisely with the probable. 'It is the reality of some possibilities,' Peirce declares, 'that pragmaticism is most concerned to insist upon.' 59 How can these two logical systems, based as they are on such methodological and epistemological similarity, diverge at this critical juncture? The probable, in Peircean pragmatism, is of absolute importance because the universals Peirce, we move from the general to the specific because everything that is is already in motion, and the phenomena we observe in specifics are already mediations. For Ramus, 'the cause is that by whose force the thing is: and therefore this first place of invention is the fountain of all sciences: for that matter is known perfectly, whose cause is understood.' The cause, therefore, is what pushes a thing to be manifested as it is in the real world, and like Peirce and the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, Ramus argues that language is instantiation of a cause becoming itself as it instantiates its mediation. To all three there are profound moral dimensions to the use of logic and language. Even though dialectic (as it pertains to reason) and speech (as it pertains to rhetoric) are separated in Ramus' logical system, nevertheless even he declares 'in use these should be united, so that the same oration can expound purely, speak ornately, and express thought wisely'. 60 They must be separate, therefore, because to distinguish and make visible is how we learn, not how dialectic and rhetoric manifest in the world, nor how we actually use them.
The significance of the methodological overlap between Peirce and Ramus should not be underestimated, especially in relation to the pedagogical projects that have been produced by Pragmatic rhetoric, which are to a great extent the epistemological and methodological opposites of current-traditional rhetoric. While current-traditional rhetoric, as an offshoot of Ramist influences, created a pedagogy rooted in criticism and 'concerned about the quality of authorial minds' 61 with all of its overtones of elitism and positivism, Pragmatic rhetoric became the bedrock of socially-epistemic rhetorical practice which maintains individuals while accounting for a practice of pluralism.

Ramus, Current-Traditional Rhetoric, and Peircean Pragmaticism: Similarities and Differences
Finally, there are three important areas of interrelationship connecting Peirce to the nexus of Ramus and the Scottish Rhetorics. First, all three, as forms of specifically Christian realism, point to the fact that everything that is, is of a representative nature. Peter Sharrat tells us that Ramus 'adopts the Christian synthesis of neo-Platonism and the gospel...he manages to combine that idea that reality, as we think we know it, is once removed from true reality, and art is twice removed, with the idea that art and philosophy somehow bring out the universals in nature'. 62  And the third similarity is that they all make the specific human faculty of reason, in its capacity to distinguish, the means of logical mediation between nature, self, and society.
An important difference to bear in mind is that Blair's project was in specific response to Empiricism, and is thus distinct from Ramus in its emphasis on emotion and experience in conjunction with the real and the social. Brian Short tells us that Scottish Common Sense rhetoric's 'genius is...for psychologising traditional tropes and giving them a force which transcends not only the canon of style, their classical locus, but the boundary which separates rhetoric from epistemology and moral philosophy'. 63 It is this movement, which privileges a single mind and thus sees texts as the reflection of the working of an authorial mind, that Sharon Crowley argues is the foundation for rhetoric based. However, this which is also expressed in Peirce's triadic dynamism, also accounts for an epistemology and moral philosophy that moves inwards and outwards, incorporating as it judges and mediates-a practice that is at once socially-epistemic and methodologically logical. Realistic method does not, in the end, lead exclusively to scientific positivism with all of the concurrent pitfalls of criticism. If, as Catherine Dunn suggests, Ramus' method were seen as a 'useful tool for demonstration, rather than a science of human reason', then the ideological, philosophic, and historical continuities between Ramus, Scottish Common Sense rhetoric, and Peircean pragmatic method would be united, by virtue of the fact that they all methodise to find truth in a way that assumes a universal method based on a realistic view that is not itself dyadic or positivistic.

Conclusion
What this chapter has shown is that the ideological trajectory from Ramistic method to current traditional rhetoric, via the Scottish Common Sense school, is significantly complicated by the debt that Peircean pragmatic method (and by extension, American pragmatism) owes to Common Sense rhetorical and logical epistemology of language; and the readily visible methodological overlaps in turn between Ramistic and Pragmatic method. All three schools of method share a philosophically realist premise in which logic is specifically oriented to action-in Ramus, to the action of making visible the logical system of invention within language, in Peirce and the Scottish Common Sense thinkers to a final concern for civic and social interaction through one's reflexive mediation of reality through language. The broader philosophical implications of this argument is the re-evaluation of the current assumption that logic, if it is based on a realist premise, necessarily removes rhetoric from any function other than the managerial and perfunctory.
As a final thought, at this juncture in the study of rhetorical theory and history, we might see this observation as a move to the post-critical; and one in which all methods of knowledge-making can be viewed, not as controversial or condemnable lapses into antiquated systems of philosophy, but as useful and inclusive tools to mediated knowing in a mediated world.

Preface
This journal article was expanded from a paper delivered at the Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary, in response to a call for papers examining the "Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Natural Law Tradition in America." The conference was a part of the celebration for the bicentennial of the PTS, and my paper won the "George Elder Davies Prize for Best Graduate Paper." I was informed by the conference organizer that my paper won because the peer-reviewers agreed that among the submissions it best pointed out genuinely new directions for philosophical inquiry within the field. Rhetorical theory and its relationship to the philosophical tradition is a lesser-studied branch of Scottish philosophy, and this paper approaches the "natural law" tradition from the rhetorical standpoint. Perhaps more than the other two manuscripts included in this dissertation, this manuscript represents more the promise of new angles of inquiry than a fully elaborated argument. Its close reading of the rhetorical texts for the re-interpretation of their epistemological foundations is certainly unusual in traditional criticism of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and demonstrates the advantages of interdisciplinary study and methodological background in English literature and Rhetoric and Composition.

TEXT
The philosophical heritage of Scottish rhetoric has been in a contested state for some time. Some, such as Janice Lauer, claim that 'its purpose was not to investigate or create, but rather to organize and present arguments through moral reasoning and empirical evidence. reasoning -is recursive, and therefore progressive; relational, therefore social in its inception and product; natural, thus subject to universal laws; and finally, perhaps most importantly of all, is inherently a method, or praxis of inquiry and knowing. I suggest broadly that their rhetorical method, far from being a historical phenomenon limited to its historical contexts, may be more useful if seen as philosophical praxis that can be examined by its philosophical, pedagogical, and conceptual productions.
These productions are multiple, often contradictory to one another, and continue to the present day. Further, the rhetorical theory presented in this reading of Hume, Campbell, Blair, and Bain clearly articulates the juncture between moral education, civil and civic conversation, personal and public virtue, and the means of creating the kinds of moral consensus necessary to religiously plural societies.
First it must be noted that the outcomes or possibilities of Scottish rhetoric's facilitative roles in moral consensus are historically seen far later than the Enlightenment and Victorian time periods that produced them. It is beyond the scope of this paper to do more than point to the conceptual frames at work in the rhetorical theories; further work would be needed to outline their linkages to latter inceptions of religious and moral pluralities. 3 The arguable claim here is that Scottish rhetoric conceptually anticipated the need to address a secular or religiously plural state. Stated conversely, in Scottish rhetoric was found a serviceable way to address this need as it did arise. 4 The Scottish Common Sense rhetorical project offers a keen reinterpretation of and Lloyd Bitzer's evaluation that, appropriating Hume, George Campbell's art of rhetoric is making language use best resemble sense impression. 6 Hume's own theories of rhetoric are grounded in his philosophy of the mind, as he wrote surprisingly very little explicitly on a co-extensive philosophy of language or rhetorical theory. 7 It has been argued that George Campbell's work is as close as one may come to extrapolating Hume's philosophy of mind into a coherent rhetorical theory. 8 Hume, of course, placed judgment and persuasion in the arena of the understanding: the faculty of probable, or inductive, reasoning. Reason, on the contrary, is the realm of the direct, intuitive, and demonstrable. In a Humean system, therefore, rhetoric is not needed in the deductive reasoning processes, or any area of knowledge that is strictly logical (such as mathematics). This is in direct opposition to the Ramistic rhetorical systems, in which rhetoric is seen as precisely the tool for communicating, in the most logical manner, that what is logical. For Hume, Smith, Campbell, and Blair, rhetoric is returned to the art of the probable. 9 The probable is also a central concept in Hume's epistemology, and more importantly, in his idea of the social and moral. After all, dictated by the probable, custom is the 'great guide of human life' and 'all inferences from experience, therefore, are the effects of custom, not of reasoning.' 10 In the mental process, the ability to create the conditions of connection (resemblance, contiguity, and causation) are passionate (and sympathetic, in instances of communication) processes first and foremost. These alone inspire belief and motivate action. For Hume, judgment and belief arise from customary associations of lively impressions that produce a strong feeling in the mind -as opposed to perceptions of actual causality, faculties of sentiment are the motor of understanding.
Hanvelt points out that for Hume rhetoric is therefore the art of making lively and vivid resemblances in order to induce belief, for 'ratiocination' and impression, or imagery, are basically one in the same. 11 Rhetoric for Hume is thus a moral art for the discovery of belief and motivation based upon the probable, not a logical art for the discovery of truth or falsehood based upon the reasonable.
George Campbell is happy to employ many, if not most, of these ideas in his philosophy of rhetoric. 12  He continues to elaborate the relationship between language and the human faculties: 'this study, properly conducted, leads directly to an acquaintance with ourselves: it not only traces the operations of the intellect and imagination, but discloses the lurking springs of action in the heart.' 17 The science of language, therefore, is the science of the mind; deeper yet than the mind, it is the science of volition. Further, its method of knowing the mind is one of deduction from the close observance of language already in use. Campbell breaks this down into four steps, clearly announcing the fourth step as the place where his philosophy of rhetoric breaks with the old rhetorical traditions and offers something new. The first step in the 'attainment of this art' is to observe the 'practical experience of mankind, which individuals, even in their rudest state, are capable of acquiring' (that is, there is no human society or individual in which language is not operating at some level). The second is the beginning of the 'critical science' of observing which modes of speech and argument are employed for the 'purposes of explaining, convincing, pleasing, moving, and persuading'; the third is to compare the effects, taking in circumstantial evidences. The fourth is to 'canvass those principals in our nature to which the various attempts are adapted, and by which, in any instance, their success or want of success may be accounted for'. This fourth and last step, he tells us, 'may be said to bring us into a new country, of which, though there have been some successful incursions occasionally made upon its frontiers, we are not yet in full possession.' 18 While it may seem that the entire art of rhetoric is contained within steps one through three, the intervention of step four is to define the art of rhetoric as epistemic. In order to understand how to effectively use language, Campbell contends that one must understand how language use operates upon those 'principals in our nature' by which we understand, are pleased, are moved, are persuaded, and act.
Alternatively, it could be said that in order to understand the principals of our nature, we may look to acquiring the arts of rhetoric. Language use, in Campbell's estimation, does not serve to find the best ways to resemble sense impressions, as Hume indicates, nor does it offer tools to manipulate other minds through impressions, as sophistic rhetoric uses knowledge of the audience. Rather, it is both the form and the method of inquiring how the mind operates, as the means to directing operations of the mind. This is consonant with Reid's contention that knowledge is not certain because it is infinite and our faculties finite: in Campbell's scheme, rhetoric is safeguarded from the charge of sophism by the education of both the rhetor and the audience. All of the participants within a civil discourse should, to varying degrees, have the opportunity to learn the rhetorical arts, which coincides also with the formation of taste. And, of course, these means must be properly guarded by Christian virtues. Therefore, using and knowing human circumstances in conjunction with a 'science of the mind' is not a stable and permanent body of knowledge; rather it is a finite and fallible practice in which the listener and speaker have equal roles.
Campbell makes his reunion of logic and eloquence plain in Chapter IV: 'eloquence,' he states, considers 'not only the subject, but also the speaker and the hearers, and both the subject and the speaker for the sake of the hearers, or rather for the sake of the effect intended to be produced in them.' Because of this, it unites an equal concern for truth and its effects. Logic is to rhetoric what the soul is to the body, what sense is to expression, that is, the animating principal. 19 Grammar is the purely contextual managerial art; eloquence, in its fullest capacity, is the dynamic, flexible method of uniting sense to expression: via a science of the mind and a science of analyzing and using context. 'Now', Campbell explains, if it be by the sense or soul of the discourse that rhetoric holds of logic, or the art of thinking and reasoning, it by the expression or body of the discourse that she holds of grammar, or the art of conveying our thoughts in words of a particular language . . .
The art of the logician is accordingly, in some sense, universal; the art of the grammarian is always particular and local. 20 But he has already established that this art of the logician is the art of thinking and reasoning and that this is not through inductive operations of the mind apart from sense but rather through the inductive process of seeing how the mind is already working by observing its uses (in language). The realist concept of rhetoric which emerges sees a universal, natural, common sense understanding of language use as refracting the use of language in the mind's coming to know. It is a circular but not a closed process, 21 as the application (and similarly the inquiry, as it also is in language) is always through the infinite variety of the particular, local and contingent.
The purpose of the language faculty in the Common Sense rhetorical vision is moral and social: Reality or fact comprehends the laws and the works of nature, as well as the arts and institutions of men . . . by the first, we must acknowledge, when applied to things, and combined with the second, our researches into nature in a certain line are facilitated, the understanding is enlightened, and many of the arts, both elegant and useful, are improved and perfected. Without the aid of the second, society must not only suffer but also perish. Human nature itself could not subsist. 22 This practice of inquiry is also recursive: that is, it informs, perfects, and corrects both the faculties and their result as it operates for the purpose of both knowing in the first place and in the second using knowledge for the creation and betterment of the social and inter-relational realm. Hugh Blair develops and explains this as the rhetorical cultivation of taste.
Blair is most interested in how one uses rhetorical arts for the cultivation of taste as through this cultivation society can achieve moral understanding. He outlines his philosophy of language in the introduction to Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles lettres thus: Speech is the great instrument by which man becomes beneficial to man: and it is to the intercourse and transmission of thought, by means of speech, that we are chiefly indebted for the improvement of thought itself. Small are the advances which a single unassisted individual can make towards perfecting any of his powers. What we call human reason, is not the effort or ability of one, so much as it is the result of the reason of many, arising from lights mutually communicated, in consequence of discourse and writing. 23 In Blair's particular and poetic explanation, taste and language are transactional, as by their practice they move between the individual's innate faculties and capacities and the discourse, and therefore taste, of others. Blair makes very clear that like Campbell he places experience as the basis of this dynamic, and rules out a priori principles or deduction -'The rules of criticism are not formed by any induction a priori, they are not formed by a train of abstract reasoning, independent of facts and observations.' 24 But he also believed that the social episteme of taste was indeed from the given and universally shared foundation of human nature as created by God. Eloquence and taste are the reflexive tools that we use to access our universal love of the good and beautiful: 'In every composition, what interests the imagination and touches the heart pleases all ages and nations. There is a certain string, to which, when struck, the human heart is so made as to answer.' 25 Thus the problem, and possibility, of rhetoric increases its power as an ethical project in that it moves from the being only the vehicle of social and personal improvement to being the very context through which we create knowledge and experience truth.
When Blair declares that reason itself is the consequence of discourse and writing, he gives a profound grounding to the necessity of educating the faculties of taste, that is, the capacity to be moved. Reason, while socially epistemic in Blair's conceptualization, is not therefore dependent entirely on the whim and winds of social convention as it is made to respond to what is universally true. However, the filterthe transactional, relational parts in the mind and heart that mediate between the universal and the individual -is the faculty of taste, which is developed and cultivated through language use, and therefore is subject to social convention. The creation of social conventions through shared taste and language practice is an essential element of moral life.
From Campbell we get a clear picture of how the Common Sense Philosophy of Rhetoric diverges from previous theories of language, in its realist and methodological orientation; from Blair we see even more acutely how recursively social its foundation and its uses are. From Alexander Bain, 26 we get a decisive philosophical articulation of the limitations of language, relative to its function in rationality. Bain's underlying philosophy of language is very pragmatic, or, more fittingly, pragmaticist: he states that language is fundamentally limited by that fact that a word and a concept exist only in relationships that language has to allude to or assume. He calls this the 'essential doubleness of knowledge, disguised by the forms of language.' 27 By doubleness he is referring to 'the fact that our mind works by contrast', 28 so Bain specifically refers to the rhetorical tool of antithesis -but doubleness just as well refers to the plurality of knowledge, to which he also refers.
Bain, like Campbell and Blair, considers that rhetoric, as 'knowledge of the persons addressed', 29 requires a complete 'systematic scheme of man's nature.' 30 He is also very lucid in elaborating the social-episteme of this knowledge. He delineates the tools of the rhetor as 'the practical maxims acquired by men in the course of their education and experience, their principles of action, or rules of procedure trusted for gaining their ends, individual or social; these are the data of the orator, his medium of persuasion, the major premises of his reasonings.' 31 This theory of rhetoric is deeply embedded in the contextual nature of human relations, and, more than an art applying itself to man, it is to a real degree the art of man, combining as it does 'all the arts of strengthening or of loosening the bonds that cement ideas in the mind. 32 For Bain, the 'essential plurality of knowledge' 33 that he describes as the multiple and possibility infinite connections each person makes in their processes of knowing -occurring through distinction and contrast-cannot be represented in language. It is the essence of the art of rhetoric to find ways of creating in hearers the processes of knowing.
For the Scottish Common Sense rhetors, the project of understanding, applying, and teaching rhetoric was one and the same as the project of common sense: more than an extension of common sense philosophical principals, it is the practice of these principles. And it is moral practice, as it is directed at every stage toward creating our capacity as we understand and use that capacity. Its uniquely empirical realism accounts for a universal in the nature of humanity: we are universal language users, we deduce from our language use the way the mind operates. Further, we can deduce the ways we operate socially from the ways we can act upon one another through language. The mere fact of these natural functions is not enough to direct their usage in natural ways: because they only operate contextually (there is no language without a grammar, for instance), we must be educated to analyze and understand the contexts in order to use the function, as we ourselves are within those contexts. There is no removal or abstraction from the fundamental reality of relationships, of contexts, of being within a dynamic. This human science of rhetoric is a unique marriage of the changeable and the same, and of the inductive and the deductive. Of course, for Campbell and Blair (less so for Bain and Hume) there is a final grounding in the ontology of being as Creation. However, its method requires no revelation to be either known or used. Its science is operationally secular, in the sense that, other than a warrant in the Creator, it refers to nothing outside of the nature of man as observed in and through his natural contexts.
Thomas Reid taught a special '12 o'clock class' at Glasgow University, a class, Peter Diamond tells us, which was 'devoted to the practical application of philosophy.' 34 It is not a quaint eighteenth-century archaism that this instruction often turned to 'eloquence'. 35 I argue that rhetorical practice, in fact, is precisely the practical application of Reid's philosophy, which is one reason the Common Sense school produced the multiple rhetorical textbooks successfully and extensively used throughout the English-speaking world for the next two hundred years.
Campbell tells us that, 'On the most sublime of all sciences, theology and ethics, is built the most important of all arts, the art of living' (Campbell 1776: lix).
Reid's idea of common sense, by his own admission, must be come to by the practice of virtue, as the 'power of reflection', while a natural power, only comes through development into maturity, and 'to acquire this habit, is a work of time and labour'. 36 He appeals to ordinary language and to attention to language altogether as the proper first subject of deductive observation. Campbell's correlation of language and the workings of the mind directly follow Reid's analysis in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. 37 Thus, of the first objects upon which to exercise the powers of reflection, language, like man's other faculties, is found in an already working and dynamic state. Therefore, the study of language exercises both the habits of reflection and the practice of the art of living, once again, in a dynamic recursive relationshipthey perfect as they inform one another. Virtue, in this knowledge economy, is also a recursive function that acts as both the beginning and end of the process, but it must be cultivated, practiced, reflected upon, learned. Like language, virtue is an action (even of attitude), oriented equally towards using and perfecting inner faculties and towards the social and outward effects.
The epistemic nature of language to reason in the Scottish Common Sense philosophy of language rests on the belief that they share with Hume in the centrality of emotion, feeling and sentiment in the processes of judgment. The strong emphasis on Eloquence, in both the philosophical systems and in the public teaching practices of Francis Hutcheson, Smith, Reid, and Blair, indicates clearly the essential importance of the language arts in the training of sentiment and sympathy and all that those terms invoke within their philosophical systems. Unlike Hume, however, the Common Sense thinkers distinguish between the means of knowing and what can be known -the rhetorical means to socially constructed knowledge: the creation of belief, and the structures of civil and personal customs of association, does not obviate the fact that truths do exist, even if we only know them through probable, finite, and imperfect means. 38 There is no final skeptical conclusion in the Common Sense rhetorical vision, only an explanation of how, and why, our conclusions are always conditional and fallible (and therefore, like in the Humean system, open to revision and expansion).
The history of the impact of the Common Sense rhetoric is perhaps inestimable. Whether or not citizens of English speaking countries went on to pursue higher educations and philosophical speculations, the rhetorical textbooks were used widely enough to have reached almost every educated person of several generations, informing and codifying language practices. But this had its drawbacks. As the century passed the dynamic rhetorical theory and language philosophy that informed these texts was lost in what became the prescriptive nature of rhetorical studies: the five paragraph essay, the positivist critical practices, the overwhelming attention to stylistic markers of taste and class. Scottish Common Sense Rhetoric, because of its realist orientation to universal truths, became the source of what is now called 'currenttraditional rhetoric,' 39 the teaching of language as an objective sign system. This, considered alongside Blair's later reputation for crafting a project of 'taste' that resulted in an oligarchy of taste-makers, and the reputation of Scottish rhetoric, by the late twentieth century, was dismal and canonical.
There is another trajectory of Common Sense language theory, however, founded in the work of C.S. Peirce. I would argue that these two conceptual trajectories could not be farther apart, although they share a foundation. Peirce, who credits his childhood turn to philosophy to reading Richard Whately, and late in life admits that he never shook his love for the 'old Scots', 40 created the method of 'realist pragmatism' via his concept of a triadic semiotic, which is nothing if not a recasting of rhetorical theory. His methods of abduction and semiotisis share Scottish rhetorics' concern for both inner virtue and social morals; his 'speculative rhetoric' shares its epistemological project. James Jacob Lizka reminds us that Peirce joins truth and inquiry: 'by true is meant at that which inquiry aims', and that 'taken in these terms, formal rhetoric becomes the study of how to best adapt inquiry to achieve truth. ' 41 Much could be said regarding Peirce's 'speculative rhetoric' of 'pragmaticism', and how in the hands of his students and contemporaries, it became the American pragmatic school best known for its Progressive education (via Dewey) and its theory of pragmatic liberalism in politics. Suffice to comment that the legacies of Dewey's progressivism couldn't be further from the positivist language teaching credited to Common Sense rhetoric by Rhetoric and Composition studies today. 42 Thus in America, on the one hand Scottish rhetoric produced a body of language use and teaching that was almost purely positivist in its outlook and methods; on the other hand it produced a body of language use and praxis that was purely pluralist and social-constructivist. This, I believe, speaks to its complicated realism, and use of what might very tentatively be called a 'Protestant natural law' philosophy of language.
While hardly a novel claim, the hinge for interpreting Scottish rhetoric has its focus on the project of virtue, or moral betterment of civil society. In the work of Campbell, Blair, and Bain, the reinstatement of 'inventio' through the union of logic and eloquence in the Common Sense epistemology results in a coherent theory of how our language use refracts our faculties and capacities.
It is profoundly relational, from its internal relation of faculties to one another and the outside world, to the outside world's infinitude of relationships. By Scottish rhetoric's recursive art of knowing ourselves through knowing our audience, it premises not unfaltering principals of rhetorical knowing, but a method of praxis/a practice of inquiry.
As a method, the Scottish rhetoric utilizes two conceptual frameworks, which each inform knowledge of the other: 1) the historical, cultural, and local nexus of practices and ideas in language, and 2) a concept of a natural and universal law.
This practice, from Reid onward, converges on the teaching of eloquence, for the first inherent reason that our faculties of knowing must be facilitated through this practice, and for the second that our faculties of knowing effect and affect the premises for discourse, and thus, the substance and context of civil life. Scottish philosophy saw, as did the classical writers they admired, that the rhetorical arts create the social order. But unlike other moments of civil society, the Scots had to address the new order of a religiously fractured state. While Scottish society was profoundly Christian, the doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and theological practices of the Scottish Protestant traditions of Christianity were contested (although not with as much genuine difference as in America, England, or Continental Europe). The Scottish rhetors were champions of religious tolerance in their own society, and they developed a system that, because of its realist orientation, could sustain and work in a reasonably uncommitted external way. The entire project of the art of rhetoric is to find and form a basis of moral consensus using a flexible method of inquiry.
Pluralistic societies require just such a tool, which the Scottish Enlightenment assessed. The challenge, says Donald J. Wolf, S.J., (writing in the 1960s), is to 'form a moral consensus in a society which is, and will remain, pluralist.' 43 Current theories of pluralism confront questions posed by societies in which moral differences run so counter that it is difficult, if not impossible, to find genuine consensus, and the resulting rhetoric and discourse is failed and hollow. We very often see politics as sophism at its worst, and yet, 'democratic societies that are fully committed to freedom of religion have decided there are certain norms and values so fundamental to human existence and so deeply held that religion cannot be used as a basis for their violation.' 44 There must be moral consensus on recurring levels, and this must happen through citizens who exercise internalized habits of mind through and within civil discourse. This is what Wolf calls 'an attitude about the conditions of cooperation ', 45 and what Alistair MacIntyre terms 'tradition-transcendent rationality.' 46 What I suggest here is that the Scottish Common Sense school offered a deeply theorized method of inquiry in the form of their Common Sense realist rhetorics in answer to this need in their modern pluralist democracy. This method, I further hypothesize, is a crucial moment in the history of Protestant natural law. It converges with Thomistic natural law theory in that theory's three-fold assertion: 1) natural law is a 'living response of reflective intellects of any age to the implications of human experience,' 2) 'the structure of the being which acts determines the structure of the being's activity, and therefore this activity develops, fulfills, and perfects being,' 3) that 'because man is an intelligent and free creature, the natural law for man is a moral law, that is, a law which he discerns and freely accepts or rejects'. 47 It diverges from the Thomistic model in that it keeps a very strong break between nature and revelation, in that it is a tool for the discernment of the moral law and can operate freely and flexibly in a religiously plural environment. It may be rightly part of the Protestant tradition at the very least in that it harnesses exigencies of Protestant Christianity to form a new Looking at the heritage of Scottish rhetoric in this way adds yet another dimension to its complicated trajectories. This points to a final concluding remark on the tensions that are always at work between theory and practice, and the possibilities that this tension affords to Scottish philosophy, if the case of the Scottish rhetoric is examined as its deeply theorized practical development.