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rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic. both alike are concerned
with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of
all men and belong to no definite science. accordingly all men make
use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt
to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and
to attack others. ordinary people do this either at random or through
practice and from acquired habit. both ways being possible, the subject
can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire
the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously;
and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function
now, the framers of the current treatises on rhetoric have constructed
but a small portion of that art. the modes of persuasion are the only
true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory.
these writers, however, say nothing about enthymemes, which are the
substance of rhetorical persuasion, but deal mainly with non-essentials.
the arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing
to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to
the man who is judging the case. consequently if the rules for trials
which are now laid down some states-especially in well-governed states-were
applied everywhere, such people would have nothing to say. all men,
no doubt, think that the laws should prescribe such rules, but some,
as in the court of areopagus, give practical effect to their thoughts
and forbid talk about non-essentials. this is sound law and custom.
it is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy
or pity-one might as well warp a carpenter's rule before using it.
again, a litigant has clearly nothing to do but to show that the alleged
fact is so or is not so, that it has or has not happened. as to whether
a thing is important or unimportant, just or unjust, the judge must
surely refuse to take his instructions from the litigants: he must
decide for himself all such points as the law-giver has not already
now, it is of great moment that well-drawn laws should themselves
define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as may be
to the decision of the judges; and this for several reasons. first,
to find one man, or a few men, who are sensible persons and capable
of legislating and administering justice is easier than to find a
large number. next, laws are made after long consideration, whereas
decisions in the courts are given at short notice, which makes it
hard for those who try the case to satisfy the claims of justice and
expediency. the weightiest reason of all is that the decision of the
lawgiver is not particular but prospective and general, whereas members
of the assembly and the jury find it their duty to decide on definite
cases brought before them. they will often have allowed themselves
to be so much influenced by feelings of friendship or hatred or self-interest
that they lose any clear vision of the truth and have their judgement
obscured by considerations of personal pleasure or pain. in general,
then, the judge should, we say, be allowed to decide as few things
as possible. but questions as to whether something has happened or
has not happened, will be or will not be, is or is not, must of necessity
be left to the judge, since the lawgiver cannot foresee them. if this
is so, it is evident that any one who lays down rules about other
matters, such as what must be the contents of the 'introduction' or
the 'narration' or any of the other divisions of a speech, is theorizing
about non-essentials as if they belonged to the art. the only question
with which these writers here deal is how to put the judge into a
given frame of mind. about the orator's proper modes of persuasion
they have nothing to tell us; nothing, that is, about how to gain
hence it comes that, although the same systematic principles apply
to political as to forensic oratory, and although the former is a
nobler business, and fitter for a citizen, than that which concerns
the relations of private individuals, these authors say nothing about
political oratory, but try, one and all, to write treatises on the
way to plead in court. the reason for this is that in political oratory
there is less inducement to talk about nonessentials. political oratory
is less given to unscrupulous practices than forensic, because it
treats of wider issues. in a political debate the man who is forming
a judgement is making a decision about his own vital interests. there
is no need, therefore, to prove anything except that the facts are
what the supporter of a measure maintains they are. in forensic oratory
this is not enough; to conciliate the listener is what pays here.
it is other people's affairs that are to be decided, so that the judges,
intent on their own satisfaction and listening with partiality, surrender
themselves to the disputants instead of judging between them. hence
in many places, as we have said already, irrelevant speaking is forbidden
in the law-courts: in the public assembly those who have to form a
judgement are themselves well able to guard against that.
it is clear, then, that rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is
concerned with the modes of persuasion. persuasion is clearly a sort
of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider
a thing to have been demonstrated. the orator's demonstration is an
enthymeme, and this is, in general, the most effective of the modes
of persuasion. the enthymeme is a sort of syllogism, and the consideration
of syllogisms of all kinds, without distinction, is the business of
dialectic, either of dialectic as a whole or of one of its branches.
it follows plainly, therefore, that he who is best able to see how
and from what elements a syllogism is produced will also be best skilled
in the enthymeme, when he has further learnt what its subject-matter
is and in what respects it differs from the syllogism of strict logic.
the true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty;
it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for
what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. hence the man who
makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.
it has now been shown that the ordinary writers on rhetoric treat
of non-essentials; it has also been shown why they have inclined more
rhetoric is useful (1) because things that are true and things that
are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites,
so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be,
the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be
blamed accordingly. moreover, (2) before some audiences not even the
possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we
say to produce conviction. for argument based on knowledge implies

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MicroJulia Training Data

Character-level training corpus for MicroJulia, a minimal GPT built in pure Julia with scalar autograd.

Sources (ordered, not shuffled)

Aristotle - Rhetoric (5,478 chunks) — MIT Classics
Euclid - The Elements (3,009 chunks) — Project Gutenberg

Vocabulary

48 characters: a-z, 0-9, space, and punctuation (.,;:!?'"-()') Plus BOS token = 49 vocab total.

Format

One chunk per line in , max 256 chars each, split at sentence boundaries.

Usage

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