Grounds of assent in Joseph Priestley's A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 81-109

  George, Ann L ^a  

^a TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 61949085506     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1998.16.1.81     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Vincent M. Bevilacqua and Richard Murphy, Editors' Introduction, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, by Joseph Priestley (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965) p. xiv.
2. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) p. 641.
3. For a full discussion of Priestley's contemporary political importance, see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Kramnick notes that Priestley was considered by his contemporaries as the leading radical intellectual of his day. He also reports Samuel Johnson's supposed railing, "Ah Priestley, an evil man, Sir. His work unsettles everything" and Edmund Burke's reaponse to Priestley's activism against Parliament in the 1780s, "If I must, my choice is made. I will rather have George III or IV than Dr. Priestley" (73-4). Within rhetorical circles, George Campbell, for instance, considered Priestley important enough to argue with over common sense and to cite regularly in his section on usage.
4. Vincent M. Bevilacqua, "Philosophical Influences in the Development of English Rhetorical Theory: 1748-1783", Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, 12 (1968): 191-215. I consider Bevilacqua's article further in the conclusion.
5. Thomas P. Miller, "Where Did College English Studies Come From?" Rhetoric Review 9 (1990): 52.
6. Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, p. 45.
7. Priestley uses the term "oratory" to denote argumentative discourse, oral or written; the word "rhetoric" does not appear in the text. Priestley's choice of the word "oratory" is unusual (Campbell, Blair, and Smith all use "rhetoric") and quite puzzling given his obvious attempts to distance his theory from certain aspects of the classical tradition. In this essay, I use the terms "oratory," "argumentation," and "rhetoric" interchangeably.
8. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777) p. iv. Subsequent references will be incorporated in the text.
9. Joseph Priestley, An Autobiography of Joseph Priestley: Memoirs Written by Himself, ed. Jack Lindsay (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970) p. 76.
10. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (New York: Garland, 1971) p. 65.
11. Jack Lindsay, Introduction to Joseph Priestley, An Autobiography, p. 33.
12. Hartley, Observations on Man, p. 368.
13. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, Priestley's utilitarianism would be a productive area for study. His notions of utility drive much of his educational reform (see, for instance, An Essay on the Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life);
14. as he shows in the preface to the Lectures, in fact, utility is the key guide to society's perfectibility. Priestley writes in An Essay on First Principles that "the good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined" (p. 17).
15. Watts reports that Jeremy Bentham says his own ideas on utility derived from reading this passage in Priestley (p. 478).
16. Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (New York: Garland, 1976) pp. viii-ix.
17. Priestley addresses this topic in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, in A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (published letters between Priestley and Richard Price)
18. and in An Examination.
19. Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, pp. 153-54.
20. Lindsay, Introduction, p. 40.
21. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government; And on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (Dublin, 1768) pp. 18-19.
22. Joseph Priestley, "Reflections on the Present State of Free Inquiry in This Country" (1785), in Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, Sermons (London, 1800) pp. 100-01.
23. Michael Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) pp. 228-35, 244-60. Watts notes that the Corporation Act carried a double penalty because by-laws required those elected to office to serve or else pay a substantial fine. Scores of Dissenters were deliberately elected, then fined if they refused to take the Anglican sacrament in order to serve, enabling corporations to collect thousands of pounds before the practice was ended in 1767 (pp. 223-24, 484).
24. Watts, The Dissenters, p. 266.
25. Joseph Priestley, An Address to Protestant Dissenters of all Denominations, On the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament, with Respect to the State of Public Liberty in General, and of American Affairs in Particular (London, 1774) pp. 3-4.
26. Priestley, Address to Protestant Dissenters, p. 10.
27. Kramnick notes, interestingly, that England's first children's books were written chiefly by Dissenters (among them Sarah Trimmer, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Barbauld, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Day) and that these books were ideologically laden, as exemplified in the popular The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) pp. 106-32.
28. Priestley, An Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Dr. Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr. Oswald's Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion (New York: Garland, 1978) p. xiii. Subsequent references will be incorporated into the text. Lindsay reports that Priestley corresponded with Hartley in 1755 about applying his ideas to education; Hartley was interested enough to offer Priestley help publishing such work, but Hartley died before anything could come of this project (p. 14).
29. Priestley's work, for example, was subsidized by John Wilkinson (his brotherin-law) and Josiah Wedgwood; they paid for much of the laboratory equipment he and his students used at Warrington and, in return, Priestley offered practical inventions and advice. Other Dissenting educators who were supported by industrialists included Richard Price, Erasmus Darwin, William Shipley, and Philip Doddridge. See Kramnick for a thorough discussion of the ties between scientific and industrial innovation in bourgeois ideology, particularly as they come together in the Dissenting academy.
30. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London, 1765) p. iii.
31. Priestley, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education, p. 11.
32. Miller, "Where did English Studies Come From?" p. 55.
33. Priestley, An Autobiography, p. 76.
34. Lindsay, Introduction to Joseph Priestley, An Autobiography, p. 15.
35. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963) p. xliii. Subsequent page references will be incorporated into the text.
36. Hence, the importance for Campbell of such concepts as vivacity and sympathy, which become the prime means by which writers can appeal to the audience's passions. For fuller explanation, see Paul Bator's "The 'Principle of Sympathy' in Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric", Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): pp. 418-24.
37. Readers interested in Campbell should also consult Howard Lewis Ulman, Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).
38. In a later section, Campbell presents a somewhat different version of the persuasive process in which the passions and the imagination are reason's "handmaids, by whose ministry she is enabled to usher truth into the heart, and procure it there a favourable reception" (p. 72). In this version, Campbell and Priestley offer similar views of the relative status of me faculties - the passions and the imagination serve reason. However, their different emphases on feeling and reason are still quite apparent: for Campbell, the handmaids lead truth to the heart; for Priestley, truth heads for the judgment.
39. Priestley, Essay on the First Principles, pp. viii-ix.
40. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, cit. in n.2 above, p. 642.
41. Adam Smith, for instance, maintains that "the Didactical method, though undoubtedly best in all matters of science, is hardly ever applicable to rhetorical discourses. The people to which [sic] they are ordinarily directed have no pleasure in these abstruse deductions. The interest, and practicability, and honourableness of the thing recommended, is what alone will sway with them, and is seldom to be shown in a long deduction of arguments" (p. 140). In the following lecture on deliberative oratory, Smith remarks that since arguments in these orations must be so simplified to suit the audience, "there can be no great nicety required in the arrangement" p. 142, Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963.) In "Philosophical Influences," Bevilacqua notes that there is precedent for the rhetorical uses of geometric form in the work of the Port-Royalists.
42. The footnote appears on pp. 38-9 of Campbell. Bevilacqua argues convincingly that Campbell's confusion is feigned, an attempt to obfuscate what Campbell realizes is a serious attack on his own work which is based on common sense philosophy. See "Campbell, Priestley, and the Controversy Concerning Common Sense", Southern Speech Journal 30 (1964): 79-98.
43. James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (Edinburgh, 1772) p. 48.
44. Priestley, An Address to Protestant Dissenters, p. 5.
45. Because he had seen Beattie and especially Oswald use common sense to ground specific religious doctrines, Priestley had little reason to believe that it would not be used in the more overtly political realm. The consequences of such a theory of evidence were only too clear to Priestley: "politicians also...may venture once more to thunder out upon us their exploded doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. For having now nothing to fear from the powers of reason, and being encouraged by the example of grave divines and metaphysicians, they may venture to assert their favourite maxims with the greatest confidence; appealing at once to this ultimate tribunal of common sense, and giving out their own mandates as the decisions of this new tribunal" (An Examination, pp. 200-01).
46. Beattie, An Essay on the Nature...of Truth, p. 45. This phrase comes from one of his explanations of common sense.
47. Priestley's idea of vividness parallels Campbell's idea of "vivacity," which Bevilacqua believes both men drew directly from Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism (Introduction, pp. xl-xli).
48. The entire passage reads, "The tendency of strong emotions and passions to generate belief may help to throw light upon several things which occur upon the subject of criticism, and works of taste and genius" (Lectures, p. 89). It may be possible to argue, therefore, that Priestley is referring here to the use of passions in belletristic rather than argumentative discourse. Indeed, in his opening lecture on criticism, he states that "an enumeration of the stronger passions of the human mind, which are roused by the powers of oratory,... I regard as foreign to my undertaking to attempt" (p. 73), and his examples in the lecture in which the quoted passage appears are taken entirely from poetry and fiction. Nevertheless, Priestley often blurs the distinction he has set up between oratory and belletristic discourse, using examples from Classical oratory and giving advice on effective religious arguments in the lectures on criticism. In addition, since Priestley claims to be examining "some critical situations of mind respecting the passions and emotions in general" (p. 73) and since he explains effects on the passions through associational psychology, it seems reasonable to conclude that language works the same in all types of discourse - vivid language will move the passions in a poem in the same manner as in an argument. It would be interesting to speculate why Priestley thinks that discussion of the rhetorical effects of the passions is "foreign" to his course, preferring instead to "describe those finer feelings which constitute the pleasures of the imagination" (p. 73) to which the overwhelming majority of his criticism lectures are devoted.
49. Bevilacqua, Introduction, p. xxxix.
50. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is a perfect example of the troubling consequences of associational psychology. Explicitly drawing on Locke's explanation of associationism, Sterne shows how it can destroy linear thought and result in the complete breakdown of communication when words evoke quite different associations in the minds of speaker and listener.
51. It is telling to note, however, that Priestley drops out of parts of the article, most notably the sections on common sense, sympathy and taste and on psychological reconceptions of Classical rhetoric. It is also telling that the two philosophic sources crucial to Priestley - associationism and philosophic necessity - are not included.
52. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd edn, (1935; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p. 49.