Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 397 "necessary connexions" become more and more dubious, it became harder to conceive ideas as informed effects of formed objects causing them by some quasi-reproductive, oneway activity. Montaigne had attacked this as early as 1580 (Essays II, 12). The ways in which the knower must act received increasing attention, not only in "British Empiricism" but on all sides. And there were sceptical arguments to suggest a total reversal from the past, viz. that now only the knower is active, that the known is passive or (frankly) mysterious . Professor Armstrong seems to lean to that view when he refers to Kant's dualism as being on the "right track" (p. 94). Those in the British and Continental traditions, such as Spinoza, Hobbes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Berkeley (.9) and Mill, who stress the relation itsel[ as an active one, with knower and known both in some way active, are ignored here in order to make up a genealogy for those who renounced the challenge to find man-inthe -world in order to explore and explain the world-as-in-man. While Dugald Stewart is cited at the end as one of the "mentalists," his colleague Destutt de Tracy (of a more interactive or anti-dualism persuasion) is ignored. In conclusion, this work is challenging and deserves study as much for its errors as for its well-sustained insights. CRAIGWALTON University o/Nevada, Las Vegas Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. By Wilbur Samuel Howell. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Pp. xii + 742. $20.00) This work is of course something of a continuation of Professor Howell's earlier book, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956), and to this reader at least it is a more useful and comprehensive book. This is undoubtedly due to the quality of writers and thinkers with whom Professor Howell is dealing; the rhetoric of such authors as John Locke, Adam Smith, or Hugh Blair, not to mention someone such as the flamboyantly eloquent elocutionist John ("Orator") Henley, is superior to that of the authors discussed in the earlier book. With the exception of Bacon, these authors are not only more instructive to read but more entertaining as well. The book is conventionally organized, in two chronological sets preceded by a background discussion of "The Aristotelian Inheritance in Logic (1615"1825)." To some extent , this draws on material in Professor Howell's earlier book, but it is a necessary preparation for the succeeding chapters and is in no way otiose. In fact, I found this chapter, with its hindsights deriving and benefitting from more than a decade of reflection, rather more stimulating than the work to which it is a supplement. Moreover, the discussion of John Sergeant, author of The Method to Science (1696) and Solid Philosophy Asserted (1697), points up an author whose writings have important ramifications in studying , for example, Swift or Bishop Butler. The remainder of the book is given over to summaries and presentations of the Ciceronian logicians and rhetoricians in the eighteenth century, the elocutionists like Orator Henley, the new logic, and the new rhetoric. The chapter on Ciceronian influences in eighteenth century rhetorical and logical thought is in a curious way disappointing. One feels that with so much material to choose from something rather more precise and positive would emerge. Here, too, I think the fault is not so much the author's as the subject matter: the extent of Cicero's influence on that segment of eighteenth century thought represented by speculations on and reflections about logic and rhetoric is simply too vast for 67 pages. Though it is chock-full of information and reminders (I particularly recall the couple of pages on Richard Grey's Memoria Technica [1730], an ingenious mnemonic treatise), the most that Howell can do is to redirect the scholar's attention to techniques and practices as familiar to the eighteenth century author as the terms of psychoanalysis are to us. 398 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Equally the specialist may feel that the analysis of the Scottish rhetoricians is not everything it could be. That the lectures of Adam Smith and Hugh Blair were far-reaching and of enormous cultural importance goes without...