CHAP. III.] HOW ELOQUENCE AIDS REASON. 235 



and faculties should have power to disturb the reason, and 

 none to confirm and strengthen it ; for they do this in a 

 much greater degree. The end of logic is to teach the fol*m 

 of arguments for defending, and not for ensnaring, the under- 

 standing. The end of ethics is so to compose the affections, 

 that they may co-operate with reasou, and not insult it. 

 And lastly, the end of rhetoric is to fill the imagination -with. 

 sucli observations and images as may assist reason, and not 

 overthrow it. For the abuses of an art come in obliquely 

 only, and not for practice, but caution. It was therefore 

 great injustice in Plato, though it proceeded from a just con- 

 tempt of the rhetoricians of his time, to place rhetoric among 

 the voluptuary arts,'^ and resemble it to cookery, which cor- 

 rupted wholesome meats, and, by variety of sauces, made 

 unwholesome ones more palatable. For speech is, doubtless, 

 more employed to adorn virtue than to colour vice. This 

 faculty is always ready, for every man s])eaks more virtuously 

 than he either thinks or acts. And it is excellently observed 

 by Thucydides, that something of this kind w^as usually 

 objected to Cleon ;^ who, as he always defended the worst 

 side of a cause, was ever inveighing against eloquence and 

 the grace of speech, well knowing that no man could speak 

 gracefully upon a base subject, though every man easily 

 might upon an honourable one : for Plato elegantly observed, 

 though the expression is now grown trite, that if virtue 

 could be beheld, she would have great admirers.^ But 

 rhetoric, by plainly painting virtue and goodness, renders 

 them, as it were, conspicuous ; for as they cannot be seen by 

 the corporeal eye, the next degree is to have them set before 

 us as lively as possible by the ornament of words and the 

 strength of imagination. The Stoics, therefore, were de- 

 servedly ridiculed by Cicero for endeavouring to inculcate 

 virtue upon the mind by short and subtile sentences and 

 conclusions,^ which have little or no relation to the imagina 

 tion and the will. 



Again, if the affections were orderly and obedient to 

 reason, there would be no great use of persuasion and in- 

 Binuation to gain access to the mind ; it w^ould then be 



' As it was in Bacon to place painting and music in the same category, 

 «* B. iii. 42. * Pbedias. 



' Orator, ij. 3S ; Tusc. I'lsp. ii. 18. 42. 



