The Making of Arguments Part 18

Professor William James, in his essay "The Will to Believe," in which he argues that it is both right and unavoidable that our feelings shall take part in the making of our faiths, begins with a careful definition and ill.u.s.tration of certain terms he is going to use constantly.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be (1) _living_ or _dead_; (2) _forced_ or _avoidable_; (3) _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our purposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you, "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say, "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

2. Next, if I say to you, "Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say: "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or go without it,"

I put you on a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.

3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed.

_Per contra_ the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions well in mind.[55]

In some arguments the working out of the definitions of a few princ.i.p.al terms may occupy much s.p.a.ce. Matthew Arnold, a famous critic of the last generation, wrote as an introduction to a volume of selections from Wordsworth's poems an essay with the thesis that Wordsworth is, after Shakespeare and Milton, the greatest poet who has written in English; and to establish his point he laid down the definition that "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life--to the question, How to live." To the development of this definition he gave several pages, for the success of his main argument lay in inducing his readers to accept it.

Many legal arguments are wholly concerned with establis.h.i.+ng definitions, especially in those cases which deal with statute law. The recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Corporation Tax cases and the Standard Oil Case are examples: in each of these what was at issue was the exact meaning of the words used in certain statutes pa.s.sed by Congress. In the common law, too, there are many phrases which have come down from past centuries, the meanings of which have been defined again and again as new cases came up. We have seen (p. 63) how careful definition the word "murder" may need. "Malice aforethought" is another familiar instance: it sounds simple, but when one begins to fix the limits at which sudden anger pa.s.ses over into cool and deliberate enmity, or how far gone a man must be in drink before he loses the consciousness of his purposes, even a layman can see that it has difficulties.

In such cases as these a dictionary definition would be merely a starting point. It may be a very useful starting point, however, as in the following extract from an article by Mr. E.P. Ripley, president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company, on "The Railroads and the People":

There is one point regarding this matter that many forget: this is that in all affairs there are two kinds of discrimination. There is the kind, which, as the dictionary expresses it, "sets apart as being different,"

which "distinguishes accurately," and there is the widely different kind which "treats unequally." in all ordinary affairs of life we condemn as "undiscriminating" those who have so little judgment or fairness as not to "distinguish accurately" or "set apart things that are different"--who either treat equally things that are unequal, or treat unequally things that are equal. Now, when the railway traffic manager "sets apart things that are different," and treats them differently, he simply does what it is the duty of every one to do.[56]

Then he goes on to develop this definition by showing the facts on which it has to bear.

On the other hand do not bore your readers with dictionary definitions of words whose meaning no one doubts; that is a waste of good paper for you, and of good time for them; and we have seen in Chapter II the futility of the dictionary for cases in which there is real disagreement over the meaning of a word.

It will be seen, then, that the a.n.a.lysis you have made in preparation for the brief may spread out large or small in the argument itself. It is wise, therefore, to look on the work done for the introduction to the brief as work done largely to clear up your own thought on the subject; when you come to writing out the argument itself, you can go back to the introduction to the brief, and see how much s.p.a.ce you are now going to give it.

In a college or school argument you will usually follow it rather closely; and you do well to do so, for you will thus fix in your mind a useful model. But when you get out into the world, you will have to consider in each case the needs and prepossessions of the particular audience. Here as everywhere in the argument you must exercise judgment; there is no formula which will fit all cases. The scheme of a.n.a.lysis of the case which has been expounded in Chapter II has stood the test as the best means yet found of exploring a subject and insuring clarity of thought and certainty of attack;[57] but I know of no single fixed scheme for the argument itself which will not be racked apart by the first half dozen practical arguments you apply it to.

51. The Body of the Argument. In the main body of the argument the difference from the brief will be largely a matter of expansion: the brief indicates the evidence, the argument states it at length. Here again you cut your argument to fit your audience and the s.p.a.ce at your command. In an argument in the editorial of a newspaper, which is rarely longer than a long college theme, there is little s.p.a.ce for the statement of evidence. In Webster's argument in the White Murder Case, which has some thirteen thousand words and which must have taken two hours or more to deliver, the facts are studied in minute detail. Most people are surprised to see the way in which a full statement of evidence eats up s.p.a.ce; if the facts are at all complicated, they must be a.n.a.lyzed and expounded one by one and their bearing on the case laid out in full. This necessity of using s.p.a.ce in order to make facts clear is the reason why it is so hard to find adequate and convincing arguments which will print in less than fifteen or twenty pages. The trouble with a swift and compact argument like that of Macaulay's on the authors.h.i.+p of the _Junius Letters_ (see p. 155) is that unless you have gone into the question for yourself, you do not know whether to accept the stated facts or not. If you do accept them, the conclusion is inevitable; but if you happen to know that scholars have long held the decision doubtful, you want to know more about the facts in detail before surrendering to Macaulay's conclusion. For an average reader to-day, who knows little of the facts, this argument would have to be greatly expanded.

In this expansion comes the chance for all the skill in exposition that you can muster, and for that subtle appeal to your readers' feelings which lies in vividness and precision of phrasing, considerations with which I will deal separately further on. Questions of proportion of s.p.a.ce we may consider here.

The only rule that can be laid down for the distribution of your s.p.a.ce is to use your sagacity, and all your knowledge of your subject and of your audience. In a written argument you have the advantage that you can let your pen run on your first draft, and then go back and weigh the comparative force of the different parts of the argument, and cut out and cut down until your best points for the purpose have the most s.p.a.ce.

In a debate the same end is gained by rehearsals of the main speeches; in the reb.u.t.tal, which is best when it is spontaneous, you have to trust to the judgment gained by practice.

Other things being equal, however, brevity carries an audience. If you can sum up your case in half the time that it takes the other side to state theirs, the chances are that your audience will think you have the right of it. Above all, beware of boring your readers by too exhaustive explanation of details or of aspects of the case which they care nothing about. I suppose there is no one of us who has not a worthy friend or two who will talk through a whole evening on whether a lawn should be watered in the evening or the early morning, or whether the eighth hole on the golf course should not be fifty yards longer. One must not be like the man who in the discussion of bimetallism a few years ago used to keep his wife awake at night expounding to her the iniquities and inequalities of a single standard. It is safer to underestimate than to overestimate the endurance and patience of your audience.

52. The Refutation. The place of the refutation will, as we have seen in the chapter on planning (see p. 82), vary greatly with the argument and with the audience. Its purpose is to put out of the way as effectively as possible the main points urged by the other side. In an argument of fact this is done both by exposing weak places in the reasoning and by throwing doubt on the facts cited, either through proof that they are contradicted by better evidence, or that the evidence brought forward to establish them is shaky or inconclusive. In an argument of policy the points on the other side are met either by throwing doubt on the facts on which they rest, or by showing that the points themselves have not coercive force.

Where there are really strong points on the other side, in either kind of argument, it is often sound policy to admit their strength. This is especially true in arguments of policy where the advantages are closely balanced. If you are trying to convince a boy that he should go to your college rather than to another, you do not gain anything by telling him that the other college is no good; if he is worth gaining over he will know better than that. And in general if you have given a man to understand that there is nothing to be said for the other side, and he afterwards finds that there are strong grounds for it, your argument will have a fall in his estimation.

In the manner of your refutation lean towards the side of soberness and courtesy. It has been said that the poorest use you can put a man to is to refute him; and it is certain that in the give and take of argument in active life the personal victories and defeats are what are soonest forgotten. If after a while you have to establish a fact in history or in biology, or to get a verdict from a jury or a favorable report from the committee of a legislature, you will think a good deal more about the arguments of your opponents than about them personally. There are few arguments in which you can afford to take no notice of the strong points of the other side; and where the burden of proof is strongly with you, your own argument may be almost wholly refutation; but it is always worth bearing in mind that if it is worth while for you to be arguing at all, there is something, and something of serious weight, to be said on the other side.

53. The Conclusion. The conclusion of your argument should be short and pointed. Gather the main issues together, and restate them in terms that will be easy to remember. Mere repet.i.tion of the points as you made them in your introduction may sound too much like lack of resource; on the other hand, it helps to make your points familiar, and to drive them home. In any event make your contentions easy to remember. Most of us go a long way towards settling our own minds on a puzzling question when we repeat to some one else arguments that we have read or heard. If you can so sum up your argument that your readers will go off and unconsciously retail your points to their neighbors, you probably have them. On the other hand, when you have finished your argument, if you start in to hedge and modify and go back to points that have not had enough emphasis before, you throw away all you have gained. In arguing nothing succeeds like decision and certainty of utterance. Even dogmatism is better than an appearance of wabbling. It is the men like Macaulay, who see everything black and white with no shades between, who are the leaders of the world's opinion. Sum up, then, wherever it is decent to do so, as if there were only one side of the case, and that could be stated in three lines.

54. The Power of Convincing. The convincing power of an argument depends on its appeal to the reason of its readers. To put the same fact in another way, an argument has convincing power when it can fit the facts which it deals with smoothly and intelligently into the rest of the reader's experience. If an argument on a complicated ma.s.s of facts, such as the evidence in a long murder case, makes the reader say, "Yes, now I see how it all happened," or an argument for the direct election of United States senators makes him say, "Yes, that is a plain working out of the fundamental principles of popular government," then he is convinced. In this aspect argument merges into exposition. It is significant that, as has already been noted, Matthew Arnold's argument that Wordsworth is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton, and Huxley's argument that the physical basis of animal and plant life is the same, are both used in a book of examples of exposition.[58] The essential difference between argument and exposition from this point of view lies in the emphasis: normally an explanation covers the whole case evenly; an argument throws certain parts and aspects of the case into relief.

If, therefore, to be convincing, your argument must provide a reasonable explanation of the whole state of affairs to which the case belongs, you can use all the devices there are for clear and effective explanation. I will therefore briefly review a few of these.

Of the value of an introduction which lays out the ground to be covered I have already spoken. The more distinct an idea you can implant in your readers' minds of the course you are going to follow in your argument, the more likely they will be to follow it. Since the success of your argument hangs on carrying them with you on the main issues, let them know beforehand just what those issues are, and in such a way that they can hold them with a minimum of effort. The value of a clear and, as it were, maplike introduction is even greater in an argument than in an exposition.

In the second place, use your paragraphing for all that it is worth, and that is a great deal. The success of any explanation or argument springs from the way in which it takes a ma.s.s of facts apart, and rearranges them simply and perspicuously; and there is no device of composition which helps so much towards clearness as good paragraphing. Accordingly when you come to make your final draft, make certain that each paragraph has unity. If you have any doubts see if you can sum up the paragraph into a single simple sentence. Then look at the beginnings of the paragraphs to see whether you have made it easy for your readers to know what each one is about. Macaulay's style is on the whole clearer and more effective for a general audience than that of any other writer in English; and his habit of beginning each paragraph with a very definite announcement of its subject is almost a mannerism. Incidentally there is no better rough test of the unity of your paragraphs than thus to give them something of the nature of a t.i.tle in the first sentence. Often, too, at the end of an important paragraph it is worth while to sum up its essence in pithy form. Mankind in general is lazy about thinking, and more than ready to accept an argument which is easy to remember and repeat. The end of a paragraph is the place for a catchword.

In the third place, bind the sentences in your paragraphs together. When one is building up a first draft, and picking facts from a variety of sources, it is inevitable that the result shall be somewhat disjointed.

In working over the first draft, really work it over, and work it together. Make all the sentences point the same way. p.r.o.nouns are the most effective connectives that we have; therefore recast your sentences so that there will be as little change of subject as possible.

Then use the explicit connectives in as much variety as you can. It is not likely that you will make your paragraphs too closely knit for the average reader.

In the fourth place, bind your argument together as a whole by connectives at the beginnings of the paragraphs and by brief summarizing paragraphs. In the present generation of schoolboys a good many have groaned over Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"; but if the first time that one of these sufferers must make an argument in real earnest, he will go back to Burke for some of the devices used to bind that argument together, he will be surprised to see how practically e efficient those devices are. And none of them counts more for clarity and thoroughness than the conscientious way in which Burke took his hearers by the hand at the beginning of each paragraph, and at each turn in his argument, to make sure that they knew just how they were pa.s.sing from one point to another.

From the doctrine of clear explanation, then, we may carry over to the making of clear arguments the habit of laying out the ground at the beginning, of making the paragraphs do their full work by attending to unity, to emphasis, and to coherence, and of binding the paragraphs together into a closely knit whole.

55. The Power of Persuading. Finally, we have to consider the question of how an argument can be made persuasive--probably the most difficult subject in the range of rhetoric on which to give practical advice. The key to the whole matter lies in remembering that we are here dealing with feelings, and that feelings are irrational and are the product of personal experience. The experience may be bitter or sweet, and to some degree its effects are modified by education; but in substance your feelings and emotions make you what you are, and your capacities in these directions were born with you. If the citizens of a town have no feeling about political dishonesty, reformers may talk their throats out without producing any result; it is only when taxes get intolerable or the sewers smell to heaven that anything will be done. Many people die for whose deaths each of us ought to feel grief, but if these people have never happened to touch our feelings, we can reason with ourselves in vain that we should feel deeply grieved.

Feeling and emotion are the deepest, most primitive part of human nature; and very little of its field has been reduced to the generalizations of reason.[59]

When you come, therefore, in the making of your argument to the point of stirring up the feelings of your readers on the subject, do not waste any time in considering what they ought to feel: the only pertinent question is what they do feel. On your shrewdness in estimating what these feelings are, and how strong they are, will hang your success as an advocate. Tact is the faculty you need now--the faculty of judging men, of knowing when they will rise to an appeal, and when they will lie back inert and uninterested. This is a matter you cannot reason about; if you have the faculty it will be borne in on you how other men will feel on your subject. The skill of politicians, where it does not confine itself to estimating how much the people will stand before rebelling, consists in this intuition of the movement of public opinion; and the great leaders are the men who have so sure a sense of these large waves of popular feeling that they can utter at the right moment the word that will gather together this diffused and uncrystallized feeling into a living force. Lincoln's declaration, "A house divided against itself cannot stand, I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," brought to a head a conflict that had been smoldering ever since the adoption of the Const.i.tution, and made him the inevitable leader who was to bring it to a close. It will be noticed, however, that the time had to come before the inspired word could make its appeal. The abolitionists and antislavery men had long been preaching the same doctrine that Lincoln uttered, and the folly and wickedness of slavery had been proved by philosophers and preachers for generations. Until the time grows ripe the most reasonable doctrine does not touch the hearts of men; when the time has ripened, the leader knows it and speaks the word that sets the world on fire for righteousness.

The same faculty, on a smaller scale, is needed by every one of us who is trying to make other people do anything. The actual use of the faculty will vary greatly, however, with different kinds of arguments.

In certain kinds of scientific argument any attempt at persuasion as such would be an impertinence: whether heat is a mode of motion, whether there are such infinitesimal bodies as the ions which physicists of to-day a.s.sume to explain certain new phenomena, whether matter consists of infinitesimal whirls of force--in all such questions an argument appeals solely to the reason; and in such Bacon's favorite apophthegm has full sway, Dry light is ever the best. In Huxley's arguments for the theory of evolution feeling had some share, for when the theory was first announced by Darwin some religious people thought that it cut at the foundations of their faith, and Huxley had to show that loyalty to truth is a feeling of equal sanct.i.ty to scientific men: hence there is some tinge of feeling, though repressed, in his argument, and a definite consciousness of the feelings of his audience.

At the other extreme are the arguments where the appeal to feelings is everything, since it is clear that the audience is already of the speaker's way of thinking. Examples of such arguments are most apt to be found in speeches in political campaigns and in appeals for money to help forward charities of all kinds. It is probable that most of the conversions in political matters are through reading; consequently the purpose of the speeches is to stir up excitement and feeling to such a heat that the maximum of the party voters will take the trouble to go out to the polls. Arguments directed to this cla.s.s, accordingly, are almost wholly appeals to feeling. The famous debate between Lincoln and Douglas in 1858 was of this character; of the thousands of people who heard them in one or another of the seven debates most had taken sides already. In such a case as this, however, where a change in general political opinion was impending, the reasoning of the debates had more force than in ordinary times, and probably helped many voters to a clearer view of a very distressing and hara.s.sing situation. Between times, however, in politics, where there are no great moral or practical differences between parties, the purpose of speeches is almost wholly persuasive. Success one way or another is a question of getting out the voters who more or less pa.s.sively and as a matter of habit hold to the party. Party speakers, accordingly, use every device to wake up their voters, and to make them believe that there is a real crisis at hand.

Every attempt is made to attach moral issues to the party platforms, and to show how the material prosperity of the voters will fail if the other party wins.

Roughly, therefore, we may say that persuasion tends to play a small part in arguments of facts, and a larger part in questions of policy.

This is a rough generalization only, for every one knows what eloquence and efforts at eloquence go into the arguments before juries in capital cases, and how dry and abstract are the arguments before the judges on points of law, or on questions of public policy in books of political economy. But in the long run, the less feeling enters into decisions of questions of fact, the better.

Of the factors which make for the persuasiveness of an argument I will speak here of three--clearness of statement, appeal to the practical interests of the audience, and direct appeal to their feelings.

There can be no doubt that clearness of statement is a powerful element in making an argument persuasive, though the appeal that it makes to the feelings of the readers is slight and subtle. In practice we mostly read arguments either to help make up our minds on a subject or to get aid in defending views for which we have no ready support. In the latter case we do not need to be persuaded; but in the former there can be no question that an argument which clears up the subject, and makes it intelligible where before it was confusing, does have an effect on us over and above its aid to our thought.

56. The Practical Interests of the Audience. Of directly persuasive power, however, are the other two factors--the appeal to the practical interests of readers, and the appeal to their emotions. Of these the appeal to practical interests has no proper place in arguments on questions of fact, but a large and entirely proper share in most arguments of policy. Henry Ward Beecher's speech on the slavery issue in the Civil War, before the cotton operatives of Liverpool,[60] is a cla.s.sic example of the direct appeal to the practical interests of an audience. They were bitterly hostile to the North, because the supplies of cotton had been cut off by the blockade; and after he had got a hearing from them by appealing to the English sense of fair play, he drove home the doctrine that a slave population made few customers for the products of English mills. Then he pa.s.sed on to the moral side of the question.

Arguments on almost all public questions--direct election of senators, direct primaries, commission form of government, tariff, currency, control of corporations, or, in local matters, the size of a school committee, the granting of franchises to street railroads or water companies, the laying out of streets, the rules governing parks--are all questions of policy in which the greatest practical advantage to the greatest proportion of those who are interested is the controlling force in the decision. At particular times and places moral questions may enter into some of these questions, but ordinarily we come to them to settle questions of practical advantage.

In arguments on all such questions, therefore, the direct appeal to the practical interests of the people you are addressing is the chief factor that makes for persuasiveness. Will a change to a commission form of government make towards a reduction of taxes and towards giving greater and more equitably distributed returns for those that are levied? Will the direct primary for state officers make it easier and surer for the average citizen of the state to elect to office the kind of men he wants to have in office? Will a central bank of issue, or some inst.i.tution like it, establish the business of the country on a basis less likely to be disturbed by panics? Will a competing street-car line make for better and cheaper transportation in the city? In all such questions the only grounds for decision are practical, and founded in the prosperity and the convenience of the people who have the decision.

To make arguments in such cases persuasive you must show how the question affects the practical interests of your readers, and then that the plan which you support will bring them the greatest advantage.

Generalities and large political truths may help you to convince them; but to persuade them to active interest and action you must get down to the realities which touch them personally. If you are arguing for a commission government in your city on the ground of economy, show in dollars and cents what portion of his income the owner of a house and lot worth five or ten thousand dollars pays each year because of the present extravagance and wastefulness. If you can make a voter see that the change is likely to save him ten or twenty-five or a hundred dollars a year, you have made an argument that is persuasive. The arguments for the reformation of our currency system are aimed directly at the material interests of the business men of the country and their employees; and the pleas for one or another system attempt to show how each will conduce to the greater security and profit of the greatest number of people.

To make such arguments count, however, you must deal in concrete terms.

A recent argument[61] for the establishment of a general parcels post in this country presents figures to show that for the transportation of a parcel by express at a rate of forty-five cents, the railroad gets twenty-two and one-half cents for service which it could do at a handsome profit for five cents. Of the validity of these figures I have no means of judging; but the effectiveness of the argument lies in its making plain to each of its readers a fact which touches his pocket every time he sends a parcel by express. It is this kind of argument that has persuasiveness, for the way we spend our money and what we get for it come close home to most of us. Of all practical interests those of the purse are of necessity the most moving for all but the very rich.

Money interests, however, are far from being the only practical interests which concern us: there are many matters of convenience and comfort where an individual or a community is not thinking of the cost.

Such questions as what kind of furnace to set up, whether to build a house of brick or of cement, which railroad to take between, two cities, are questions that draw arguments from other people than advertising agents. Of another sort are questions that concern education. What college shall a boy go to; shall he be prepared in a public school, or a private day school, or a boarding school? Shall a given college admit on certificate, or demand an examination of its own? Shall a certain public school drop Greek from its list of studies; shall it set up a course in manual training? All these are examples of another set of questions that touch practical interests very closely. In arguments on such questions, therefore, if you are to have the power of persuading and so of influencing action, you must get home to the interests of the people you are trying to move. The question of schools is very different for a boy in a small country village and for one in New York City; the question of admission is different for a state university and for an endowed college; the question of Greek is different for a school which sends few pupils on to college and for one which sends many: and in each case if you want to influence action, you must set forth facts which bear on the problem as it faces that particular audience. Except perhaps for the highest eloquence, there is no such thing as universal persuasiveness.

The questions which actively affect the average man usually concern small groups of people, and each group must be stirred to action by incentives adapted to its special interests.

57. The Appeal to Moral Interests. Still further from the interests that touch the pocket, and constantly in healthy and elevating action against them, are the moral interests. The appeal to moral motives is sometimes laughed at by men who call themselves practical, but in America it is in the long run the strongest appeal that can be made. We are still near enough to the men who fought through the Civil War, in which each, side held pa.s.sionately to what it believed to be the moral right, for us to believe without too much complacency that moral forces are the forces that rule us as a nation. Mr. Bryan and Mr. Roosevelt have both been called preachers, and the hold they have had on great, though differing, parts of the American people is incontestable. If any question on which you have to argue has a moral side, it is not only your duty, but it is also the path of expediency, to make appeal through the moral principle involved.