. 115 . SECTION 1. THE WORK OF THE INTRODUCTION . SECTION 2. THE WORK OF THE ARGUMENT PROPER SECTION 3. THE WORK OF THE PERORATION - XIX. MATERIAL FOR BRIEF XXIII. MATERIAL FOR BRIEF RECOGNITION OF PANAMA 528 PRINCIPLES OF ARGUMENTATION CHAPTER I THE NATURE OF ARGUMENTATION No man can escape thinking. At times he must face questions on which it is vital to his happiness or success that he should think clearly; at times, too, it will be essential to his own welfare or that of those dear to him to be able so to present the result of his clear and cogent thinking as to make his hearers act as he wishes. Herein lies the importance of argumentation for all men. As President Coolidge has said, "The power to think is the most practical thing in the world." But anyone who has tried to make another person act in some particular way knows that he has often failed, even when feeling strongly the rightness of what he advocated, because he could not convey to the other person his sense of its rightness, or, even when the desirability of the act was admitted, could not move him to do it. Too often the root of the difficulty is that, though the speaker feels strongly on the subject, he has not thought clearly on it. 1 What is more common than the sight of grown men talking on political or moral or religious subjects in that off-hand, idle way, which we signify by the word unreal? "That they simply do not know what they are talking about" is the spontaneous, silent remark of any man of sense who heard them. Hence such persons have no difficulty in contradicting themselves in successive sentences without being conscious of it. Hence others, whose defect in intellectual training is more latent, have their most unfortunate crotchets, as they are called, or hobbies, which deprive them of the 1 Calvin Coolidge, Have Faith in Massachusetts, p. 79. Houghton Mifflin Company. |