Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole, a public … - Richard Whately

There is, I conceive, no point in which the idea of dishonest artifice is in most people's minds so intimately associated with that of Rhetoric, as the address to the Feelings or Active Principles of our nature. This is usually stigmatized as "an appeal to the Passions instead of the Reason;" as if Reason alone could ever influence the Will, and operate as a motive, which it no more can, than the eyes, which show a man his road, can enable him to move from place to place; or than a ship provided with a compass, can sail without a wind.

Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.

Though the easiest popular way of practically refuting … any Fallacy is, by bringing forward a parallel case, where it leads to a manifest absurdity, a metaphysical objection may still be urged against many cases in which we thus reason from calculation of chances; an objection not likely indeed practically to influence any one, but which may afford the Sophist a triumph over those who are unable to find a solution.