1.G 00. RHETORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS

    Chapter 7: RHETORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS.

BELIEVE it was Locke who inveighed against Illustrations as the enemies of truth, as leading men astray by latent or supposed analogies; and yet I apprehend that the strictest and most formal processes of logical reasoning have led just as many men astray as ever illustrations did. You can perplex people, and you can, with great facility, make ingenious issues with illustrations; but so you can with every thing else. They are liable to misuse, but no more than any other instrument of persuasion. If a man knows truth and loves it, if he is earnest in the inculcation of it, and if he never allows himself to state for truth that which he does not thoroughly believe to be true, the processes which he employs, whether analogies, causal reasoning, or illustrations the most poetical, will participate in the honesty of the man; and there is little risk that any one part will bemistaken more than an}- other.