We may now return to our more direct concern with rhetoric. Since according to this demonstration oratory speaks from an eminence and has a freedom of purview, its syllogism is the “rhetorical syllogism” mentioned by Demetrius—the enthymeme.[149] It may not hurt to state that this is the syllogism with one of the three propositions missing. Such a syllogism can be used only when the audience is willing to supply the missing proposition. The missing proposition will be “in their hearts,” as it were; it will be their agreement upon some fundamental aspect of the issue being discussed. If it is there, the orator does not have to supply it; if it is not there, he may not be able to get it in any way—at least not as orator. Therefore the use of the rhetorical syllogism is good concrete evidence that the old orator relied upon the existence of uncontested terms or fixations of belief in the minds of his hearers. The orator was logical, but he could dispense with being a pure logician because that third proposition had been established for him. These two related considerations, the accepted term and the conception of oratory as a body of judicious conclusions upon common evidence, go far toward explaining the quality of spaciousness. Indeed, to say that oratory has “spaciousness” is to risk redundancy once the nature of oratory is understood. Oratory is “spacious” in the same way that liberal education is liberal; and a correlation can be shown between the decline of liberal education (the education of a freeman) and the decline of oratory. It was one of Cicero’s observations that the orator performs at “the focal point at which all human activity is ultimately reviewed”; and Cicero is, for connected reasons, a chief source of our theory of liberal education.[150] Thus far we have rested our explanation on the utility of the generalized style, but this is probably much too narrow an account. There is also an aesthetic of the generalization, which we must now proceed to explore. Let us pause here momentarily to re-define our impression upon hearing the old orator. The feature which we have been describing as spaciousness may be translated, with perhaps a slight shift of viewpoint, as opacity. The passages we have inspected, to recur to our examples, are opaque in that we cannot see through them with any sharpness. And it was no doubt the intention of the orator that we should not see through them in this way. The “moral magnifying glass” of Craddock’s General Vayne made objects larger, but it did not make them clearer. It rather had the effect of blurring lines and obscuring details.