Lastly, the old style may be called, in comparison with what has succeeded, a polite style. Its very diffuseness conceals a respect for the powers and limitations of the audience. Bishop Whatley has observed that highly concentrated expression may be ill suited to persuasion because the majority of the people are not capable of assimilating concentrated thought. The principle can be shown through an analogy with nutrition. It is known that diet must contain a certain amount of roughage. This roughage is not food in the sense of nutriment; its function is to dilute or distend the real food in such a way that it can be most readily assimilated. A concentrate of food is, therefore, not enough, for there has to be a certain amount of inert matter to furnish bulk. Something of a very similar nature operates in discourse. When a piece of oratory intended for a public occasion impresses us as distended, which is to say, filled up with repetition, periphrasis, long grammatical forms, and other impediments to directness, we should recall that the diffuseness all this produces may have a purpose. The orator may have made a close calculation of the receptive powers of his audience and have ordered his style to meet that, while continuing to “sound good” at every point. This represents a form of consideration for the audience. There exists quite commonly today, at the opposite pole, a syncopated style. This style, with its suppression of beats and its consequent effect of hurrying over things, does not show that type of consideration. It does not give the listener the roughage of verbiage to chew on while meditating the progress of the thought. Here again “spaciousness” has a quite rational function in enforcing a measure, so that the mind and the sentiments too can keep up with the orator in his course. Perhaps this is as far as we can go in explaining the one age to another. We are now in position to realize that the archaic formalism of the old orator was a structure imparted to his speech by a logic, an aesthetic, and an epistemology. As a logician he believed in the deduced term, or the term whose empirical support is not at the moment visible. As an aesthetician he believed in distance, and that not merely to soften outline but also to evoke the true picture, which could be obscured by an injudicious and prying nearness. As an epistemologist he believed, in addition to the foregoing, that true knowledge somehow had its source in the mind of minds, for which we are on occasion permitted to speak a part. All this gave him a peculiar sense of stature. He always talked like a big man. Our resentment comes from a feeling that with all his air of confidence he could not have known half as much as we know. But everything depends on what we mean by knowing; and the age or the man who has the true conception of that will have, as the terms of the case make apparent, the key to every other question. Chapter VIII THE RHETORIC OF SOCIAL SCIENCE