Contents - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

Chapter 10Laws of Nature and the EmotionsJustice is a mental disposition which gives every man his desert while preserving the commoninterest. Its first principles proceed from nature, then certain rules of conduct becomecustomary by reason of their utility; later still both the principles that proceeded from natureand those that have been approved by custom received the support of religion and the fear ofthe law. (De Inventione II 160)As a young man of 22 Cicero composed De Inventione, a handbook on rhetoric derived fromearlier sources, in which he set out the established means of inventing arguments in the forum or lawcourts. In Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s day students used the same text for composing arguments inschool exercises – whether as written prose or in verbal disputation. Such exercises taught studentshow to think, according to received wisdom, and to express their thoughts clearly in a formal manner.Coleridge is known to have used De Inventione at Christ’s Hospital and demonstrated skill in suchexercises at Cambridge. His early lectures and sermons would have been constructed using suchhandbooks, and were not concerned with any strikingly original materials, but with the skilfulpresentation of commonplaces in an appropriate manner. 1 As Richard Clancey has pointed out,Wordsworth’s classical education ‘was heavily rhetorical’ (Classical Undersong xvi). He would haveengaged in similar exercises at Hawkeshead, and in the ‘wrangles’ at Cambridge that Schneiderdescribes (Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education 70). Such ‘debates’ played a large part in both men’seducation. Coleridge obviously enjoyed constructing such exercises in formal disputation in his earlyyears and was accomplished in the art. 2 But after he discovered Kant, he shunned such rhetorical andderivative forms of ‘thinking’, which Kant had dismissed from any truly ‘critical’ philosophicaldiscussion. 3 Cicero had also realised the limitations of such forms of argument derived from set topicslater in his life, writing De Oratore in which he had adapted Aristotle’s more complex form ofrhetorical dialectic and introduced philosophical concepts.In this chapter I will focus on excerpts from De Legibus and the Tusculan Disputations inorder to present further evidence of Cicero’s influence on Wordsworth as he developed his poeticidentity in the later 1790s. De Legibus is a work that Wordsworth must have studied as a republicanthinker, and I present a brief synopsis of the first Book here, to give some idea of how important1For a detailed study of Coleridge’s training in ‘rhetoric’ see John Nabholtz’s chapter on ‘Coleridge and theReader’ in My Reader, My Fellow Labourer. See, also, Coleridge’s own description of James Bowyer’spedagogical methods at Christ’s Hospital, in Chapter 1 of Biographia.2 For an example of Coleridge’s work see John Antony Harding’s article on ‘Coleridge’s College Declamation1792’ in The Wordsworth Circle 8.4 (1977): 361-7.3For Kant’s critique of rhetoric see Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Barnard, p. 171. The fourth book ofAugustine’s On Christian Doctrine would have also persuaded Coleridge that, for all his skill at composition,it is the word of God, not the words of men that truly persuade. Coleridge was later highly critical of those,like Sir James Mackintosh, who prided themselves on being learnéd through their ability to use such topicalforms of argumentation - but lacking the wisdom of a Cicero.200