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ideal of effectively arguing both sides of the question, and he was to prove influential in restoring thefortunes of rhetoric as he helped initiate the study of the philosophy of language. 49At the time that Wordsworth’s ‘rhetorical’ manner of thinking was no longer being used, orunderstood, Coleridge’s approach was being developed by I. A. Richards in his Practical Criticism.This Coleridgean bias has been taken for granted in most twentieth-century approaches to literatureand, as a result, Wordsworth’s differing form of thinking was judged as old-fashioned, illogical andconfused. It was not until the late 1950s that the form of argumentation Wordsworth utilised in hisown theorising was again recognised and acknowledged to be a valid method of practical reasoning;though not in literary studies. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca re-discovered thesignificance of Aristotle’s rhetorical dialectic as they were searching for ‘a logic of value judgements’in their research into forms of argumentation. Their studies engaged them in a complex study of legalarguments, and the forms of logic or dialectic appropriate to them, and led to their rediscovery ofAristotle’s method of ethical argumentation. In their findings, published in The New Rhetoric: ATreatise on Argumentation, they concluded that Aristotle’s method was actually the mostsophisticated form of argument for the discussion of human issues, and was in fact the only reallyvalid method of practical argumentation.In The New Rhetoric Perelman argued that ‘philosophical’ arguments that follow the rules offormal logic, and which address a ‘universal audience’ cannot actually address the realities of livinghuman situations. They therefore remain metaphysical speculations with no actual relevance topractical reality. Perelman’s mid-twentieth century enquiry into the nature of value judgements can beseen to replicate Wordsworth’s earlier search for ‘political justice’ and answers to his ‘moralquestions’ in 1795. His enquiry, like theirs, led him to Aristotle and to a form of argument that takesplace within the context of actual human experience and addresses the affairs of ‘the human heart’ thatWordsworth made so central to his poetics. Perelman’s work was foundational to modern studies ofapplied rhetoric, and the significance of his approach is described in a series of essays he published inThe New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays in Rhetoric and its Applications (1979). Theintroductory essay ‘The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning’ describes ‘The loss of aHumanist Tradition’, and traces the gradual demise of the use of the classical forms of argumentestablished by Cicero and Quintilian, that were based on Aristotelian method. 50 In contrast toAristotle’s method, which recognised the relativity of all judgements made about human topics,Coleridge was committed to a ‘critical philosophy’ that aimed to arrive at absolute judgements that49For a reading of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that invokes Wittgenstein, see Charles Altieri’s early essay,‘Wordsworth’s “Preface” as Literary Theory’ Criticism, 18. 2 (1976): 122-146. Altieri is another scholarwho has recognised Wordsworth’s debt to the rhetorical tradition and has argued the case for appreciating his‘eloquence’ in, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetics of Eloquence: A Challenge to Contemporary Theory’, RomanticRevolutions: Criticism and Theory. Ed. Ken Johnston, et al, pp. 371-407. See also Altieri’s broaderargument as expressed in Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals,which connects ethos and ethics.50 Other essays in the collection are also important to an understanding of distinctions that Wordsworth wouldhave appreciated, but which many contemporary readers may be unaware of. See also Baumlin, J. S. &Baumlin, T. F. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory.43