e himself, he also became a power; but in himself and
for himself, after all, he was consciously nothing. When Cicero speaks
of his _nunquam minus Solus quam cum solus_, he is announcing what he
feels to be, and knows will be, accepted as a very extraordinary fact.
For even _in rure_ it is evident that friends made it a duty of
friendship to seek out and relieve their rusticating friends.

_On the Distinction between 'Rhetorica utens' and 'Rhetorica
docens'._--It was a perplexity, familiar to the experience of the
Schoolmen, that oftentimes one does not know whether to understand by
the term _logic_ the act and process of reasoning involved and latent in
any series of connected propositions, or this same act and process
formally abstracting itself as an art and system of reasoning. For
instance, if you should happen to say, 'Dr. Isaac Watts, the English
Nonconformist, was a good man, and a clever man; but alas! for his
logic, what can his best friend say for it? The most charitable opinion
must pronounce it at the best so, so'--in such a case, what is it that
you would be understood to speak of? Would it be the general quality of
the Doctor's reasoning, the style and character of his philosophical
method, or would it be the particular little book known as 'The Doctor:
his _Logic_,' price 5s., bound in calf, and which you might be very shy
of touching with a pair of tongs, for fear of dimming their steel
polish, so long as your wife's eye was upon your motions? The same
ambiguity affects many other cases. For instance, if you heard a man
say, 'The _rhetoric_ of Cicero is not fitted to challenge much
interest,' you might naturally understand it of the particular style and
rhetorical colouring--which was taxed with being florid; nay, Rhodian;
nay, even Asiatic--that characterizes that great orator's compositions;
or, again, the context might so restrain the word as to _force_ it into
meaning the particular system or theory of rhetoric addressed to
Herennius, a system which (being traditionally ascribed to Cicero) is
usually printed amongst his works. Here, and in scores of similar cases,
lies often a trap for the understanding; but the Schoolmen evaded this
trap by distinguishing between 'Rhetorica _utens_,' and 'Rhetorica
_docens_,' between the rhetoric that laid down or delivered didactically
the elements of oratorical persuasion as an art to be learned, and
rhetoric, on the other hand, as a creative energy that _wielde