Doug that's a pretty robust test, an interesting one too -- from recent
lolling about in Aristotle I draw the following:
"the true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty"
I find this quite precise and troubling. The probable non-existence of so
particular a faculty is per se hardly an objection. And this in the
context of a discussion of demonstrative, forensic, epideictic rhetoric:
what does -sympathy- do to make itself fit into this equation, if it does
anything, and if it does fit?
Also Doug there are interesting passages relating to your COMMUTER SKIM
entry, I think, in a dialogic poem I've been paused over recently, 'The
Farewell', by Charles Churchill, published June 1764. EG:
'Tis sure the symptom of a narrow soul
To draw its grand attachment from the whole,
And take up with a part; Men, not confin'd
Within such paltry limits, Men design'd
Their nature to exalt; where'er they go,
Wherever waves can roll, and winds can blow,
Where'er the blessed Sun, plac'd in the sky
To watch this subject world, can dart his eye,
Are still the same, and, prejudice out-grown,
Consider ev'ry country as their own.
At one grand view They take in Nature's plan,
Not more at home in England, than Japan.
But the thing is: within the wide-angle forensics of the poem, these lines
cannot be more than approximately true and this is specially marked.
Perhaps we -prefer- what is approximately true, it seems to say.
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