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42 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

But the greatest injury caused by the rhetorical doctrine
of “ornate” expression to the theoretical systematisation of
the forms of the human spirit, concerns the treatment of lan-
guage, because, granted that we admit naked and simply
grammatical expressions, and expressions that are ornate or
rhetorical, language becomes an aggregate of naked expres-
sions and is handed over to grammar, and, as an ulterior con-
sequence (since grammar finds no place in rhetoric and
aesthetic), to logic, where the subordinate office of a semei-
otic or ars Significancli is assigned to it. Indeed, the logistic
conception of language is closely united and proceeds pari
passu with the rhetorical doctrine of expression; they ap-
peared together in Hellenic antiquity, and they still exist,
though disputed, in our time. Rebellions against the Iogicism
of the doctrine of language have rarely appeared, and have
had as little efficacy as those against rhetoric; and only in the
romantic period (traversed by Vico a century before) has a
lively consciousness been formed by certain thinkers as to
the fantastic or metaphoric nature of language, and its closer
connection witlι poetry than with logic. Yet since a more or
less inartistic idea of art persisted even among the best (con-
ceptualism, moralism, hedonism, etc.), there remained a
very powerful impediment to the identification of language
and art. This identification appears to be as unavoidable as
it is easy, having established the concept of art as intuition
and of intuition as expression, and therefore implicitly its
identity with language: always assuming that language be
conceived in its full extension, without arbitrary restrictions
to so-called articulate language and without arbitrary ex-
clusion of tonic, mimetic, and graphic; and in all its inten-
sion—that is, taken in its reality, which is the act of speaking
itself, without falsifying it with the abstractions of grammars

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