Emotional appeals 57and use language calculated to arouse that emotion. When you
have built it up assiduously by means of graphic descriptions, you
turn it to bear on the question of fact. Very few audiences are able
to turn it off abruptly; most will allow it to flood out onto the area
normally reserved for reasoned assessment. Whether your appeal
is to fear, envy, hatred, pride or superstition makes no difference.
Indeed, you can use them alternately. Pride in one's own race,
class or nation can be appealed to, even as envy of others is built
up, perhaps to the point where an ad odium becomes possible.
The argumentum ad modum deserves a special mention
because its appeal is to the audience's desire for gradualism. An
audience is most vulnerable to it when they are trying to be
reasonable. They equate reason with a quiet life, thinking that
something admitted in due measure is more likely to be right.
Like the argumentum ad temperantiam, which urges the middle
course between extremes, the ad modum appeals to that most
ancient of maxims which recommends moderation in all things.
You should always introduce your subtle appeal to lure them
away from reason by urging your audience:
Let's be reasonable about this.
(A strong emotional appeal for the quiet life.)Sentimens is a clever fallacy. Its idiotic claim, that emotion is a
better guide, is most alluring to an intelligent audience. Intelli-
gent people are often afraid of being thought rather cold because
they use reason so much. They do not want to appear to be
emotionally deficient, and are easy prey to a speaker who assures
them that they are just as sensitive, loving and compassionate as
the next person, who is also a bit of a bore. This permits them the
delusion that they are welcome into the common fold, instead of
remaining aloof from it. They happily abandon reason as the
price of their admission ticket to the human race.