Rhetorica:
The Common Topoi,
III. Cause and Effect
By Gabriel Blanchard
This is, justly, a popular topos. But there are certain vulnerabilities inherent in it, which we disregard at our peril.
Therefore,
We have discussed definition and similarity. We come now to the third of the common topoi: cause and effect. As a topic, we have touched on this before, back in our Great Conversation series; there, we were principally concerned with the philosophical and scientific meanings of “cause,” rather than its use in rhetoric. The sciences are, overwhelmingly, attempts at uncovering the unseen causes of effects we see, or at predicting the effects of causes we can bring about. By following the chain in one direction, we may discover that lightning is an electrical discharge; by following it in the other, we can create cunning webs of aluminum, copper, and tungsten spanning hundreds of miles that allow us, with the flick of a switch, to illuminate a city.
As for philosophic causality, we are apt at this juncture to think of things like the cosmological argument, and assume that this is a basically religious topic—or to think of more simplistic, even degraded, examples of people claiming to read signs and omens, interpreting even everyday happenings as messages from the supernal realm. But there is at least one form of philosophical reasoning about cause and effect that has been with us as far back as human memory goes, appearing both in the most superstitious and the most skeptical cultures. That form, put bluntly, is guilt. Every judicial proceeding, civil as well as criminal, is an attempt to determine who or what is the cause of some effect in the eyes of the law, and then, whether and to what extent the effect can and shall be reversed.
Corpus omne perservare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.
That every body remains remains in its state of resting, or of moving uniformly in a straight line, until it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
Precautions
Given the perennial popularity of litigation, and the last couple of centuries’ scientific advances and the technological achievements built upon them, it is natural that cause-and-effect reasoning should be popular. However, among scholars of rhetoric, this topos does not enjoy quite the same esteem—and, of course, there is a reason for that. In a lecture originally delivered in 1962, University of Chicago English professor Richard Weaver said,
If a speaker should define man as a creature with an indefeasible right to freedom and should upon this base an argument that a certain man or group of men are entitled to freedom, he would be arguing from definition. … Cause and effect appears in this scale to be a less exalted form of argument, though we all have to use it because we are historical men. … Those who are partial to arguments based on effect are under a temptation to play too much upon the fears of their audience by stressing the awful nature of some consequence or by exaggerating the power of some cause. Modern advertising is prolific in this kind of abuse. There is likewise a temptation to appeal to prudential considerations only … An even less admirable subvariety of this source is the appeal to circumstance, which is the least philosophical of all the topics of argument. …
An example of this which we hear nowadays with great regularity is: “We must adapt ourselves to a fast-changing world.” This … does not pretend, even, to offer a cause-and-effect explanation. If it did, the first part would tell us why we must adapt ourselves to a fast-changing world; and the second would tell us the result of our doing so. The usually heard formulation does neither. … It simply cites a brute circumstance and says, “Step lively.”1
This does not mean (and Weaver did not think) that the topos of cause and effect is a fallacy. Nor does it follow that every instance of reasoning from causality is as intellectually crass as the shabbiest appeals to circumstance that he cites with such distaste. Indeed, insofar as we ourselves are capable of causing things, or at any rate of resisting effects, every exhortation to any virtue is intimately involved in this kind of reasoning, and in a kindred sense, the topoi of causality and definition meet in such exalted pieces of rhetoric as I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
For that matter, some uses of this topos claim to be dealing with wholly moral or spiritual causality—the Biblical book of Job is rich with such material, and the Gospel of John also touches on it in a famous passage. But here we come upon another difficulty: namely, that reasoning about causality can actually be fairly hard to do, even in the physical realm, which at least affords us the opportunity to check how correct our reasoning really is by experiment. Taking a fictional passage from quite a different sort of author:
“I was very pleased to learn,” the abbot continued, “that in numerous cases you decided the accused was innocent. … Inquisitors often, to demonstrate their zeal, wrest a confession from the accused at all costs … I like to think you pronounced a sentence of guilty only when—”
“—the accused were guilty of criminal acts, of poisoning, of the corruption of innocent youths, or other abominations my mouth dares not utter—”
“—that you pronounced sentence only when,” the abbot continued, not heeding the interruption, “the presence of the Devil was so evident to all eyes that it was impossible to act otherwise without the clemency’s being more scandalous than the crime itself.”
“When I found someone guilty,” William explained, “he had really committed crimes of such gravity that in all conscience I could hand him over to the secular arm.”
The abbot was bewildered for a moment. “Why,” he asked, “do you insist on speaking of criminal acts without referring to their diabolical cause?”
“Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. … I do not say it is impossible: the Devil, like your horse Brunellus, also indicates his passage through clear signs. But why must I hunt for these proofs? … Who am I to express judgments on the plots of the Evil One, especially,” he added, and seemed to want to insist on this reason, “in cases where those who had initiated the inquisition, the bishop, the city magistrates, and the whole populace, perhaps the accused themselves, truly wanted to feel the presence of the Devil?”2
1Language Is Sermonic, pp. 212-215 of the 1970 edition published by Louisiana State University Press, edited by Richard Johannesen, Rennard Strickland, and Ralph Eubanks.
2Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, First Day: Terce (pp. 29-31 of the 1983 English translation published by Harcourt Books). The original text has ellipses (…) where we have placed em-dashes (—); this substitution was made to avoid confusion between interruptions in a character’s speech and discontinuities in our excerpt of the text.
An alumnus of the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s in Classics, Gabriel Blanchard serves as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like our above-mentioned series on the Great Conversation—the great web of philosophical, scientific, artistic, political, and spiritual interchange that our culture is part of. It features posts on the nature of signs and symbols, the meaning and history of magic, the idea of humor (and the humors), the institution of the family, the spheres and varieties of authority, and dozens more topics. Happy reading, and have a safe and pleasant Fourth of July weekend!
Published on 3rd July, 2025. Page image of The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone (1771) by Joseph Wright, depicting Hennig Brand’s discovery of phosphorus.