Points of view [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION ' Well, we had good talk, ' was the remark of Dr. Johnson after an evening spent with his friends at the 'Crown and Anchor' tavern. This was his way of saying that he had been successfully provocative, and that a good ding-dong battle of wits had been fought. No doubt the Doctor was inclined to overdo it on these occasions, as we see from Boswell's comment : 'Yes, sir ; you tossed and gored several persons.' But even if his friends did not always enjoy the tossing and goring as much as he did, they must have come away with a feeling of mental exhilaration and an enhanced capacity for precise thinking on the subjects discussed. That indeed is the chief justification of provocative discourse : the lazy-minded and the conventional are forced to look at their ideas afresh and re-examine the logical basis of their theories ; the mists of ignorance and prejudice are dispelled so that the light of truth may appear. It must be admitted, however, that controversialists do not always exhibit the purity of motive implied in this justification. Dr. Johnson, we know, frequently 'talked for victory' rather than for the ascertainment of truth. It was one of the paradoxes of his character that, though as a moralist he constantly stressed the need for a scrupulous regard for truth, as a debater he would freely resort to overstatement and even wrong-headed perversion of fact : the moralist's austere