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concluded, in The Methodical Memory, was the unfortunate
hallmark of the empirical science-spurred advent of Current-
Traditional Rhetoric in nineteenth century America. For
Crowley, the rigorous privileging of Reason by the “natural” or
“physical” Sciences – engendered through scientific
investigation and the collection and cataloguing of scientific
knowledge and “truth” – manifested itself in rhetoric through a
“quasi-scientific bias” against anything that was “nonrational”
or simply “irrational”: all that is disparate and unpredictable
and impetuous and, yet again, uncertain. And 19 th
century
rhetoricians’ adoption of those Reason-headed principles and
even practices of the science laboratory was inappropriate
because, as Crowley declares, “Rhetoric is notoriously
unscientific” (10), explaining further, later in her book, that,
“Given its inextricable connection with specific cultural and
social contexts, […] rhetorical practice and its effects are not
predictable in the ways in which philosophers of rhetoric have
assumed them to be. That is to say, rhetorical theory cannot be
scientific” (166). But, unfortunately, those rhetorical
theorists and practitioners whose work would serve as the
foundation for Current-Traditional Rhetoric did indeed imitate
Science, or at least attempt to, most crucially its deification
of Reason. Upon the consequences of this privileging of Reason
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