Although the increasingly ‘critical attitude’ of the reading public had been largely fuelled by the unrelenting dissemination of fiercely competing and frequently highly didactic discourses of the Revolution Controversy, overtly moralizing religious propaganda, and the didactic dissemination of all ‘received ideologies’ (as Jonathan Rose has demonstrated), suspicions about competing claims to truth in this period also had their origins in an increasing disdain for the earlier influences of ‘New Rhetoricians’ such as George Campbell, Joseph Priestley and Hugh Blair. ‘New Rhetoricians’ attempted, in the words of Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)

By the end of the eighteenth century, however, such tactics came to be viewed with the same mounting scepticism as that being bestowed upon didacticism. For Coleridge, rhetorical principles aimed specifically at ‘convincing, pleasing, moving, or persuading’ could effectively reason anybody into believing anything – just as the ‘eristic’ methods of the Sophists in Plato's dialogues had demonstrated. As James Mulvihill has observed, because of such ‘false rationalism’ and