In Chaïm Perelman, Ray Dearin and I contend that presence transcends
the isolated effects that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca catalogue; we contend that
there is a global form, a synergy of effects in which “to be persuaded is to live in a
world made significantly different by the persuader.” Later, on my own, I extend
this form of presence from the verbal to the visual. In this paper, I attempt to further
this analysis of presence, to offer a systematic account of the verbal-visual interaction
on which it depends, to offer, in effect, a genealogy of presence. Such an account is
essential if we are to explain the mystery of verbal-visual presence, to explain what
is, in fact, the central mystery of Perelmanian presence, the transformation of the
perceptual into the argumentative. My example is Darwin’s first masterpiece, The
Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs