Ethos has seemed to be in general an elusive device. Aristotle thought ethos the most influential of rhetorical appeals, although in Rhetoric he provided only cursory explanation of ethos, unlike logos, pathos, and style (Kinneavy and Warshauer 172). Of this paucity of coverage, S. Michael Halloran ribbed: "Of the three modes of appeal, Aristotle acknowledges ethos to be probably the most important, though he seems to wish that logos were." (60) Recent discussions of ethos offer a more psychological angle, including the idea that "character, in many instances, is the force of an argument" (Alcorn 4).