point of view. Other studies, distinct from that of literature, multiplied, and invaded the educational curriculum: reducing the portion of the whole that could be allotted to classical literature, reducing in the main the literary element of classical study, which begins only when the difficult languages have been mastered. The situation could be met only by specialization; and hence arose the departmental scheme of study which still obtains the arrangement by which different students in different classrooms are engaged with Greek, Latin, Oriental, Romance, German, English literatures, studying these in connection with the respective languages, and with much else that is important but is not literature. It is clear that a study of literature so divided cannot, even under the best circumstances, rise above the provincial; for a large proportion of those who enter into it it becomes little beyond a study of language. Such breaking up of the whole field into independent departments would not be tolerated for a moment in a study of philosophy, or a study of history. Specialization of the same kind belongs to the pursuit of the natural sciences. But here the ever minuter subdivision of the field, essential for the investigator, is balanced by an ever growing sense that the Nature which is being examined from so many points of view is one and the same. There is no such catholic grasp of literature: no tendency to correlate one literature with another, modern with ancient; no instinct of perspective which seeks to view particular questions as they arise in the light of the study as a whole. Literary study remains a country without a map. Hence the unity of literature becomes the first postulate for sound literary study.

In addition to this consideration, there are two master ideas of modern thought which will be found to have only slightly affected the study of literature as it obtains at present. These are inductive observation, and evolution. As to each of these some explanation is necessary.

The attempt is sometimes made to depreciate the importance of inductive method as a characteristic of modern thought. It is claimed that modern observers do not in fact proceed on the system formulated for them by Bacon; that logical processes which are the converse of inductive have a large space in the field of modern science. But such objections seem to be beside the mark. The question is not one of logic, which is concerned with the possible modes of thinking, but with the habits of thought which, at particular times, are found to prevail. The modern observer does not think in the scheme of Bacon or Mill, just as the deductive philosopher does not think in syllogisms. Thinking, alike for the thinker and his reader, is an instinctive process, unconscious of its steps; it makes no matter how the successive steps have been reached-whether by system, or by intuition, or by happy chance so long as they meet acceptance. The criterion comes when some step in the process is challenged: then it is that the deductive reasoner falls back upon his syllogisms, the inductive thinker verifies by observation of the matter in hand. In modern philosophy, induction does not supersede other modes of thought; but it serves as a standard to which, ultimately, they are referred. Deductive mathematics may be the most fitting mode of arriving at a system of moving bodies; but a leading use of that system when it is attained is to confront it with positive observation of actual moving bodies. Large portions of modern speculative thought will be in regions in which observation and verification are impracticable; such speculations will remain the least certain and convincing parts of philosophy; while, if they touch any point where observation becomes possible, by such verification they will stand or fall.

Now, of all studies, that of literature is the one in which there least appears this instinct of verification by observation of the subject-matter. A modern review will be effective by

reason of the literary skill with which it is presented; by the literary interest which the reading of it evokes. If the reader were to turn from the review to the work treated, in order to see how far this has been elucidated by what he has just read, no one would be more surprised than the reviewer. Discussions of literary theory proceed for the most part on trains of a priori reasoning: if particular pieces of literature do not harmonize with the reasoning, so much the worse for the literature. If we seek the principles on which the reasoning rests, often these have been constructed on the spur of the moment; or they are a mere tradition from the past; or they have the authority of a great name; or there is begging of the question by dogmatic pronouncements as to what good taste requires. A theory of Hamlet will be welcomed because it is new; or because it is extremely interesting; or because it falls in with some favorite ethical principle. No doubt it will be supported by quotations from the play-quotations that tell in its favor: if objection be made that the theory leaves large parts of the poem without significance, this can be met by the suggestion that Shakespeare was an irregular genius, who did not frame his play to please the critics of the future. The same Shakespeare is handled by those whose interest is philology, or textual criticism: it is instructive to contrast the care with which the philologist or textual critic will marshal his authorities, weigh evidence, show conscientious desire to account for apparent exceptions, with the broad generalizations of the purely literary critic, who is secure in his confidence that the theory will not be confronted with the poem it is advanced to explain. Thus, even at this late date, we have to plead—as if it were a novelty -that literary questions are questions to be decided upon evidence. Of course, in this as in other studies there is abundant room for a priori reasoning. But any study is open to suspicion, as long as it evades the verification of theory by appeal to the subject-matter.

The second of the important ideas is evolution. Of course, evolution is not a modern, but one of the most ancient of all conceptions. Not only the early philosophy of Plato, but the poetry which preceded philosophy, is full of evolution. Hesiodic poetry starts with the evolution of gods and universe. The Prometheus of Aeschylus is a study in evolution: the long disquisition of Prometheus on his benefits to mankind is simply the evolution of human civilization, with a startling climax in the art of divination. Not to be behindhand, Aristophanic comedy presents the Chorus of Birds singing the evolution of all things out of an embryonic 'wind-egg.' What modern thought has done is to give greater definiteness to the conception of evolution, seeing in it the differentiation by gradual process of specific varieties out of what was more general, and the reunion of species in new combinations. For our present purpose the important thing is to distinguish two mental attitudes: what may be called the static and the evolutionary attitude of mind. The static thinker is possessed by fixed ideas, or fixed standards, usually drawn from the state of things he sees around him: these he, half-unconsciously, brings to bear upon regions of thought the most remote from his own. An eighteenthcentury thinker was conscious of living in a world in which individuality played a great part, yet not without some concession to social claims: with this consciousness he surveys the origin of society, and finds it in some social contract by which the individual surrenders part of his individual liberty in return for the advantages of social protection. It has not occurred to him that this individuality he was taking for granted was, historically, the late product, evolved slowly out of the social ideals he was trying to explain. A literary critic has been born into an age of books and original authors, to whom plagiarism is a sin. With such prepossessions he inquires whether David or some other person 'wrote' a particular psalm, whether Homer is the 'author' of the Iliad. It does not occur

to him that writing and books and authors make a particular stage of literature; that originality had to be invented, while what corresponds to plagiarism was the conventionality from which originality was an off-shoot. Whole studies have been revolutionized by turning from static principles, taken for granted as universal, to the interrogation of history for the developing principles by which its successive stages are interpreted. The static thinker will speak freely of evolution: but to him evolution means the advance up to his fixed standards, and again degeneration from them. In the other habit of mind the bias is toward the idea of process, rather than the idea of fixity: the variety appearing in things it seeks to express, not in distinctions fortified by limiting definitions, but as so many terms in a process that interprets them all. The study of literature has been traditionally static. To approach literature with the evolutionary mental attitude will bring solution for most of the controversies by which literary study has been distracted.

In what follows I propose to speak of Literary Morphology, Literary Evolution, Literary Criticism, and again to review the Philosophic and the Artistic aspects of literature. In the treatment of these subjects the foundation principles will be inductive observation of literature as it actually is, and emphasis on evolutionary processes. And the field of view from which the literature treated is to be drawn will be determined by the conception of literature as a unity.