Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/115

 now reaps in language, in law, in political economy; in fine, in the most accurate and most extended knowledge of history which the world has ever known. Science, like a hundred-handed Briareus, working in many a field, yet watching with the eyes of an Argus all the richly varied ingathering, has learned how to probe among the very roots of social thought, and speech, and action. The hands of the mighty Titan have found the clan ideas, the clan facts, at the roots of property and political institutions, of legal rights, religious doctrines, and moral principles. Are we not justified in the belief that we shall find them also at the roots of literature?

What is a "clan"? As already observed, we are not to suppose that all clans are exactly alike. Trades-unions and co-operative associations are called by their respective common names, yet even with our abundant means of contemporary information we are content to merge individual differences in our general notions of the one and the other. The ancient clan groups—not a whit the less ancient because they coexist with the most advanced civilisation as at the present day—differ widely from trades-unions and co-operative societies in being for the most part of natural, not artificial, growth. They are groups not made with hands, not planned with a set purpose, not supplied with defined rules which can be printed and exhibited in the rooms of a club, but intensely united by bonds of common thought and feeling compared with which the deepest sentiments of Christian communion can hardly be regarded as other than artificial. This bond of unity is common kinship, common ancestry. Not realised as an idea of the intellect, not reflected upon as an emotion of the heart, but profoundly felt to be the centre of social life, this common kinship is as real as though it could be touched in the person of