Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/44

 expression of an impersonal "law," of an order of events to which innumerable social and physical causes have contributed? It is the work of creative art to bring before us "live human figures;" and an artist's view of literary and every other kind of history is best conceived from this strongly individual standpoint. But requirements of art are one thing, truths of science another; and a little reflection will convince us that Kingsley's idea of character-history is far less truthful than artistic.

§ 8. To understand history we must understand men and women. True; but men and women are exceedingly complex units, and their treatment as purely isolated units would not only fail to contribute to the understanding of history, but would tend to resolve all human knowledge into a mass of disconnected atoms among which all general principles and even thought itself would perish. In order to understand either ourselves or history we must therefore combine and compare these personal units with each other, with the rest of the animal world, with physical nature. The bodies of men and women consist of components which may be chemically resolved into the vegetable and mineral elements of other animals and of physical nature. Their unreflecting emotions seem to be a current of sense-life not greatly different from that of other animals. But their social sympathies vary from a sense of obligation as narrow as that of clan-ties to one as wide as universal brotherhood; and their individual reason varies from the weakest sense of personal existence to the most profound depths of subjective philosophy. So far as the elements of each individual man or woman are shared with other animals and physical nature, we have certainly not reached the sphere of biographies or autobiographies. But when we have reached the sphere within which