Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/77

 The system of caste, with its corporate and impersonal conceptions of human being, could not humanise nature in at all the same manner as that strongly-developed individualism which meets us in the cities of Greece. Ideas of human existence more or less impersonal are found in all early communities where, as in the clan, the individual is morally merged in the corporate being of his group; and the weak sense of personality in such social conditions is readily transferred to the phenomena of nature. Indeed, one of the main results of that development of personal consciousness which everywhere accompanies that of individual independence from communal restraints, is to see nature no longer clothed in the confused and confusing garb of man's early personality, but in clear contrast with a profound consciousness of each man's individual being.

But we have now illustrated the social and physical relativity of literature at sufficient length. It is time for us to ask what use the scientific student of literature can make of such relativity. Over and above the influences of climate and scenery, plant-life and animal-life, can we discover any tolerably permanent principle of social evolution round which the facts of literary growth and decay may be grouped? And, assuming that some such principle has been discovered, what is the proper method by which the collection of facts and their reference to this central principle shall proceed? It is to these questions that we now propose to turn; and first to the problem whether the growth and decay of literature contain any such guiding principle in spite of their apparent chaos of limited causes and effects.