Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/184

 and say that the tendency to connect the facts of history with the overruling operations of law is fast breaking down the barriers which separate our views of the government of the material world from those we hold concerning the affairs of man; so that it is safe to predict that the time is not far distant when, in a philosophical point of view, no very perceptible difference will be seen between the forces which control the conduct and career of nations and those which preside over the movements and revolutions of planets.

In view of this overshadowing influence, it were useless to touch upon the minor disturbances which science is producing upon history. It may almost be described as the grand motive power, which, in our day, is dragging the car of history along with it, as it drags all the rest in the train of literature. Whether they are the luxurious palace cars, like poetry and history, furnished with all the elegance which man's inventive genius has been accumulating for centuries, and which only the richly-endowed may enter, or whether they are the plainer passenger-cars, like fiction and eloquence, filled with a group of motley characters, of greater or less pretensions and importance, and tricked out in a variety of costumes—they are all whirled along over the same road, obedient to the impulse given them by the mighty machine which stands, or rather flies, at the head of the train.

The highest aim of science is to discover the truths of nature. Literature, aspiring to something similar to this, recognizes the highest merit of literary composition in what is called its "truth to nature." In delineations of character, in descriptions of scenery, in the skillful weaving together of the component parts of a play or a novel, in the birth of sentiment, or in the happy turn given to an expression, what we most admire is the writer's adherence to certain rules or standards that have the closest conformity with what we observe in the internal or external worlds. From what we perceive in ourselves or in things around us, we derive the measure and gauge of all literary excellence. True, our own perceptions are trained and quickened by the thoughts and perceptions of others; so that what we read or hear aids us in correcting, enlarging, or refining our literary judgments. But we must be able to combine empirical tests with subjective analysis, before the intellectual process can be completed which authorizes us to determine whether any given production reaches that highest grade of excellence implied in its being "true to nature." But what, it may be asked, does this truth to nature actually consist in? Is it necessary that the author should set before us something that really exists?—something to be seen in nature, like a tree or a waterfall? Do we require of him an absolute verity? So far from this, it is only necessary that he should not shock us with anything that, at first sight, is repugnant to our tastes or feelings—anything that bears on its face the marks of falsehood or extravagance. Within these limits, a "counterfeit presentment" is as good as the original. All that the most fastidious