imaginative even within its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto ourselves abides,—the human soul, though never seen face to face. To enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order, is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the outward order is brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within.

In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from consideration. The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a state of mind and a state of external fact. Under one aspect, so much of the action as is included in any single life and is there a linked sequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of that individual. Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth the relations of all the characters involved, of their several courses of experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, has its unity in the constitution of the universe,—the impersonal order, that structure of being itself, which is independent of man's will, which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he must accept without appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, to which man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its broadest conception the power that increases life, and all things are under its sway. Its sphere is above man's will; he knows it as immutable law in himself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though we say that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world of the soul's life, so under the other it shadows forth the invisible will of God, we do not escape from the outward world. Sense is still the medium by which only man knows his brother man and God also as through a glass 

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