image is not the god; Christianity is the religion of idealism, for Christ is God incarnate. Idealism presents the reality itself, the universal truth made manifest in the concrete type, and there present and embodied in its characteristics as they are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction of thought, symbolically or allegorically.

The way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently plain; but it may be useful, with respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the analogy which has been said to exist between it and an illustrative scientific experiment. If scientific law is declared experimentally, the course of nature is modified by intent; certain conditions are secured, certain others eliminated; a selected train of phenomena is then set in motion to the end that the law may be illustrated, and nothing else. In a perfect experiment the law is in full operation. In plot there is a like selection of persons, situations, and incidents so arranged as to disclose the working of that order which obtains in man's life. The law may be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a brief way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many characters in an abundance of action over a wide scene as in Shakspere; in either case equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man's life of what shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in action. The process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. The common method of all is to present the universal law in a particular instance made for the purpose.

In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers no transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essence of type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universality in the particular instance. There is a sense in which this general truth is more real, as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomena come and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man's breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that the mind strives for in idealism,—this organic form of life, the object of all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, are thus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in every branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are only a part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in using them, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differ in appearance from like 

 Prev. P 47/137 next