INTRODUCTION. 'N the treatment of literature the proposition which seems Proposi IN treatment of literatureof assertion at the present moment is, that there is an inductive science of literary criticism. As botany deals inductively with the phenomena of vegetable life and traces the laws underlying them, as economy reviews and systematises on inductive principles the facts of commerce, so there is a criticism not less inductive in character which has for its subject-matter literature. tion. tion in The presumption is clearly that literary criticism should Presumpfollow other branches of thought in becoming inductive. favour of Ultimately, science means no more than organised thought; inductive literary and amongst the methods of organisation induction is the criticism. most practical. To begin with the observation of facts; to advance from this through the arrangement of observed facts; to use à priori ideas, instinctive notions of the fitness of things, insight into far probabilities, only as side-lights for suggesting convenient arrangements, the value of which is tested only by the actual convenience in arranging they afford; to be content with the sure results so obtained as 'theory' in the interval of waiting for still surer results based on a yet wider accumulation of facts: this is a regimen for healthy science so widely established in different tracts of thought as almost to rise to that universal acceptance which we call common sense. Indeed the whole progress of science consists in winning fresh fields of thought to the inductive methods. |