dly have acquired
any real sense of the beautiful; save for them we could not have known
anything of truth. No accurate definition of these things carefully
distinguishing between them can be attempted here. It may be assumed
that what is meant by matters of fact will be understood without
definition. As we read the story in great measure for the purpose of
enlarging our experience, this part of our possible literary material is
worth considering further. In the child we are able to detect very early
a growing curiosity. That curiosity does not disappear when the child
has grown from boy to man; he is still asking questions of the universe,
still trying to piece the fragments of his knowledge into a law-ordered
and will-ordered whole. What he knows has been the product of
experience, what he may yet know further must be the product of
experience. This experience may not all be personal, but even that which
he gets at second hand is so far useful in helping him toward that
understanding of the universe for which he hopes. He never will reach
that understanding, all his experience will make but a fraction of
things to be known matters of fact to him; and yet a deathless interest
in the scarcely recognized belief that the facts and forces of which he
has known have some unifying principle makes his emotions quicken at
every new experience that may have possible significance.

=10. Appeal of Experience, Beauty, and Truth.=--It will be evident,
then, that experience which somehow makes the impression of superior
importance may be presented inorganically and yet gain an interested
hearing. The method of creating this impression, whether through the
appearance of conviction in the writer or by various literary devices,
need not detain us here. We shall be concerned merely with noting that
the possible relation of the particular to the general, of this
experience to the whole of experience, makes it a thing of moment. In
just what way experience develops in us the sense of the beautiful, just
what it is in anything that makes us distinguish beauty in it, cannot
now be determined. It will be enough for us to know that literature
makes a large appeal to a sense of the beautiful in us, a sense not
fortuitous and irrational, though varying, but normal and almost
universal, dependent upon natural laws of development. Truth is also
difficult of definition, but we may understand that when out of
experience, as through a process of rea