soning, we have reached a
conclusion that is something more than a matter of fact, a conclusion
touching our emotions and having vital spiritual interest to us, the
experience, whether our own directly or at second hand, has brought us
to a truth. Truth is, perhaps, that matter of fact of universal
intelligence that transcends the matter of fact of the finite mind.

=11. Literary Principles and Qualities.=--There are some fundamental
principles of literary presentation which we may briefly review here.
All our study of science, and in a less obvious fashion, of all the
physical, social, and artistic world about us, is more or less an
attempt to classify, simplify, and unify facts whose relations we do not
see at a glance. We must observe and learn the facts first, but they
will be of no great utility to us as unrelated items of knowledge. The
need of establishing some sort of law and order in our understanding of
the mass of phenomena of which we must take cognizance is so insistent
that we early acquire the habit of attempting to hold in mind any new
fact through its relation to some other fact or facts. In other words,
we can retain the knowledge we acquire only by making one fact do duty
for a great many other facts included in it. Our writing must not
violate what is at once a necessity and a pleasure of the mind. Unity,
simplicity, coherence, harmony, or congruity, must all be sought as
essential qualities of any writing. We must also indicate our sense of
the relative values of the things with which we deal by a proper
selection of details for presentation, a careful subordination of the
less important to the more important through the proportion of space and
attention given to each, and through other devices for securing
emphasis. Let us keep in mind value, selection, subordination,
proportion, emphasis, as a second group of terms for principles involved
in writing. We may also wish to give our subject further elements of
appeal through what may be suggested beyond the telling, through the
melody and rhythm of the words, or through a quickening of the sense of
the beautiful. Suggestion, melody, rhythm, beauty, are to be included,
then, in a third group of qualities that may contribute to the
effectiveness of what we write.

=12. Conceptual Writing.=--Of the literary qualities that have just been
discussed, only the first group is perhaps essential to what has been
designated as conceptual writing. Here we may pl