d and
understood. The history of man is the history of a constant and
continuous seeking for the truth. Amazed before a universe of facts,
he has striven earnestly to discover the truth which underlies
them--striven heroically to understand the large reality of which the
actual is but a sensuously perceptible embodiment. In the earliest
centuries of recorded thought the search was unmethodical; truth was
apprehended, if at all, by intuition, and announced as dogma: but in
modern centuries certain regular methods have been devised to guide
the search. The modern scientist begins his work by collecting a large
number of apparently related facts and arranging them in an orderly
manner. He then proceeds to induce from the observation of these facts
an apprehension of the general law that explains their relation. This
hypothesis is then tested in the light of further facts, until it
seems so incontestable that the minds of men accept it as the truth.
The scientist then formulates it in an abstract theoretic statement,
and thus concludes his work.

But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Accepting
many truths from many scientists, the philosopher compares,
reconciles, and correlates them, and thus builds out of them a
structure of belief. But this structure of belief remains abstract and
theoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn.
Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and the
philosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginative
embodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back into
concrete terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them
imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and indued to actuality;
and thus he gives expression to the truth.

=The Necessary Triple Process.=--This triple process of the
scientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artistic
expression of truth has been explained at length, because every
great writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental
process. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth,
not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter.
His theme is human life. It is some truth of human life that he
endeavors to discover, to understand, and to announce; and in
order to complete his work, he must apply to human life an attention
of thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, and
artistic. He must first observe carefully