arising in our consciousness under the actor's
genius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who
makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scene
that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any
illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.

And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through our
own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret the
external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known
only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to
our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never
seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is
not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within
its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live
in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto
ourselves abides,--the human soul, though never seen face to face. To
enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as
sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of
personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order,
is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the outward order is
brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field,
yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within.

In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single
soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from
consideration. The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a
double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a
state of mind and a state of external fact. Under one aspect, so much
of the action as is included in any single life and is there a linked
sequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of that
individual. Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth
the relations of all the characters involved, of their several courses
of experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, has
its unity in the constitution of the universe,--the impersonal order,
that structure of being itself, which is independent of man's will,
which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he must
accept without appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, to
which man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its br