natural and not artificial. Of a thousand persons of all ages who read the “Iliad,” the hundred who get the most out of it will include men, women, and children, some who have “higher” education and some who have not, well-informed men and uninformed boys. The hundred will be those who have the most imagination. The boy of fourteen who has an active intelligence can understand Shakespeare better than the least imaginative of those who have taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at our universities. The man of imagination, even if he has taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, will find deeper delight and wisdom in Shakespeare than the uninformed boy. Readers differ in individual capacities and in the extent of their experience in intellectual matters. But class differences, especially school-made differences, are swept away by the power of literature, which abhors inessential distinctions and goes direct to the human intelligence. The direct appeal of literature to the human intelligence and human emotions is what we mean by our principle of union. Nothing can divorce us from the poet if we have a spark of poetry in us. The contact of mind between poet and reader is immediate, and is effected without any go-between, any intercessor or critical negotiator. Now, what happens to the principles of our declaration of independence and the constitution of our democracy of readers when we open to a page of one of Darwin’s works on biology, or a page of the philosopher Plato, and find that we do not get the sense of it at all? We can understand the “Iliad,” the “Book of Job,” “Macbeth,” “Faust”; they mean _something_ to us, even if we do not receive their whole import. But here, in two great thinkers who have influenced the whole intellectual world, Plato and Darwin, we come upon pages that to us mean absolutely nothing. The works of Plato and Darwin are certainly literature. But they are something else besides: they are science, and the understanding of them depends on a knowledge of the science that went before the particular pages that are so meaningless to us. Here is a kind of literature, the mere reading of which requires special training.