fitting symbol for pure radiant joy--a sort of prolonged, exultant, celestial state of joy. A shadow, to the mature mind, lies over the brightest and most delightful of life’s happenings. He suggests that a poet who should try to imitate music in this respect could do little but write the word “Joy!” with exclamation marks. He could write nothing else that was unambiguous. And, indeed, a symbol is always ambiguous unless, like the symbols of the mathematician, its meaning is completely exhausted by its symbolic intent. The symbol distracts; it brings with it a crowd of irrelevant associations, and for that reason, even when the symbols are most superbly handled, as in _Macbeth_, the resultant communication is less definite than with music. But the very great, the immense, importance of literature lies in the fact that it can, partially at least, shape the facts of life so as to make them consonant with the nature of man. If experience can furnish symbols which express the deepest needs and aspirations of the soul, then life can be, at least partially, illuminated. For man can understand nothing which is not consonant with his own nature. The literature which truly illuminates life is the literature which interprets life most fully in terms of our own emotions and aspirations. In this sense not only all literature, but all science, is anthropomorphic. Science is only possible in so far as it is logical. That is to say, the universe can only be understood in so far as its happenings are obedient to the laws of man’s own mind. In its relation to mathematics, where the mind pays no attention to the arbitrary conditions of experience, physics plays something of the same part as is played by literature in its relation to music. Both physics and literature, in their universal function, are concerned with a world which _need_ not obey the laws native to the spirit of man. Such illumination as they can give is dependent upon, as it were, what correspondences they can find. The revelation of life afforded by _The Brothers Karamazov_, for instance, consists in relating the phenomena of life to the deepest impulses of the spirit of man. Only so does life become in any measure truly comprehended; and it is in this respect that such works differ from those reports on life where we may recognise and assent to everything, but where our comprehension of anything is not deepened. Such works as _The Brothers Karamazov_ may be called philosophic, if we use the word to include something other than purely intellectual understanding.