All I will do is to state a possibility. If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people--a very few people, but a few novelists are among them--are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is possible it means the end of imaginative literature--which if I understand him rightly is the view of that acute enquirer, Mr. I. A. Richards. Anyhow--that way lies movement and even combustion for the novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result. I do not know on the verge of which philosophy or what rival philosophies the above remarks are wavering, but as I look back at my own scraps of knowledge and into my own heart, I see these two movements of the human mind: the great tedious onrush known as history, and a shy crablike sideways movement. Both movements have been neglected in these lectures: history because it only carries people on, it is just a train full of passengers; and the crablike movement because it is too slow and cautious to be visible over our tiny period of two hundred years. So we laid it down as an axiom when we started that human nature is unchangeable, and that it produces in rapid succession prose fictions, which fictions, when they contain 50,000 words or more, are called novels. If we had the power or license to take a wider view, and survey all human and pre-human activity, we might not conclude like this; the crablike movement, the shiftings of the passengers, might be visible, and the phrase "the development of the novel" might cease to be a pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important, because it implied the development of humanity. INDEX OF MAIN REFERENCES Alain, 73-74 Aristotle, 126-129 Asquith, Mr., 161 Austen, Jane, 100-101, 112-114 Beerbohm, Max, 171-175 Bennett, Arnold, 62-63 Birth, treatment of, 76-77, 81-82 Blake, William, 211 Brontë, Charlotte, 139-140 Brontë, Emily, 209-211 C. P. S., 210 Chevalley, Abel, 17 Clark, W. G., 13-15 Death, treatment of, 76, 82-83 Defoe, Daniel, 87-95 Dickens, Charles, 32-34, 104, 108-109, 119-120 Dickinson, Lowes, 177 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 188-195 Douglas, Norman, 107-108 Eliot, George, 184-188 Eliot, T. S., 41 Fantasy defined, 158-159 Fielding, Henry, 118, 124, 175-176 "Flat" characters, 103-112 Food, treatment of, 77, 83 France, Anatole, 214-215 Freeman, John, 204 Garnett, David, 161 Gide, André, 121-122, 146-153 Goldsmith, Oliver, 143