To the humanist, however, this liability is precisely its momentous importance. Here is mind itself by which man becomes human out of brute, mind in symmetry as it develops by confronting life and carrying on the adventure. According to its competence it apprehends the scene, the play, and the players, conceives the significance of the plot, exercises its judgment, lays its guiding principles, and conducts its affairs in wisdom or unwisdom, justice or injustice, harmony or inharmony. That it may be the mind of a fool is always its tragic possibility. In shifting the basic common discipline from humane letters to natural science, then, modernism has, in so far, _abandoned the mind_. I say this in conscious enjoyment of hyperbole. There remains just so much of mind as develops in casual experience--that corrupting casual experience which science so sedulously avoids in its technology. But the point at issue is one of discipline, the conscious extension of mental competence beyond the limits of casual experience. Plainly the discipline of natural science neglects much of the mind as irrelevant. For natural science is an attempt to picture and understand the material universe as it still would be if the knower were not in it--things and their relations to each other. The virtue sought by the man of science is the ability to ignore what he, by the accident of his conscious existence, thrusts into the situation. Obviously this discipline will articulate the consciousness for thought only here within this field of knowledge--among things and their relations, to the rigid exclusion of the knower and his affairs. Humane letters, on the other hand, make no such exclusion. They too deal with things and their relations. But they include what natural science ignores--the knower and his responsive evaluation of what he knows. Literature looks out from the common centre at which the experience of life itself places us. It is an imaginative, reflective extension of that experience. And it does directly what experience itself does only indirectly if at all, for being articulate or nothing--symbol and meaning forever hand in glove--it specifically articulates the reader’s mind, enriching and clarifying the premisses of consciousness with which in turn that mind thinks in the field of common human responsibility. Here is the telling difference between the literate and the empiric mind--not in intelligence, not in specific knowledge, but in the substance and quality of the premisses of thought.