The dramatic art, based on the science of human nature in the revelation of its inner states through outer signs, is the exercise of that power whereby man can indefinitely multiply his personality and life, by identifying himself with others, or others with himself, by divesting himself of himself and entering into the characters, situations, and experiences of those whom he beholds or reads of or creatively imagines. This definition elevates the art, in its pure practice, high above the reach of cavil; for its central principle is the essence of that disinterested sympathy and vicarious atonement whose culmination on Calvary have deified the Christ. Let us trace a little the rise and nature of this power from a point of view somewhat different from the one in which we have already considered it. The life of a peach-tree, a rose-bush, or a squash-vine is rigidly determined for it in advance by the seed from which it springs and the soil and climate in which it grows. Its life is simply the sum of actions and reactions between the forces in itself and the forces in its environment; and this sum of dynamic relations is fixed fatally by its organic structure. To a degree the same is true of the life of a weasel, a pig, a horse, or an eagle; but this with two modifications, two elements of greatening freedom and variety. First, in connection with the consciousness and the power of locomotion which distinguish the animal from the vegetable, it can change its environment, from cliff to cave, from village to desert, from field to shore, from hill to valley, or from a temperate zone to a tropical, thus securing a large mass of changes in its surrounding conditions, resulting in a correspondent diversity or increase in that sum of actions and reactions which composes its life. Second, the gregarious nature of animals enables them likewise, to some extent, to supplement one another, to exchange states of consciousness and unite their experience. Crows hold consultations and caw with mutual intelligibility. A flock of wild geese understand the honk of their leader, and obey every signal perfectly. Bees converse, build, hunt, wage war, and carry on their little monarchical republic with amazing cunning and consent.