CHAPTER II.
RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE.
§ 7. Literature, however rude, however cultured, expresses the feelings and thoughts of men and women on physical nature, on animal life, on their own social communion, on their individual existence. It is incumbent, therefore, on the champions of universal literary ideas to discover the existence of some universal human nature which, unaffected by differences of language, social organisation, sex, climate, and similar causes, has been at all times and in all places the keystone of literary architecture. Is there one universal type of human character embracing and reconciling all the conflicting differences of human types in the living world and in its historic or prehistoric past? Can really scientific reasons be advanced in support of the sentimental belief in that colossal personage called "man," whose abstract unity is allowed to put on new phases of external form, but whose "essence" is declared to remain unaltered? Unfortunately any such scientific inquiry has been generally supplanted by explosive or pathetic assertions of dogma. Yet the relativity of literature may not unaptly be illustrated by the dogmatic assertions of its opponents.
Kingsley, in his address on "the limits of exact science as applied to history," reminded his audience
