as they escape from time and place, race, culture, and religion, and present man eternal and universal in his primary actions, moods, and passions, they appeal to a greater number and with more permanence; they become immortal in becoming universal.  To preserve this universality is the essence of the type, and the degree of universality it reaches is its measure of value to men.  It is immaterial whether it be simple as Ajax or complex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of imagination solely as in Hercules, or have a historical basis as in Agamemnon; its exemplary rendering of man in general is its substance and constitutor its ideality.

Action, the second great branch of life, is generalized by plot.  It lies, as has been said, in the region of experience.  Character, though it may be conceived as latent, can be presented only energetically as it finds outward expression.  It cannot be shown in a vacuum.  It embodies or reveals itself in an act; form and feature, as expressive of character, are the record of past acts.  This act is the link that binds type to plot.  By means of it character enters the external world, determining the course of events and being passively affected by them.  Plot takes account of this interplay and sets forth its laws.  It is, therefore, more deeply engaged with the environment, as type is more concerned with the man in himself.  It is, initially, a thing of the outward as type is a thing of the inward world.  How, then, does literature, through plot, reduce the environment in its human relations to organic form?

The course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a process of nature independent of man, in part the product of his will.  It is a continuous stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporal sequence.  Science deals with that portion of the whole which is independent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerning causal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principle of unchanging and necessary order in nature.  Science seeks to reduce the multiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur to these simple formulas of law.  Science does not begin in reality until facts end; facts, ten or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the law which contains them is found, and are a burden to her until it is found.  Literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same way as science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conception of spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of the soul.  This causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by definition is a series of events causally related and conceived as a unit, technically called the action.  Plot is thus analogous to an illustrative experiment in science; it is a concrete example of law,—­it is law operating.