Again, the “use of the scientific method” is not equivalent to the application in the arts of scientific theories, altho here once more the man of letters is free to take these for his own and to bend them to his purpose.  Ibsen has found in the doctrine of heredity a modern analog of the ancient Greek idea of fate; and altho he may not “see life steadily and see it whole,” he has been enabled to invest his somber ‘Ghosts’ with not a little of the inerrable inevitability which we feel to be so appalling in the master work of Sophocles.  Criticism, no less than creation, has been stimulated by scientific hypothesis; and for one thing, the conception of literary history has been wholly transformed since the theory of evolution was declared.  To M. Brunetiere we owe the application of this doctrine to the development of the drama in his own language.  He has shown us most convincingly how the several literary forms,—­the lyric, the oration, the epic, with its illegitimate descendant, the modern novel in prose,—­may cross-fertilize each other from time to time, and also how the casual hybrids that result are ever struggling to revert each to its own species.

Science is thus seen to be stimulating to art; but the “use of the scientific method” would seem to be more than stimulation only.  It leads the practitioners of the several arts to set up an ideal of disinterestedness, inspired by a lofty curiosity, which shall scorn nothing as insignificant, and which is ever eager after knowledge ascertained for its own sake.  As it abhors the abnormal and the freakish, the superficial and the extravagant, it helps the creative artist to strive for a more classic directness and simplicity; and it guides the critic toward passionless proportion and moderation.  Altho it tends toward intellectual freedom, it forces us always to recognize the reign of law.  It establishes the strength of the social bond, and thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever young and ever true, what is known as “neo-romanticism,” with its reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-social, and therefore probably immoral.

The “use of the scientific method” will surely strengthen the conscience of the novelist and of the dramatist; and it will train them to a sterner veracity in dealing with human character.  It will inhibit that pitiful tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which asserts the reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before the final fall of the curtain.  It will lead to a renunciation of the feeble and summary psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of weakness or of wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden effort of will.  And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of life, subtler than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell unduly on the mere machinery of human motive and to aim not at a rich portrayal of the actions of men and women, but at an arid analysis of the mechanism