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If experience can furnish
Symbols which express the deepest needs and aspirations of the soul, then life can be, at least partially, illuminated. For man can understand nothing which is not consonant with[Pg 174] his own nature. The literature which truly illuminates life is the literature which interprets life most fully in terms of our own emotions and aspirations. In this sense, not only all literature, but all science, is anthropomorphic. Science is only possible insofar as it is logical. The universe can only be understood insofar as its happenings are obedient to the laws of man’s own mind. In its relation to mathematics, where the mind pays no attention to the arbitrary conditions of experience, physics plays something of the same part as is played by literature in its relation to music. Both physics and literature, in their universal function, are concerned with a world which need not obey the laws native to the spirit of man. Such illumination as they can give is dependent upon, as it were, what correspondences they can find. The revelation of life afforded by The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, consists in relating the phenomena of life to the deepest impulses of the spirit of man. Only so does life become in any measure truly comprehended; and it is in this respect that such works differ from those reports on life where we may recognise and assent to everything, but where our comprehension of anything is not deepened. Such works as The…
