crudely, sometimes with keen scientific insight, were anticipated by 

 Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians of note all the way from 

 Dante, Scaliger, and Sidney down. If these writers and their main 

 contributions to the science could be cited, it would be seen that 

 they do not discredit, but confirm, the scope and hope of the science 

 of to-day. They testify to the need of a science in the nature of 

 things. They perform their service by anticipations in detail of a 

 discipline that could not be designated a science until the sciences 

 propaedeutic thereto had been developed. Advances in historical 

 method, in psychological, sociological, linguistic, and ethnological 

 research have, now, furnished the discipline with an instrument 

 unknown to its forebears in critical procedure; and with fresh and 

 rich materials for illumination from without. The conception of 

 literature as a unit is no longer hypothetical; the comparison of 

 national histories has proved it. The idea of a process by evolu- 

 tion may be unproved; but that some process, as by permutation, 

 must obtain is recognized. We no longer look upon the poet as in- 

 spired. Literature develops with the entity which produces it, 

 the common social need and faculty of expression; and it varies 

 according to differentiae of racial, physiographic, and social condi- 

 tions, and of the inherited or acquired characteristics of which the 

 individual author is constituted. The science of its production 

 must analyze its component factors and determine the laws by which 

 they operate. By a constant factor are fixed the only possible 

 moulds or channels of expression, and, therefore, the integral and 

 primary types, as, for instance, within the realm of poetry, the 

 lyric, narrative, and dramatic. By the presence of other factors, 

 both inconstant, these types are themselves liable to modification. 

 I refer, of course, to environment, that is to say, to the anteced- 

 ent and contemporary condition of thought, social tendency, and 

 artistic fashion; and to the associational congeries called the author. 

 So far as physiological and psychological modes of expression may 

 be submitted to objective and historical analysis, so far as the 

 surrounding conditions which directly or indirectly affect the art 

 in which the author works, and the work of the author in that art, 

 may be inductively studied, and their nature interpreted and regis- 

 tered in relation to other products of society, such as language, 

 religion, and government, so far is the discipline of which we speak 

 legitimately scientific. And as rapidly as experimental psychology, 

 anthropology, ethnology, or the history of art in general, prove their 

 right to scientific recognition, they become instruments for the 

 comparative investigation of the social phenomenon called literature. 

 It is thus that the literary science, just now called comparative 

 literature, improves upon the efforts of the former stylistic or poet- 

 ics, largely traditional or speculative, and displaces the capricious 



