THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 27 
brotherhood. Then, and only then, can we fully sympathize and 
understand ; and it is very evident that to bring about this result the 
novel must give us more than words and actions and must be true to 
nature. 
We have seen that it is also one of the possibilities of the novel 
to be the best means of presenting a great deal that is essential to 
our development. It is equally plain in this case, as in that we have 
just been considering, that to accomplish this result the novel must 
give us more than the external and must be true to human nature. 
To benefit us by giving us self-knowledge, a novel must present 
the courses of life that men actually follow, and must make 
plain to us the motives and principles that are really predominant. 
It is not moralizing that the world wants most, it is such an analysis 
of experience as shall lay bare its elements. It seems to me that 
after all these centuries the world to-day does not know enough about 
the universal malady, selfishness, for example, to give a satisfactory 
diagnosis. There are a great many facts referred in a loose way to 
selfishness, but where do we find the analysis that shows us the real 
elements, the psychology, of selfishness. They tell us that 
it is doing things for our own gratification, but this will 
not stand, because it makes it deliberate, and we all know that 
very little of the selfishness in the world is deliberate. We do not 
act for the purpose of gratifying ourselves at the expense of others, 
we simply do what seems best at the time. Then we will have to 
seek the root of selfishness in our knowledge of what is best and 
highest, or farther back still wherever our analysis may lead us. If 
we can once discover the true source it will be easy to prescribe a 
remedy. This one instance may help to illustrate what I mean by 
the necessity for an analytical and accurate knowledge of the facts 
of experience before we can form rules of conduct. The novel 
that truly represents the inner life gives us this knowledge. If, in 
this novel I am advocating, the character of a bad men is depicted 
with truth to nature, we will see the steps by which he became bad ; 
he will not seem to us some one outside the pale of our common 
humanity, where he is virtually placed by too many writers ; we will 
recognize in him a being like ourselves whose course of life has a 
sequence in it; we will find that he has motives that are to him as 
strong incentives to action as ours are to us; we will see in him what 
we might become if we took his first downward step. If the char- 
