rt but also to instruct--to
instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by
presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For
the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary
people, is no less true than the best history and biography, which
record actual facts of human life; and it is more true than such
careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily
newspapers. The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor in
which it has been held in all ages among all races. "You can't fool
all the people all the time"; and if the drama and the epic and the
novel were not true, the human race would have rejected them many
centuries ago. Fiction has survived, and flourishes to-day, because it
is a means of telling truth.

=Fact and Fiction.=--It is only in the vocabulary of very careless
thinkers that the words _truth_ and _fiction_ are regarded as
antithetic. A genuine antithesis subsists between the words _fact_ and
_fiction_; but _fact_ and _truth_ are not synonymous. The novelist
forsakes the realm of fact in order that he may better tell the truth,
and lures the reader away from actualities in order to present him
with realities. It is of prime importance, in our present study,
therefore, that we should understand at the very outset the relation
between fact and truth, the distinction between the actual and the
real.

=Truth and Fact.=--A fact is a specific manifestation of a general
law: this general law is the truth because of which that fact has come
to be. It is a fact that when an apple-tree is shaken by the wind,
such apples as may be loosened from their twigs fall to the ground: it
is a truth that bodies in space attract each other with a force that
varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. Fact is
concrete, and is a matter of physical experience: truth is abstract,
and is a matter of mental theory. Actuality is the realm of fact,
reality the realm of truth. The universe as we apprehend it with our
senses is actual; the laws of the universe as we comprehend them with
our understanding are real.

=The Search for Truth.=--All human science is an endeavor to discover
the truths which underlie the facts that we perceive: all human
philosophy is an endeavor to understand and to appraise those truths
when once they are discovered: and all human art is an endeavor to
utter them clearly and effectively when once they are appraise