t of the great religious
teachers have had deductive minds: from the basis of certain sublime
assumptions they have asserted their commandments. Most of the great
scientists have thought inductively: they have reasoned from specific
facts to general truths, as Newton reasoned from the fall of an
apple to the law of gravitation. Most of the great poets have thought
deductively: they have reasoned from general truths to specific facts,
as Dante reasoned from a general moral conception of cosmogony to the
particular appropriate details of every circle in hell and purgatory
and paradise. Now is not the thesis tenable that it is in just this
way that realism differs from romance? In their endeavor to exhibit
certain truths of human life, do not the realists work inductively and
the romantics deductively?

In order to bring to our knowledge the law of life which he wishes to
make clear, the realist first leads us through a series of imagined
facts as similar as possible to the details of actual life which he
studied in order to arrive at his general conception. He elaborately
imitates the facts of actual life, so that he may say to us finally,
"This is the sort of thing that I have seen in the world, and from
this I have learned the truth I have to tell you." He leads us step by
step from the particular to the general, until we gradually grow aware
of the truths he wishes to express. And in the end, we have not only
grown acquainted with these truths, but have also been made familiar
with every step in the process of thought by which the author himself
became aware of them. "Adam Bede" tells us not only what George Eliot
knew of life, but also how she came to learn it.

But the romantic novelist leads us in the contrary direction--namely,
from the general to the particular. He does not attempt to show us how
he arrived at his general conception. His only care is to convey
his general idea effectively by giving it a specific illustrative
embodiment. He feels no obligation to make the imagined facts of his
story resemble closely the details of actual life; he is anxious
only that they shall represent his idea adequately and consistently.
Stevenson knew that man has a dual nature, and that the evil in him,
when pampered, will gradually gain the upper hand over the good. In
his story of the "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," he did not
attempt to set forth this truth inductively, showing us the kind of
facts from the ob