ABSTRACT
When the modern mind plays Hamlet, surveying its own potentialities and limitations, we may not find it untimely to pause for a moment over a skull. Now the terms of the present discussion presuppose both unity of knowledge and diversity of methods: and method, etymologically considered, is simply a way of getting somewhere. No further presupposition should be necessary for the various sciences, which proceed along their parallel courses with an unhesitating directness. Each participant will react according to his lights, implicitly comparing his own observations with those which the artist has been conveying to him. He will be convinced to the extent that he finds what in classical criticism is termed "verisimilitude". Poets at best can merely claim, with Pindar, to utter "things like truth". Dismissing these as fabrications, moralists can emulate Plutarch in calling poets liars. Puritans have argued from age to age that poetry is untrue, that fiction is false, that art is immoral.
