The process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. The
common method of all is to present the universal law in a particular
instance made for the purpose.
In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers no
transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essence
of type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universality
in the particular instance. There is a sense in which this general truth
is more real, as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the
phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomena
come and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man's
breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of
ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us
transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that
the mind strives for in idealism,--this organic form of life, the object
of all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, are
thus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in every
branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are only
a part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in using
them, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differ
in appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails itself
of that condensing faculty of the mind which most economizes mental
effort and loads conceptions with knowledge.
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