o back upon itself, and with due tenderness
and gratitude it has set behind it the things of its unreflective
childhood. It stands on the stable foundation of the witness of the
spirit within us to itself, to its own nature, its own powers and its
own rights; it knows itself as the knower, the interpreter, the teacher,
and therefore the master and maker of itself. Yet we must not identify
or confuse this our deeper or deepest self which we thus create with the
separate selves or souls which each of us is; it is not any one of them
nor all of them together, unless we give to the word 'together' a new
and more pregnant sense than it has yet come to bear. It is not the
'tribal' or 'collective' or 'social' self, for it is not made by
congregation or collection or association, but by some far more intimate
unification than is signified by any of these terms, namely by coming
together in and by knowledge. It is the spirit which is in us all and in
which we all are, which is more yet not other than we, without which we
are nothing and do nothing and yet which is veritably the spirit of man,
the immortal hero of all the tragedy and comedy--the whole drama--of
human history; it is of this spirit as it is by it, that Philosophy has
in repeated and resolute reflection come to know the nature and the
method of its progress. Such knowledge has come into the world and
prevails more widely and more potently than ever before; possessed in
fullness by but a few, it is open and available to all and radiates as
from a beacon light over the whole field of human experience; at that
fire every man can light his candle. This is the light in which alone
the record of man's thoughts and achievements can be construed and which
exhibits them as steps and stages on that triumphant march to higher and
higher levels such as alone we can rightly name Progress. Where else
than in History, and, above all, in the History of Knowledge, is
Progress manifested, and in that where more certainly than in the
unretreating and unrevoked advance towards a deeper, a truer, a wiser
knowledge of itself by the spirit that is in and is, Man?

Yes, such knowledge, truth and wisdom now exists and is securely ours,
though to inherit it each generation and each individual must win it
afresh and having won it must develop and promote it, or it ceases not
only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only
in the act and fact of its progress, and so for