it not to progress is at
once to return to impotence and nothingness. And it is we who maintain
it in being, maintaining it by endless reiterated efforts of reflection,
and so maintaining it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it
and using it as a source of strength and a fulcrum or a platform for
further effort. Upon self-knowledge in this sense all other 'knowledge'
reposes; upon it and the knowledge of other selves and the world, which
flows from it, depends the possibility of all practical advance. In the
dark all progress is impossible.

But since this discovery was made and made good, the spirit of
Philosophy has not stood still; it has gone on, and is still going on,
to extend and deepen and secure its conquests. Once more it has turned
from its fruitful and enlightening concentration on the inner self and
its life to review what lies or seems to lie around and outside it. It
finds that those who have stayed, or fallen, behind its audacious but
justified advance in self-knowledge, still cherish a view of what is
external to this (the true or real self so now made patent), thoughts or
fancies which misconceive and misrepresent it--thoughts persisted in
against the feebler protesting voices of Art and Religion and so held
precariously and unstably though apparently grounded upon the authority
of Science. To the unphilosophic or not yet philosophic mind the spirit
of man, already in imagination multiplied and segregated into individual
'souls', appears to be surrounded with an environment of alien
character, often harsh to man's emotions, often rebellious or
untractable to his purposes, often impenetrable to his understanding,
and in a word indifferent or hostile to his ideals and aspirations after
progress and good. Nay, the individual souls seem to act towards one
another separately and collectively as such hindrances, and again, each
individual soul seems to be encrusted with insuperable impediments. Even
the light within is enclosed in an opaque screen which prevents or
counteracts its outflow, so that the spirit within is as it were
entombed or imprisoned. 'Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in,' we
cannot communicate with one another or join with one another in thought
or deed; and the hope of progress seems defeated by the recalcitrant
matter that shell upon shell encases us. The world of our bodies, of the
bodies and spirits of others, and all the vast _compages_ of things and
forces which we