call 'Nature' blinds and baffles us, mocks our hopes and
breaks our hearts. How idle to dream that amidst and against all this
neutrality or hostility any substantial or secure advance can be made!

In answer to all these thoughts, these doubts and fears, Philosophy is
beginning with increasing boldness to speak a word, not of mere comfort
and consolation, but of secure and confident wisdom. All this so-called
'external' nature and environment is not hostile or alien to the self or
spirit which is in man, it is akin and allied to it as we now know it to
be. Whatever is real and not merely apparent in History or Nature is
rational, is of the same stuff and character as that which is within us.
It too is spiritual, the appearance and embodiment of what is one in
nature and mode of being with what lies deepest and is most potent in
us. So far as it is not that, it is appearance and not reality, woven
like a dream by imagination or endowed with an unstable and shifting
quasi-reality by our thoughts and suppositions and fancies about we
know not what. Not that it is an illusion, still less a delusion, rather
what it is is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
reality, a symbol beautiful, orderly, awe-inspiring yet mutilated,
partial, confused, of something deeper and more real, the expression,
the face and gesture, of a spirit that, as ours does, knows itself, its
own profound being and meaning, and does what it does in the light of
such knowledge, a spirit which above all progresses endlessly towards
and in a richer and fuller knowledge of itself. What we call
Fact--historical or natural--is essentially such an expression, on the
one hand a finished expression, set in the past and therefore for ever
beyond the possibility of change and so of progress, an exhausted or
dead expression, on the other hand a passing into the light of what was
before unknown even to the expresser's self, an act by which was made
and secured a self-discovery or self-revelation, a creative act of
self-knowledge and so significant and interpretable. This double
character of events in History and Nature is dimly descried in what we
specially call 'nature', but comes more fully into view in the sphere of
human history, where each step is at once a deed and a discovery, a
contribution to the constitution of the world of fact and a fulguration
of the light within illuminating facts as the condition of its own
inexhaustible continuance.