The world of Fact, artistic or aesthetic,
scientific, moral, political, economic, is what the spirit builds round
itself, creating it out of its own substance, while it itself in
creating it grows within, evolving out of itself into itself and
advancing in knowledge or wisdom and power. And out of its now securely
won self-knowledge it declares that it--itself--is the source and spring
of all real fact whatsoever, which is its self-created expression, made
by it in its own interests, and for its own good, the better and better
to know itself. Nothing is or can be alien, still less hostile to it,
for 'in wisdom has it made them all'. Looking back and around it
re-reads in all fact the results of its own power of self-expression.
Nothing is but what it has made.

All this might perhaps have been put very simply by saying that ever
since man has set himself to know his own mind in the right way, he has
succeeded better and better, and that in knowing his own mind he has
come to know and is still coming to know all else beside, including all
that at first sight seems other than, or even counter to, his own mind.
He has learned what manner of being he is, how that being has been made
and how it continues to be made and developed, and again, how in the
course of its self-creation and self-advance it deposits itself in
'fact' and reflecting on that fact rises beyond and above itself in
knowledge and power. He is mind or spirit, and what lies behind and
around him is spiritual. As he reflects upon this the meaning of it
becomes ever more clear and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the
same time more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In
becoming known what was before dead and dark and threatening or
obstructive or hostile is made transparent, alive, utilisable,
contributing to the constantly growing self that knows and is known.
Here is the growing point of reality, the _fons emanationis_ of truth
and worth and being, evidencing its power not as it were in increase of
bulk, but in the enhancing of value. And surely here is Progress, which
consists not in mere enlargement or expansion but in the heightening of
forces to a new power--in a word, in their elevation to a more
spiritual, a more intelligent and therefore more potent, level.

To the artistic eye the universe presents itself as a vast and moving
spectacle, to the scientific mind as the theatre of forces which repeat
their work with a mechanical unif