ormity or perhaps fatally run down to
a predestined and predictable final arrest, to the devout or religious
soul as the constant efflux of a beneficent will, unweariedly kind,
caring for the humblest of its creatures, august, worshipful, deserving
of endless adoration and love, while to the philosophic mind it is known
and ever more to be known as the self-expression of a mind in essence
one with all minds that know it in knowing themselves, know it as the
work or product of a mind engaged or absorbed in knowing itself, and so
creating itself and all that is requisite that it may learn more and
more what is hidden or stored from all eternity within its plenitude. At
least we may say that the conception of a Mind which in order to know
itself creates the conditions of such knowledge, which wills to learn
whatever can be learned of itself from whatever it does, supplies the
best pattern or original after which to model our vaguer and more
blurred conceptions of progressive existence and being elsewhere. It
furnishes to us an ideal of a progress which realizes or maintains and
advances itself, for it is independent upon external conditions. The
Progress of Philosophy or of Wisdom is a palmary instance of progress
achieved out of the internal resources of that which progresses. And
after this pattern we least untruly and least unworthily conceive the
mode of that eternal and universal Progress which is the life of the
Whole within and as part of which we live.

The aim of Philosophy is not edification but the possession and
enjoyment of Truth, and the Truth may wear an aspect which, while it
enlightens, also blinds or even at first appals and paralyses. And
certainly Reality or Philosophy as has come to know it and proclaims it
to be, is not such as either directly to warm our hearts or stimulate
our energies. Not to do either has Philosophy come into the world, nor
so does it help to bring Progress about; nor does it offer prizes to
those who pursue either moral improvement or business success, nor
again does it increase that information concerning 'nature' and men
which is the condition of the one and the other, yet to those who love
Truth and who will buy no good at the sacrifice of it, what it offers is
enough, and to progress towards and in it is for them worth all the
world beside; it is, if not the only real progress, that in the absence
of which all other progress is without worth or substance or reality. In
the en