magining and our
supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for,
must go on under conditions--the conditions of what we know as to the
nature of ourselves and our surroundings--and yet under these conditions
has a very large liberty or autonomy.

The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is not and cannot be
the Progress that we know, but must be the result of imagination or
supposition, and it is high and necessary wisdom to trust our
imaginations and aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be
determined by what we have learned in or from the past; it cometh not
with observation, and the sources of experience cannot of themselves
supply us with it, and though it comes in and with experience, it does
not come from or out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us
by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and is not merely
subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten of the imagination, it is
appearance, not ultimate reality, and it cannot be thought out or wholly
evacuated of mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the
language we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore not
theoretical?

Nevertheless, while I must acknowledge this insuperable difference
between the Progress we can make our end or ideal and the Progress we
believe that in ourselves and around us we apprehend, I still would lay
renewed stress upon the congruence and affinity of the two, and urge
that the perception of the one--the Progress without us--and the pursuit
of the other--the Progress within us--support and fertilize each the
other. The more we know or can learn of the one the more effectively do
we pursue the other, and conversely. The light and the fruits are bound
together: the theory and the practice of Progress cannot be dissevered
without the ruin of both.

The ideal of Progress which we present to ourselves is and must be one
which is partly determined or limited by past achievement and partly
enlarged by the study of what powers higher than our own have
accomplished and are accomplishing. The formation of it must move
constantly between a respect for what has been achieved and a worship,
so to speak, for what is far better than anything that yet has been or
become fact, and therefore incumbent or imperative upon us.

The mode and manner of the Progress which is achieved in the Universe
has become in various ways clearer to us and opens out undreamt-of