some ways, in spite of its apparent arrogance this is the best name for
what is sought--or missed. Yet from the beginning the name was felt not
sufficiently to distinguish what was meant from the high skill of the
cunning craftsman and the worldly wisdom of the man of affairs, the
statesman or soldier or trader. In the case of all these it was
difficult to disengage the knowledge involved from natural or trained
practical dexterity. What was desired and required was knowledge
distinguished but not divorced from practice and application--'pure
knowledge' as it was sometimes called; not divorced, I repeat, for it
was not conceived as without bearing upon the conduct of life, but still
distinguished, as furnishing light rather than profit. For good or evil
Philosophy began by considering what it sought and hoped to reach as
pre-eminently knowledge in some distinctive sense, and having so begun
it turned to reflect once more upon what it meant by so conceiving it
and to make this meaning more precise and clear. So it came to present
to itself as its aim or goal a special kind or degree of knowledge, to
be inspired and guided by the hope of that. Practical as in many ways
was the concern of ancient philosophy--its whole bent was towards the
bettering of human life--it sought to achieve this by the extension and
deepening of knowledge, and not either through the cultivation or
refinement of emotion or the organization of practical, civil or social
or philanthropic activities. It laboured--and laboured not in vain--to
further the increase of knowledge by defining to itself in advance the
kind or degree of knowledge which would accomplish the ultimate aim of
its endeavour or subserve its accomplishment. Hence we must learn to
view with a sympathetic eye its repeated essays to give precision and
detail to the conception or ideal of knowledge.
In form the answer rendered to its request to itself for a definition,
was determined by the principle that the knowledge which was sought and
alone, if found, could satisfy, was knowledge of the real, or as it was
at first more simply expressed, of what is, or what really and veritably
is. Refusing the name of knowledge except to what had this as its
object, men turned to consider the nature of the object which stood or
could stand in this relation. With this they contrasted what we, after
them, call the phenomena, the appearances, the manifold aspects,
constantly shifting with the shifting points of view of the observer or
many observers of it, inconstant, unsteady, superficial, mirrored
through the senses and imagination, multiplied and distorted in
divergent and changing opinions, or misrepresented and even caricatured
in the turbid medium of ordinary speech, like a clouded image on the
broken waters of a rushing stream. 'It'--so at first they spoke of the
object of true or 'philosophic' knowledge--was one and single, eternal
and unchangeable, a universe or world-order of parts fixed for ever in
their external relations and inward structure. In each and all of us
there was, as it were, a tiny mirror that could be cleared so as to
reflect all this, and in so far as such reflection took place an inner
light was kindled in each which was a lamp to his path. Knowing--for to
know was so to reflect the world as it really was--knowing, man came to
self-possession and self-satisfaction--to peace and joy--and was even
'on this bank and shoal of time' raised beyond the reach of all
accidents and evils of mortal existence--looking around and down upon
all that could harm or hurt him and seeing it to be in its law-abiding
orderliness and eternal changelessness the embodiment of good. So
viewing it, man learned to feel the Universe his true home, and was
inspired not only with awe but with a high loyalty and public spirit.
'The poet says "Dear City of Cecrops", and shall I not say "Dear City of
God"?'
The knowledge thus reached or believed to be attainable was more and
more discriminated from what was offered or supplied by Art or Science
or Religion, though it was still often confused with each and all of
them. As opposed to that of Art, it was not direct or immediate vision
flashed as it were upon the inner eye in moments of inspiration or
excitement; as opposed to that of Science, it was a knowledge that
pierced below the surface and the seeming of Nature and History; as
opposed to that of Religion (which was rather faith than knowledge), it
was sober, unimaginative, cleansed of emotional accompaniment and
admixture, the 'dry light' of the wise soul. True to the principle which
I have stated, ancient Philosophy proclaimed that the only knowledge in
the end worth having was knowledge of Fact--of what lay behind all
seeming however fair--Fact unmodified and unmodifiable by human wish or
will; it bade us know the world in which we live and move and have our
being, know it as it is truly and in itself, and knowing it love it,
loyally acquiescing in its purposes and subserving its ends. In all this
there was progress (was there not?) to a view, to a truth (how else
shall we speak of it?) which has always, when apprehended, begotten a
high temper in heroic hearts. Surely in having reached in thought so
high and so far the mind of man had progressed in knowledge and in
wisdom.
But now a change took place, from which we must date the rise or birth
of modern philosophy. Hitherto on the whole the mind of man had looked
outward and sought knowledge of what lay or seemed to lie outside
itself. So looking and gazing ever deeper it had encountered a spectacle
of admirable and awe-compelling order, yet one which for that very
reason seemed appallingly remote from, if not alien to, all human
businesses and concerns. Now it turned inward and found within itself
not only matter of more immediate or pressing interest, but a world that
compelled attention, excited curiosity, rewarded study. Slowly and
gradually the knowledge of this, the inner world--the world of the
thinker's self--became the central object of philosophic reflection. The
knowledge that was most required--that was all-important and
indispensable (so man began explicitly to realize)--was knowledge of the
Self, not of the outer world that at best could never be more than
known, but of the self that knew or could know it, that could both know
and be known. Henceforward what is studied is not knowledge of
reality--of any and every reality--or of external reality, but knowledge
of the Self which can know as well as be known. And the process by which
it is sought is reflection, for the self-knowledge is not the knowledge
of other selves, but the knowledge of just that Self which knows itself
and no other. Thus the knowledge sought is once more and now finally
distinguished from the knowledge offered or supplied by Art or Science
or Religion: not by Art, for the Self cannot appear and has no seeming
nor can it any way be pictured or described or imagined; not by
Science, for it lies beyond and beneath and behind all observation, nor
can it be counted or measured or weighed; not by Religion, for knowledge
of it comes from within and the disclosure of its nature is by the
self-witness of the Self to its self, not by revelation of any other to
it. Thus there is disclosed the slowly-won and slowly-revealed secret of
modern Philosophy, that the knowledge which is indispensable, which is
necessary as the consummation and key-stone of all other knowledge, is
knowledge of the knowing-self, self-knowledge, or, as it is sometimes
more technically called, self-consciousness, with the corollary that
this knowledge cannot be won by any methods known to or specially
characteristic of Science or Art or Religion. To become self-conscious,
to progress in self-consciousness is the end, and the way or means to it
is by reflection--the special method of Philosophy.
This is the step in advance made by the modern spirit beyond all
discoveries of the ancients; it is the truth by the apprehension of
which the modern spirit and its world is made what it is. Not outside us
lies Truth or the Truth: Truth dwelleth in the inner man--_in interiore
hominis habitat veritas_. Is this not progress, progress in wisdom, and
to what else can we ascribe the advance save to Philosophy?
It was one of the earliest utterances of modern Philosophy, and one
which it has never found reason to retract, that the Self which knows
can and does know itself better than aught else whatsoever, and in that
knowledge can without end make confident and sure-footed advance. To
itself the Self is the most certain and the most knowable of all
realities--with this it is most acquainted, this it has light in itself
to explore, of this it can confidently foresee and foretell the method
of advance to further and further knowledge. It knows not only its
existence but its essence, its nature, and it knows by what procedure,
by what ordered effort or exercise of will it can progress to height
beyond height of its self-knowledge. I say, it knows it, but it also
knows that that knowledge cannot be attained all at once or taken
complete and ready-made, for it _is_ itself a progress, a self-created
and self-determined progress, and on that condition progress alone is or
is real. For it to be is not to be at the beginning or at the end of
this process, but to be always coming to be, coming to be what it is not
and yet also what it has in it to be. Of nothing else is Progress so
intimately the essence and very being; if we ask 'What progresses or
evolves?', the most certain answer is 'The spirit which is in man, and
what it progresses in, is knowledge of itself, which is wisdom'.
Speaking of and for Philosophy I venture to maintain that nothing is
more certain than that that spirit which has created it has grown, is
growing, and will ever grow in wisdom, and that by reflection upon
itself and its history--nor can the gates of darkness and error prevail
against the irresistible march of its triumphant progress.
As we look back the history of Philosophy seems strewn with the debris
of outworn or outlived errors, but out of them all emerges this clear
and assured truth, that in self-knowledge lies the master-light of all
our seeing, inexhaustibly casting its rays into the retreating shadow
world that now surrounds us, melting all mists and dispelling all
clouds, and that the way to it is unveiled, mapped and charted in
advance so that henceforward we can walk sure-footedly therein. Yet that
does not mean that the work of Philosophy is done, that it can fold its
hands and sit down, for only in the seeking is its prize found and there
is no goal or end other than the process itself. For this too is its
discovery, that not by, but in, endless reflection is the Truth
concerning it known, the Truth that each generation must ever anew win
and earn it for itself. The result is not without the process, nor the
end without the means: the fact _is_ the process and other fact there is
none. In other forms of so-called 'knowledge' we can sever the
conclusion from its premisses, and the result can be given without the
process, but with self-knowledge it is not so and no generation, or
individual, can communicate it ready-made to another, but can only point
the way and bid others help themselves. And if this, so put, seems hard
doctrine, I can only remind you that to philosophize has always meant
'to think by and for oneself'.
It is perhaps more necessary to formulate the warning that what is here
called self-knowledge and pronounced to constitute the very essence of
the spirit that is in man, is far removed from what sometimes bears its
name, the extended and minute acquaintance by the individual mind with
its individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies, its weaknesses and
vanities, its whims and eccentricities; nor is it to be confused with
the still wider acquaintance with those that make up our common human
nature in all its folly and frailty which is sometimes called 'knowledge
of human nature'; no, nor with such knowledge as psychological science,
with its methods of observation and induction and experiment, offers or
supplies. It is knowledge of something that lies far deeper within
us--'the inward man', which is not merely alike or akin but is the same
in all of us; beneath all our differences, strong against all our
weaknesses, wise against all our follies, what each of us rightly calls
his true self and yet what is not his alone, but all men's also. As we
reflect upon it duly, what discloses or reveals itself to us is a self
which is both our very own and yet common or universal, the self of each
and yet the self of all. The more we get to apprehend and understand it,
the more we become and know ourselves, not so much as being but as
becoming one with one another; the differences that sunder us in
feeling and thought and action melting away like mist. The removal of
these differences is just the unveiling of it, in which it at once comes
to be and to be known. In coming to know it we create it. The unity of
the spirit thus becomes and is known as indubitable fact, or rather (I
must repeat) not as fact, as if it were or were anything before being
known, but as something which is ever more and more coming to be, in the
measure in which it is coming to be known--known to itself. For this is
the hard lesson of modern philosophy, that our inmost nature and most
genuine self is not aught ready-made or given, but something which is
created in and by the process of our coming to know it, which progresses
in existence and substantiality and value as our knowledge of it
progresses in width and depth and self-assurance. The process is one of
creative--self-creative--evolution, in which each advance deposits a
result which prescribes the next step and supplies all the conditions
for it, and so constantly furnishes all that is required for an endless
progress in reality and worth. This is the process in which the spirit
of man capitalizes and substantiates its activities, committing its
gains to secure custody, amassing and using them for its
self-enrichment--in which it depends on no other than itself and is
sovereign master of its future and its fate. This is the way in which
selves are made, or rather, make themselves.
This is the discovery of modern Philosophy, the now patent secret which
it offers for the interpretation of all mysteries and the solving of all
problems--and it offers it with unquestioning assurance, for it has
explored the ground and has awakened to the true method of progress
within it. And as I have said or implied, to the reflective mind regress
is impossible, it cannot go back upon itself, and with due tenderness
and gratitude it has set behind it the things of its unreflective
childhood. It stands on the stable foundation of the witness of the
spirit within us to itself, to its own nature, its own powers and its
own rights; it knows itself as the knower, the interpreter, the teacher,
and therefore the master and maker of itself. Yet we must not identify
or confuse this our deeper or deepest self which we thus create with the
separate selves or souls which each of us is; it is not any one of them
nor all of them together, unless we give to the word 'together' a new
and more pregnant sense than it has yet come to bear. It is not the
'tribal' or 'collective' or 'social' self, for it is not made by
congregation or collection or association, but by some far more intimate
unification than is signified by any of these terms, namely by coming
together in and by knowledge. It is the spirit which is in us all and in
which we all are, which is more yet not other than we, without which we
are nothing and do nothing and yet which is veritably the spirit of man,
the immortal hero of all the tragedy and comedy--the whole drama--of
human history; it is of this spirit as it is by it, that Philosophy has
in repeated and resolute reflection come to know the nature and the
method of its progress. Such knowledge has come into the world and
prevails more widely and more potently than ever before; possessed in
fullness by but a few, it is open and available to all and radiates as
from a beacon light over the whole field of human experience; at that
fire every man can light his candle. This is the light in which alone
the record of man's thoughts and achievements can be construed and which
exhibits them as steps and stages on that triumphant march to higher and
higher levels such as alone we can rightly name Progress. Where else
than in History, and, above all, in the History of Knowledge, is
Progress manifested, and in that where more certainly than in the
unretreating and unrevoked advance towards a deeper, a truer, a wiser
knowledge of itself by the spirit that is in and is, Man?
Yes, such knowledge, truth and wisdom now exists and is securely ours,
though to inherit it each generation and each individual must win it
afresh and having won it must develop and promote it, or it ceases not
only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only
in the act and fact of its progress, and so for 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 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. 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.