Now it is unimportant whether the renunciation is forced or willingly taken. But as a general rule it may be laid down, that by giving up his own desires as he feels them at the moment, to the needs and advantage of those around him, or to the objects which he finds before him demanding accomplishment, a human being passes to the discovery of his true self on and on. The process is limited by the responsibilities which a man finds come upon him. The method of moral advance is to acquire a practical knowledge; he must first see what the advantage of some one other than himself would be, and then he must act in accordance with that view of things. Then having acted and formed a habit, he discovers a response in himself. He finds that he really cares, and that his former limited life was not really himself. His body and the needs of his body, so far as he can observe them, externally are the same as before; but he has obtained an inner and unintellectual, but none the less real, apprehension of what he is. Thus altruism, or the sacrifice of egoism to others, is followed by a truer egoism, or assertion of self, and this process flashed across by the transcendent lights of religion, wherein, as in the sense of justice and duty, untold depths in the nature of man are revealed entirely unexpressed by the intellectual apprehension which we have of him as an animal frame of a very high degree of development, is the normal one by which from childhood a human being develops into the full responsibilities of a man. Now both in science and in conduct there are self elements. In science, getting rid of the self elements means a truer apprehension of the facts about one; in conduct, getting rid of the self elements means obtaining a truer knowledge of what we are--in the way of feeling more strongly and deeply and being bound and linked in a larger scale. Thus without pretending to any scientific accuracy in the use of terms, we can assign a certain amount of meaning to the expression--getting rid of self elements. And all that we can do is to take the rough idea of this process, and then taking our special subject matter, apply it. In affairs of life experiments lead to disaster. But happily science is provided wherein the desire to put theories into practice can be safely satisfied--and good results sometimes follow. Were it not for this the human race might before now have been utopiad from off the face of the earth. In experiment, manipulation is everything; we must be certain of all our conditions, otherwise we fail assuredly and have not even the satisfaction of knowing that our failure is due to the wrongness of our conjectures. And for our purposes we use a subject matter so simple that the manipulation is easy. CHAPTER V. KNOWLEDGE: SELF-ELEMENTS.