If we did not act upon the process of thinking of another reality than that which appearance gives, act upon it fearlessly and by a mode of thinking to which we can safely trust ourselves, science would stand still, there would be no progress in physics, discoveries would cease, there would be no improvement in morals, the world would remain stationary. What did Columbus do, when, going behind the phenomena that made the earth appear to be a flat surface, he thought of it as a sphere? Did he break the law of thought? He formed an idea of a reality behind appearance, not by employing the phenomenal manifestations to help him to the new conception, but by going away from them in search of a reality that lay behind them, and which they seemed to contradict. This conception of a sphere as the reality of the earth's condition proved to be the truth. He did not bring it, and did not need to bring it, into connection with appearance. He did not use, and did not need to use, the relations of the visible phenomena to help him to attain his conception of a spherical form of the earth. He contradicted them all. Did all the moral lawgivers who have reformed the world break the law of thought, when, going behind the phenomena of human conduct, with their relations pointing to one idea of right and wrong, they conceived the idea of a new and a better rule of life? When it was said, in place of the old law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"--when for the old rule of revenge there was substituted forgiveness of injuries--something was inculcated that contradicted all the appearances of the social phenomena, and that lay beyond them. Did the consciousness of this new reality become "a formless consciousness of the inscrutable"? What is there about it that is inscrutable? There is nothing inscrutable about it, or in the consciousness of it, excepting the mode in which the being who promulgated it came to exist. The idea of forgiveness is clearly within the compass of human thought and of human endeavor. When we are in the process of making a new physical discovery, or of forming a new rule of moral action, we work away from the materials which the phenomenal manifestations give us, to a new conception. We become conscious of a new reality behind appearance, and of an existence beyond the relations of the phenomena with which we have heretofore been familiar. It is to this striving after realities behind appearances--striving by an entirely true process of thinking--that the world owes its progress.