In ancient times the physician was considered sacred and belonged to the priesthood, not to a priesthood appointed only by man, but to a strong and real priesthood anointed by God. The physician of the future will be again a king and a priest; for only he who is not merely nominally but truly divine can be in possession of divine powers. In him the triangular pyramid consisting of science, religion and art will culminate in one point, called Self-knowledge or Divine Wisdom, where man himself becomes identified with that superior light and intelligence—his true self—of whose ray his personality is a vehicle, image and symbol. There is a long and weary road to be travelled yet before mankind will arrive at this summit of perfection, and the goal is so far away that only few are able to see it, while to many it will be an apparently unrealisable ideal, and, like a mountain peak lost in the clouds, inconceivable; but the ideal exists and the clouds that hinder us from seeing it are our own errors and misconceptions; it remains with ourselves to clear them away. We ourselves, by the power of so much of the perception of truth as we have already received and which has become our own, have it within our reach to overcome the darkness and open our minds to the influence of the light. But the light itself we cannot create or manufacture; it is not the product of our calculations, influences and theories. The truth is self-existent, eternal; it may be perceived, but it cannot be made. The reason why so few can realise the meaning of the term “self-knowledge,” is that the knowledge obtained in our schools is exclusively of an artificial kind. We read that which other men have believed and known and we imagine we know it. We fill our minds with the thoughts of others and find little time to think for ourselves. We seek to arrive at a conviction of the existence of this or that object by means of arguments and inferences, while we refuse to open our eyes and to see ourselves the very thing about whose existence we argue. Thus from a theosophical point of view we should appear to a higher being like a nation of people with closed eyes arguing about the existence of the sun and unable or unwilling to look at it for ourselves. There is only one way to arrive at real self-knowledge, and this is _Experience_. By external experience we attain knowledge of external circumstances; by experiencing internal powers we attain internal knowledge of them. _To know_ in reality means _to be_. By becoming material we learn the laws ruling in matter; by becoming spiritual we learn the laws of the spirit; our will is free to guide us in either direction. We cannot know truth in any other way than by becoming true, nor wisdom except by becoming wise. We can know any external or internal power, be it heat or light, love or justice, only by the effects which we experience from its action upon or within our own self.