therefore no dream, beholding a present--an ever-present--Reality? It was Philosophy, or philosophers, as I have said, that first discerned the fact of Progress, named it, and divined its lineaments. To Philosophy the name and notion of Progress belongs as of right--the right of first occupation. Merely to have invented a name for the fact is no small service, for thus the fact was fixed for further study and examination. But with the name Philosophy gave us the idea, the notion, and therewith the fact began to be understood and to become amenable to further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines, distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called a notion, a fit member of the world of mind, a seat and source of intellectual light. In this work Philosophy proceeds and succeeds simply by reflecting on whatever meaning it has in whatever manner already acquired; it employs no strange apparatus or recondite methods, only continues more thoughtfully and conscientiously to use the familiar means by which the earlier simpler meanings were appropriated and developed, following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy and painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands an effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to force our thoughts to run counter to our customary heedless use of words and to learn to employ them even for a short time with a steady precision of significance. Yet unless this effort is resolutely made we must remain the easy prey of manifold confusions and errors which trip us in the dark. Our words degrade into tokens which experience will not cash--tangles of symbols which we cannot retranslate. But Philosophy is more than the attempt to refine and subtilize our ordinary words so as to fit them for the higher service of interpretative thought, more even than the endeavour to improve the stock of ideas no matter how come by, by which we interpret to ourselves whatever it imports us to understand. All this it is and does, or strives to do, but only as subsidiary to its true business and real aim. All this it might do and do successfully, and yet make or bring about no substantial progress in itself or elsewhere. And when progress in Philosophy is spoken of, it is not either such improvement in language nor such improvement in ideas that alone or mainly is meant.