To the artistic eye the universe presents itself as a vast and moving spectacle, to the scientific mind as the theatre of forces which repeat their work with a mechanical uniformity or perhaps fatally run down to a predestined and predictable final arrest, to the devout or religious soul as the constant efflux of a beneficent will, unweariedly kind, caring for the humblest of its creatures, august, worshipful, deserving of endless adoration and love, while to the philosophic mind it is known and ever more to be known as the self-expression of a mind in essence one with all minds that know it in knowing themselves, know it as the work or product of a mind engaged or absorbed in knowing itself, and so creating itself and all that is requisite that it may learn more and more what is hidden or stored from all eternity within its plenitude. At least we may say that the conception of a Mind which in order to know itself creates the conditions of such knowledge, which wills to learn whatever can be learned of itself from whatever it does, supplies the best pattern or original after which to model our vaguer and more blurred conceptions of progressive existence and being elsewhere. It furnishes to us an ideal of a progress which realizes or maintains and advances itself, for it is independent upon external conditions. The Progress of Philosophy or of Wisdom is a palmary instance of progress achieved out of the internal resources of that which progresses. And after this pattern we least untruly and least unworthily conceive the mode of that eternal and universal Progress which is the life of the Whole within and as part of which we live.