Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of being realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making; it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque or unintelligible. To its exemplification or illustration there we must turn for light upon our problem. Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and imaginative or opinionative--which is Latin for 'dogmatic'--Religion, and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using that to supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of both.