ealise the immense benefits
of the inner knowledge, and for the same reason he is also qualified to
warn us of the dangers on the way to its acquisition; for nowhere is it
more true that

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,"

and it is one of the greatest of these dangers that he points out in
this poem.

Under the figure of Lazarus he describes the man who has practically
grasped the reality of the inner side of things, for whom the veil has
been removed, and who knows that the external and visible takes its rise
from the internal and spiritual. But the description is that of one
whose eyes have been so dazzled by the light that he has lost the power
of accommodating his vision to the world of sense. He now commits the
same error from the side of "the within" that he formerly committed from
the side of "the without," the error of supposing that there is no vital
reality in the aspect of things on which his thoughts are not
immediately centered. This is want of mental balance, whether it shows
itself by refusing reality to the inward or the outward. To be so
absorbed in speculative ideas as to be unable to give them practical
application in daily life, is to allow our highest thoughts to evaporate
in dreams.

There is a world of philosophy in the simple statement that there can be
no inside without an outside, and no outside without an inside; and the
great secret in life is in learning to see things in their wholeness,
and to realise the inside and the outside simultaneously. Each of them
without the other is a mere abstraction, having no real existence, which
we contemplate separately only for the purpose of reviewing the logical
steps by which they are connected together as cause and effect. Nature
does not separate them, for they are inseparable; and the law of nature
is the law of life. It is related of Pythagoras that, after he had led
his scholars to the dizziest heights of the inner knowledge, he never
failed to impress upon them the converse lesson of tracing out the steps
by which these inner principles translate themselves into the familiar
conditions of the outward things by which we are surrounded. The process
of analysis is merely an expedient for discovering what springs in the
realm of causes we are to touch in order to produce certain effects in
the realm of manifestation. But this is not sufficient. We must also
learn to calculate how those particular effects, when produced, will
stand r