This mental skin-disorder is far more irritating and more destructive, and not only leads to, but actually is, in all its forms, a sort of self-consciousness through which we work with real difficulty.

To discover its shallowness and the simplicity of its cure is a boon we can hardly realize until, by steady application, we have found the relief.  The discovery and cure do not lead to a millennium any more than the cure of any skin disease guarantees permanent health.  For deeper personal troubles there are other remedies.  Each will recognize and find his own; but freedom, through and through, can never be found, or even looked for clearly, while the irritation from the skin disease is withdrawing our attention.

   “But, friends,
    Truth is within ourselves:  it takes no rise
    From outward things; whatever you may believe,
    There is an inmost centre in us all
    Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
    Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
    This perfect clear perception which is truth. 
    A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
    Blinds it, and makes all error; and to know
    Rather consists in opening out a way
    Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
    Than in effecting entry for a light
    Supposed to be without.”

Browning’s “baffling and perverting carnal mesh” might be truly interpreted as a nervous tangle which is nothing at all except as we make it with our own perverted sight.

To help us to move a little distance from the phantom tangle, that it may disappear before our eyes, has been the aim of this book.  So by curing our mental skin-disease as a matter of course, and then forgetting that it ever existed, we may come to real life.  This no one can find for another, but each has within himself the way.

The end.