It cannot be doubted that, like Plato, he saw in the triviality of the women of the upper classes especially, one of the gravest dangers which beset the Republic. For the aim of Democracy is great free personalities, and these can only be produced from a noble maternity. Unless motherhood and fatherhood in all their aspects become a living science,[511] and the practice of personal health is recognised as the finest of the arts, any achievement of the purpose of Democracy must be slow indeed. Of other and very secondary kinds of culture, desirable enough in their place, America, he continues, has no lack. In some respects she is more European than Europe. But to personality, and the moral force which is personality, she is alarmingly indifferent. We have fussed about the world, cries this stern speaker of truth to his age and nation; we have gathered together its art and its sciences, but we have not grown great in our own souls. Our mean manners result precisely from that. Thus he returns to reiterate the cry that can always be heard whenever we open any book of his, the cry of the quintessential importance of religion in every field of human life.[512] For religion is the life of the soul; that is to say, it is the heart of life. Whitman's religion, however, is not that which is taught by churches and churchmen. It is a religion extricated from the churches. In a notable passage[513] he declares: "Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's isolated self to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the Divine levels, and commune with the unutterable". In short, religion is moral or spiritual force: it is that which forms and maintains existence: without it, the continued life of nation or individual is inconceivable. For a nation, too, has its soul-identity; and must become conscious of that if it is to live, much more if it is to lead. The awakening of America to this consciousness of its spiritual purpose Whitman awaits, as the prophets of Israel awaited the Messiah.[514] And we may add that with its realisation of nationhood, there comes to a people the sense of its membership in the solidarity of the race. Now this soul-consciousness, he proceeds, comes to a nation through its literature. In its songs and in its great epics, a people tells and reads the secrets of its life; it sees there, as in a glass, the Divine purpose which tabernacles in its own heart. A literature which can do this for America will not be made by merely correct and clever college men, or by fanciful adepts in the arts of verse. Those who make it must breathe the open air of Nature; they must, in the largest sense, be men of science. But in Whitman's language nature and science include more than the material and the seen. They are the world of reality and its knowledge; and the soul is the essence of reality: wherefore its experience is the sum of knowledge.