He was over in the city again for his next birthday celebration, and after the dinner, Colonel Ingersoll made a long, impassioned tribute to his friend.[734] The comradeship between them was strong and satisfying to both; Whitman was always in better spirits after a call from the colonel. "He is full of faults and mistakes," he said once to an English friend, "but he is an example in literature of natural growth as a tree"; adding, "he gives out always from himself."[735] Their attitude toward questions of religion was often antagonistic, and on this occasion, after the speech, Whitman made a sort of rejoinder. While gratefully acknowledging his friend's appreciation of _Leaves of Grass_, he pointed out that Ingersoll had stopped short of the main matter, for the book was crammed with allusions to immortality, and was bound together by the idea of purpose, resident in the heart of all and realising itself in the material universe. He turned to Ingersoll, demanding, "Unless there is a definite object for it all, what, in God's name, is it all for?" And Ingersoll, shaking his head, replied, "I can't tell. And if there is a purpose, and if there is a God, what is it all for? I can't tell. It looks like nonsense to me, either way." From this intellectual agnosticism no argument could dislodge a mind like Ingersoll's, for noble as it was, it was limited by its own logic, and to logic alone, working with the material of merely intellectual knowledge, the universe must inevitably remain a riddle. Whitman, recognising a more perfect faculty of reason, and cognisant of a field of transcendent knowledge which Ingersoll had never known, was able to realise a purpose in this, which to Ingersoll seemed only nonsense. For the divinely creative imagination, when it is awakened, discovers in all things the meanings of creative thought. And personality, when in its supreme hours it transcends the limitations of human knowledge, and enters the consciousness of the Whole, discovers the meaning of immortality, and the indestructibility of the soul. Such flights are naturally impossible to the pedestrian faculties of the mind. Ingersoll spoke again in Philadelphia, in the same vein and on the same subject, in October.[736] He had a large audience of perhaps two thousand persons in the Horticultural Hall, and Whitman was present on the platform. Taking up his subject somewhat in the manner of O'Connor in the _Good Gray Poet_, the orator denounced the hypocrisy and parochialism of American opinion, and proclaimed the Divine right of the liberator, genius. He justified "Children of Adam," and gave in his adherence to the theory of free rhythm which is exemplified in the _Leaves_.