With a strong religious basis, this would work no harm, for the rules of life, as laid down by religions, would suffice. But there are many who do not accept these rules as any absolute indication of the will of God, but only as the regulations of good men, which have a claim to respect and nothing more. And thus it seems to me that altruism--thoroughgoing altruism--hands over those who regard it as an ideal, and who are also of a sceptical turn of mind, to the most absolute unfixedness of theory, and, very possibly, to the greatest errors in life. And here we come to the point where the study of space becomes so important. For if this rule of altruism is the right one, if it appeals with a great invitation to us, we need not therefore try it with less precaution than we should use in other affairs of infinitely less importance. When we want to know if a plank will bear, we entrust it with a different load from that of a human body. And if this law of altruism is the true one, let us try it where failure will not mean the ruin of human beings. Now, in knowledge, pure altruism means so to bury the mind in the thing known that all particular relations of one’s self pass away. The altruistic knowledge of the heavens would be, to feel that the stars were vast bodies, and that I am moving rapidly. It would be, to know this, not as a matter of theory, but as a matter of habitual feeling. Whether this is possible, I do not know; but a somewhat similar attempt can be made with much simpler means. In a different place I have described the process of acquiring an altruistic knowledge of a block of cubes; and the results of the laborious processes involved are well worth the trouble. For as a clearly demonstrable fact this comes before one. To acquire an absolute knowledge of a block of cubes, so that all self relations are cast out, means that one has to take the view of a higher being. It suddenly comes before one, that the particular relations which are so fixed and important, and seem so absolutely sure when one begins the process of learning, are by no means absolute facts, but marks of a singular limitation, almost a degradation, on one’s own part. In the determined attempt to know the most insignificant object perfectly and thoroughly, there flashes before one’s eyes an existence infinitely higher than one’s own. And with that vision there comes,--I do not speak from my own experience only,--a conviction that our existence also is not what we suppose--that this bodily self of ours is but a limit too. And the question of altruism, as against self-regard, seems almost to vanish, for by altruism we come to know what we truly are. “What we truly are,” I do not mean apart from space and matter, but what we really are as beings having a space existence; for our way of thinking about existence is to conceive it as the relations of bodies in space. To think is to conceive realities in space.