This music is the highest, but the notes that go to make it up are everywhere. Altruism does not arise, is not imposed from without, at any period or by any crisis, by progress or by society. The spiral unwinds with the unwinding life upon the globe. It is the form of illusion under which all life proceeds. It is the law of mind. The eye treats space and color as entities. It cannot see on any other terms. The stomach digests food, but not its own lining. We are obliged to think in terms of the objective universe. We are not wholesome unless we are self-forgetting. There is no cranny in all the million manifestations of nature where you can interfere between the organism and its object without representing disease. And man is more than a mere altruistic animal. At least the religions of Humanity have never expressed him. At those times when he is entirely unselfish and therefore entirely himself, when he feels himself to be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love, all reverence, all service to something not himself, yet something personal, he has faith. The theologies are attempts to formulate this state of mind in order that it may be preserved. It is clear enough that every mind must speak in its own symbols, and that the symbols of one must always appear to another as illusions. Yet each man for himself knows he faces a reality. This is a psychological necessity. Destroy the belief, and on the instant he changes. Show him that he is the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, a half man. A man whose mind is divided, as, for instance, by the consciousness of a personal motive, cannot believe. He stands like the wicked king in the play of Hamlet; unable to pray. It is a psychological impossibility. The concern of mankind for their forms of doctrine is gratuitous. Faith re-appears under new names. You cannot convince a lover that he is bent on self-development, nor any decent man that he does not believe in, is not controlled by something higher than himself. The question is not one of words. We may trace this reverent attitude of mind upward through the acts and activities of the spirit, and it makes no difference whether we regard religion as the source and origin of them all or as the summary of them all. In Shakespeare’s plays we see a cycle of human beings, the most living that we have ever met with, and the absence of mystical or emotional religion from many of the plays is one of the wonders of nature. There is no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; we are not offended. The reason may be that the element has been employed in the act of creation. Religion has been consumed in the development of character. It is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to the characters. It is here seen as artistic perfection. The same is true of the Greek statues and of the Sistine Sibyls, and of other work left by those two periods, the only other periods in which the individual attained completion.