The sects of religion forget their disputes and recognize the spirit of religion in this profane author. He cannot be identified with any institution. According to the old saying, he gave up the Church and took to religion. Ho gave up the State, and took to humanity. The formularies and breviaries to which political and religious philosophers profess their allegiance were nothing to him. These formularies are a convenient shorthand, to save the trouble of thinking. But Shakespeare always thought. Every question that he treats is brought out of the realm of abstraction, and exhibited in its relation to daily life and the minds and hearts of men. He could never have been satisfied with such a smug phrase as 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. His mind would have been eager for details. In what do the greatest number find their happiness? How far is the happiness of one consistent with the happiness of another? What difficulties and miscarriages attend the business of transmuting the recognized materials for happiness into living human joy? Even these questions he would not have been content to handle in high philosophic fashion; he would have insisted on instances, and would have subscribed to no code that is not carefully built out of case-law. He knew that sanity is in the life of the senses; and that if there are some philosophers who are not mad it is because they live a double life, and have consolations and resources of which their books tell you nothing. It is the part of their life which they do not think it worth their while to mention that would have interested Shakespeare. He loves to reduce things to their elements. 'Is man no more than this?' says the old king on the heath, as he gazes on the naked madman. 'Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three of us are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!' That is how Shakespeare lays the mind of man bare, and strips him of his pretences, to try if he be indeed noble. And he finds that man, naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all the sins and all the evils that follow frailty, still has faith left to him, and charity. King Lear is still every inch a king.