The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. Did he believe in the immortality of the soul and in a future state? Who can say? What we can say is, that if we require affirmative evidence of such a faith, we shall seek for it in vain. In the Sonnets, where he seems to speak from himself, the only immortality to which he refers is the permanence of the impression which his genius as a poet will leave--immortality in the sense in which Cicero and Tacitus have so eloquently interpreted the term. But on the other hand, if there is nothing to warrant a conclusion in the affirmative, there is nothing to warrant one in the negative. His attitude is precisely that of Aristotle in the _Ethics_; a life beyond this is neither affirmed nor denied, but the scale of probability inclines towards the negative, and his moral philosophy proceeds on the assumption that life is the end of life.[54] Goethe has said that man was not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to attempt to solve them, that he might keep within the limits of the knowable. And it is within the limits of the knowable that Shakespeare’s theology confines itself. Starting simply, as Gervinus says, from the point, that man is born with powers and faculties which he is to use, and with powers of self-regulation and self-determination which are to direct aright the powers of action, the “Whence we are,” and the “Whither we are going,” are problems for which he has no solution.[55] Men must endure Their going hence e’en as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. And for ripeness or unripeness, man’s will is responsible. He would probably have agreed with the saying of Heraclitus, ηθος ανθρωπω δαιμων. Throughout his Dramas all is explicable, with the single exception of Macbeth, without reference to supernaturalism. Perfectly intelligible effects follow perfectly intelligible causes; the moral law solves all. But especially conspicuous is the absence of the theological element where we should especially have looked for it. “Men and women,” says Brewer, “are made to drain the cup of misery to the dregs; but, as from the depths into which they have fallen, by their own weakness, or by the weakness of others, the poet never raises them, in violation of the inexorable laws of nature, so neither does he put a new song in their mouths, or any expression of confidence in God’s righteous dealing. With as hard and precise a hand as Bacon does he sunder the celestial from the terrestrial kingdom, the things of earth from the things of heaven.”[56]