As hero-worship becomes more imaginative, it merges insensibly into that devotion to ideal persons that is called religious. It has often been pointed out that the feeling men have toward a visible leader and master like Lincoln, Lee, Napoleon, or Garibaldi, is psychologically much the same thing as the worship of the ideal persons of religion. Hero-worship is a kind of religion, and religion, in so far as it conceives persons, is a kind of hero-worship. Both are expressions of that intrinsically social or communicative nature of human thought and sentiment which was insisted upon in a previous chapter. That the personality toward which the feeling is directed is ideal evidently affords no fundamental distinction. All persons are ideal, in a true sense, and those whom we admire and reverence are peculiarly so. That is to say, the idea of a person, whether his body be present to our senses or not, is imaginative, a synthesis, an interpretation of many elements, resting upon our whole experience of human life, not merely upon our acquaintance with this particular person; and the more our admiration and reverence are awakened the more actively ideal and imaginative does our conception of the person become. Of course we never _see_ a person; we see a few visible traits which stimulate our imaginations to the construction of a personal idea in the mind. The ideal persons of religion are not fundamentally different, psychologically or sociologically, from other persons; they are personal ideas built up in the mind out of the material at its disposal, and serving to appease its need for a sort of intercourse that will give scope to reverence, submission, trust, and self-expanding enthusiasm. So far as they are present to thought and emotion, and so work upon life, they are real, with that immediate social reality discussed in the third chapter. The fact that they have attached to them no visible or tangible material body, similar to that of other persons, is indeed an important fact, but rather of physiological than of psychological or social interest. Perhaps it is not going too far to say that the idea of God is _specially_ mysterious only from a physiological point of view; mentally and socially regarded it is of one sort with other personal ideas, no less a verifiable fact, and no more or less inscrutable. It must be obvious to anyone who reflects upon the matter, I should think, that our conceptions of personality, from the simple and sensuous notions a little child has of those about him, up to the noblest and fullest idea of deity that man can achieve, are one in kind, as being imaginative interpretations of experience, and form a series in which there are no breaks, no gap between human and divine. All is human, and all, if you please, divine.