And although no man, as I have said, can ever express to other minds in terms of the intellect the reality he has thus witnessed, he has found means to do better than this—he can help them to share his vision. These means we call Poetry, Art, and Religion which is the poetry of Ethics. Through these it is that man most truly lives, because united in spirit with a larger life than his ‘self’ and his senses are aware of. Through them it is that while the eye sees the sunrise, the spirit sees the glory, that while the intellect apprehends Truth, the soul is ready to die for it, that while self-interest bands men together in communities for mutual service, Love prompts to the services that will never be recompensed. We are not then, it seems, absolutely imprisoned in our ‘I,’ strait as the bonds may seem. But this must be added, that they will never seem so strait as when we fancy that we can get out of them by any purely intellectual conception of the Ultimate Reality. “God,” says Æschylus most nobly, “is the Air, God is the Earth, God is the Heavens; yea, God is all things, and That which is above them.”[123] There is always a ‘beyond’ for the explorations of the intellect. The function of the intellect is to combine and reduce to order the experiences of sense, thus guiding us with definite aim through the bewildering wonders of life. But let us not dream that it can ever guide us to any goal or terminus. The goal is at once infinitely distant and nearer than our breath and blood. The search for it will last as long as Time. It is of the essence of the view of the universe here put forward that the intellect can never embrace it in any closed system of thought. Turn as we may to one after another of these closed systems as each grows out of harmony with advancing knowledge and insight, the true conclusion, at least for readers who have followed these pages with assent, will be to stand cheerfully ready to renounce all systems, trusting in the last resort to no formulas, but to the play of eternal Powers on the imagination, the heart, the will:— “They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full, Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings, To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.”[124] PART II: ETHICS CHAPTER VII LAW, FREE WILL, PERSONALITY “——And this main miracle that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world.” Tennyson.