Inspiration is a commonplace of life, though only too often we think of it solely in connection with religion, and especially with reference to the Bible. Because thought flies free and ever consorts like with like, so almost every moment of our days we are inspiring others and being inspired in return. It is mere delusion that we consider ourselves independent units, for we are literally built of one another. Memory largely constitutes the man, for his every experience and thought is recorded by his subconscious memory, and goes to the making of his characteristics and his personality. Day by day we meet, and perforce remember each other: we remember also those to whom we may never have spoken, and so--unintroduced--they creep in this subtle way into our personality. "We are, each one of us, united by bonds of emotional influence with the personalities of all those with whom we have had to do. If we could see them, they would guide us to their objects, for they never lose their way. Thus by threads of love, threads of hatred, threads of adoration, threads of thought, the universe of souls is interpenetrated and linked up into a unity of correlated activity, an intricate web of life."[9] Something of myself goes, in my thoughts, into this written word: you read it, and as the thought incorporates itself in your mind so does some tenuous element of my personality creep into your own. Our independence is a fiction. We inspire each other, whether we like it or no. [Note 9: C. J. Whitby, M.D. "The Open Secret."] But inspiration is of all kinds: it is like those neutral forces of faith and thought, which depend for their result upon the direction in which they are turned. Inspiration can uplift, but it may also degrade. We ourselves by the tuning of our own thoughts determine which it shall accomplish. Like can only answer to like: anger can never play echo to love, for their vibrations are so far apart in attunement that the one cannot influence the other. But anger answers to anger, and love to love. It is the eternal response of the love implanted in the spirit of man that ever bids him answer to the love that radiates from the divine. Hence, in whatever age or clime we look, always there is to be seen man in quest for the unseen, after joy, beauty, truth, happiness, after all those spangles that glitter on the garment of love.