As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for the great spiritual genius?—for I think that we may allow the great mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favourable environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by it. That is a certainty in the case of any living thing; a certainty so obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those who talk about the mystic craving for solitude—his complete aloofness from human life—seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these relations shall be. The _yogi_ or the hermit who retreats to the forest in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God, only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body, the bacterial populations of his alimentary system, would be there to remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or nun “buried alive” in the cloister is still living a family life; only it is a family life that is governed by special ideals. Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking colour all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency; that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonize rather than conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts—the cult—which he thus shares, may be enormous: for the cult is an expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual crudity, its innate conservatism, its primitive demands for safety and personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low level of the adoration which they evoke, may distress and even disgust him. Yet, even so, it is better for him that he should be within a church than outside it. Compared with this one fact—that he is a member of a social group which recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives in an environment permeated by religious concepts—the accuracy in detail of the creed which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical acts, is unimportant.