"What is holy?" is a question raised by Goethe in a certain distich, and the answer he gives is: "that which binds together many souls." In this sense we may affirm that what is sacred, together with the end expressed in the above association, and as such association, has actually formed the primary content of self-subsistent building and the art of such. The earliest example of this we may take from the story of the building of the tower of Babylon. In the broad expanse of the Euphrates valley we are told that mankind erected an enormous architectural work. It is built by the labour of a community, and this public character of its construction is at the same time the end and content of the work itself. And what is equally true is this, that this foundation of an association of communal labour is no mere unity of a patriarchal stamp; on the contrary we find here that the mere unity of the family is precisely that which is set on one side, and this building, which is raised to the heavens, is the objective presentment of the dissolution of the more primitive type of unity and the realization of another of more expansive range. The collective activity of peoples belonging to that age worked in it; and, in proportion as they came together in order to accomplish a building of prodigious size, the product of their activity came to be the band, which, on the ground and soil they had thus selected, and by means of the accumulated mass of stone and the architectural construction on the land--just as in our case morality, custom, and the lawful constitution of State-life--bound them in unity together. A building of this kind is in consequence also symbolical for the reason that it merely suggests the band of unity which it is, because it is only able, by means of its form and content, to express the sacred unity which unites men in an external way. It is also equally a part of this tradition that the communities have once more split apart from the centre of attraction which united them on a work of this external character.