You read Shakespeare. What do you get out of Shakespeare? All that your brain is able to hold. It depends upon your brain. If you are great--if you have been cultivated--if the wings of your imagination have been spread--if you have had great, free, and splendid thoughts--'r you have stood upon the edge of things--if you have had the courage to meet all that can come--you get an immensity from Shakespeare. If you have lived nobly--if you have loved with every drop of your blood and every fibre of your being--if you have suffered--if you have enjoyed--then you get an immensity from Shakespeare. But if you have lived a poor, little, mean, wasted, barren, weedy life--you get very little from that immortal man. So it is from every source in nature--what you get depends upon what you are. Take then the second step. If thought is a necessity, there can be no responsibility for thought. And why has man ever believed that his fellow-man was responsible for his thought? Everything that is, everything that has been, has been naturally produced. Man has acted as, under the same circumstances, we would have acted; because when you say "under the circumstances," it is the same as to say that you would do exactly as they have done. There has always been in men the instinct of self-preservation. There was a time when men believed, and honestly believed, that there was above them a God. Sometimes they believed in many, but it will be sufficient for my illustration to say, one. Man believed that there was in the sky above him a God who attended to the affairs of men. He believed that that God, sitting upon his throne, rewarded virtue and punished vice. He believed also, that that God held the community responsible for the sins of individuals. He honestly believed it. When the flood came, or when the earthquake devoured, he really believed that some God was filled with anger--with holy indignation--at his children. He believed it, and so he looked about among his neighbors to see who was in fault, and if there was any man who had failed to bring his sacrifice to the altar, had failed to kneel, it may be to the priest, failed to be present in the temple, or had given it as his opinion that the God of that tribe or of that nation was of no use, then, in order to placate the God, they seized the neighbor and sacrificed him on the altar of their ignorance and of their fear. They believed when the lightning leaped from the cloud and left its blackened mark upon the man, that he had done something--that he had excited the wrath of the gods. And while man so believed, while he believed that it was necessary, in order to defend himself, to kill his neighbor--he acted simply according to the dictates of his nature.