It is impossible to define what is meant by respect for human personality. To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny. Although it is the whole of him that is sacred to me, he is not sacred in all respects and from every point of view. He is not sacred in as much as he happens to have long arms, black eyes, or possibly commonplace thoughts. Nor as a prince, if he is one; nor as a sweeper if that is what he is. The caste and class differences are accidental. At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it. This profound and childlike and unchanging expectation of good in the heart is not what is involved when we agitate for our rights. Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ Himself could not restrain, ‘Why am I being hurt?’, then there is certainly injustice.

When the infliction of evil provokes a cry of sorrowful surprise from the depth of the soul, it is not a personal thing. Injury to the personality and its desires is not sufficient to evoke it, but only and always the sense of contact with injustice through pain. It is always, in the last of men as in Christ Himself, an impersonal protest. There are also many cries of personal protest, but they are unimportant; you may provoke as many of them as you wish without violating anything sacred. In so far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else. Truth and beauty dwell on this level of the impersonal and the anonymous. This is the realm of the sacred; on the other level nothing is sacred. What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal. All this is too obvious. If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all. Perfection is impersonal.

That collectivity is not only alien to the sacred, but it deludes us with a false imitation of it. Idolatry is the name of the error which attributes a sacred character to the collectivity. It is the commonest of crimes, at all times, at all places. There is nothing scandalous in the subordination of the person to the collectivity. Scientists of the same class are equally enslaved by fashion, which rules over science even more despotically than over the shape of hats. For these men the collective opinion of specialists is practically a dictatorship. The human being can only escape from the collective by raising himself above the personal and entering into the impersonal. The moment he does this, there is something in him, a small portion of his soul, upon which nothing of the collective can get a hold. If he can root himself in the impersonal good so as to be able to draw energy from it, then he is in a condition, whenever he feels the obligation to do so, to bring to bear without any outside help, against any collectivity, a small but real force. A collectivity is much stronger than a single man who can only be performed by a mind in a state of solitude. Every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is charged with a responsibility towards all humans. This means, on the one hand, that for every person there should be enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one’s time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence. At the same time, the person needs warmth, lest it be driven by distress to submerge itself in the collective. If this is the good, then modern societies, even democratic ones, seem to go about as far as it is possible to go in the direction of evil.