Testifying to the U. S. Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage in 1898, Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed, "There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea:  the solitude of self . . . to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.  Such is individual life."

    Ms. Stanton makes a telling point about the nature of the human being.  As she notes, ultimately, all people are individuals.  That is, although humans are made to be in fellowship with other human beings, they remain individual entities, entities in which there is a place that, in ways no one or nothing else can, defines them:  the very deepest part of their soul.

     And it in this depth of being that we find what most matters to who we are as human beings:  the presence of transcendence, the fact of omniscience, the order which undergirds the cosmos.  We find our connection to the seminal principle of existence.

     Without this point of depth, as Ms. Stanton suggests, we are beacons of inner solitude, grand bastions of individuality without any larger point.