There is nothing in the whole range of human experience more widely known and universally felt than spirit. Apart from spirit there could be no community, for it is spirit which draws men into community and gives to any community its unity, cohesiveness, and permanence. Think, for example, of the spirit of the Marine Corps. Surely this is a reality we all acknowledge. We cannot, of course, assign it any substance. It is not material and is not a ``thing'' occupying space and time. Yet it exists and has an objective reality which can be experienced and known. So it is too with many other spirits which we all know: the spirit of Nazism or Communism, school spirit, the spirit of a street corner gang or a football team, the spirit of Rotary or the Ku Klux Klan. Every community, if it is alive has a spirit, and that spirit is the center of its unity and identity.

In searching for clues which might lead us to a fresh apprehension of the reality of spirit, the close connection between spirit and community is likely to prove the most fruitful. For it is primarily in community that we know and experience spirit. It is spirit which gives life to a community and causes it to cohere. It is the spirit which is the source of a community's drawing power by means of which others are drawn into it from the world outside so that the community grows and prospers. Yet the spirit which lives in community is not identical with the community. The idea of community and the idea of spirit are two distinct and separable ideas.