II. _Love requires that a social life based solely on its commandments take the place of the State._ "To-day every man who thinks, however little, sees the impossibility of keeping on with the life hitherto lived, and the necessity of determining new forms of life."[1036] "The Christian humanity of our time must unconditionally renounce the heathen forms of life that it condemns, and set up a new life on the Christian bases that it recognizes."[1037] 1. Even after the State is done away, men are to live in societies. But what is to hold them together in these societies? Not a promise, at any rate. Christ commands us to make "no vows,"[1038] to "promise men nothing."[1039] "The Christian cannot promise that he will do or not do a particular thing at a particular hour, because he cannot know what the law of love, which it is the meaning of his life to obey, will demand of him at that hour."[1040] And still less can he "give his word to fulfil somebody's will, without knowing what the substance of this will is to be";[1041] by the mere fact of such a promise he would "make it manifest that the inward divine law is no longer the sole law of his life";[1042] "one cannot serve two masters."[1043] Men are to be held together in societies in future by the mental influence which the men who have made progress in knowledge exert upon the less advanced. "Mental influence is such a way of working upon a man that by it his wishes change and coincide with what is wanted of him; the man who yields to a mental influence acts according to his own wishes."[1044] Now, the force "by which men can live in societies"[1045] is found in the mental influence which the men who have made progress in knowledge exert upon the less advanced, in the "characteristic of little-thinking men, that they subordinate themselves to the directions of those who stand on a higher level of knowledge."[1046] In consequence of this characteristic "a body of men put themselves under the same rational principles, the minority consciously, because the principles agree with the demands of their reason, and the majority unconsciously, because the principles have become public opinion."[1047] "In this subordination there is nothing irrational or self-contradictory."[1048] 2. But in the future societary condition how shall the functions which the State at present performs be performed? Here people usually have three things in mind.[1049]