If, therefore, we desire to express this perfecting of political passions which I have described, in terms of a more profound and essential order of things, we may say that men to-day are displaying, with a hitherto unknown knowledge and consciousness, the desire to situate themselves in the _real_ or practical manner of existence, in opposition to the _disinterested_ or _metaphysical_ manner. Moreover, it is remarkable to see how political passions to-day more and more expressly assert their derivation from this realism and from it alone. On the one hand we have a Socialism which constantly declares that it has no interest in universal man, no interest in procuring justice for him or any other ‘metaphysical phantom’, but solely desires to obtain possession of material advantages for the benefit of its class. On the other hand we have the nationalist mind which everywhere takes a pride in being purely realistic. The French people who fought in the past to carry to other nations a doctrine they believed would bring happiness (I say the people, for its rulers never shared in that simple-minded belief) would now blush to have it even suspected that they would fight ‘for principles’.[26] Is it not suggestive to observe that the only wars of the past which, to some extent, brought into play passions that were a little disinterested--the wars of religion--are the only wars from which humanity has freed itself?[27] And that immense idealistic upheavals like the crusades (idealistic at least with humble people) should now be something which makes the modern man smile, like the spectacle of children at play? Is it not also significant that the national passions (which I have shown are the most perfectly realist of all political passions) should be those which I have been able to point out have most absorbed all other passions?[28] Let me add to this, that these passions, insofar as they are the will of a group of men to set themselves up as distinct from others, have attained a hitherto unknown degree of consciousness.[29] Finally, the supreme attribute we have discovered in political passions, i.e. the divinization of their realism, is now openly admitted, with a plainness never seen before. The State, Country, Class, are now frankly God; we may even say that for many people (and some are proud of it) they alone are God.[30] Humanity, by its present practice of political passions, thereby declares that it has become more realist, more exclusively and more religiously realist than it has ever been. III _The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal_ _‘I created him to be spiritual in his flesh; and now he has become carnal even in the spirit.’_--(Bossuet, _Élévations_, VII, 3.)