In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures, and is generally exempt from all moral dogmatism.[61] But let us come back to this movement of the ‘clerks’ exhorting the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them distinct from others. What will especially amaze history in this movement of the ‘clerks’ is the perfection with which they have carried it out. They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them _the most distinct_ from others, in their poets rather than in their scientists, in their legends rather than in their philosophies, since poetry (as they perfectly well perceived) is infinitely more national, more separating than the products of pure intelligence.[62] They have exhorted the peoples to honour their poets’ characteristics insofar as they are peculiar to them and are not universal. Recently a young Italian writer praised his language because it is only used in Italy, and poured scorn on French because it is employed universally.[63] They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in _everything_ which makes them distinct from others, not only in their language, art, and literature, but in their dress, houses, furniture, and food. During the past half century it has been a common experience to see serious writers (to go no further than France) exhorting their compatriots to remain faithful to French fashions, French hair-dressing, French dining rooms, French cooking, French cars. They have exhorted the peoples to feel themselves distinct even in their vices. The German historians, says Fustel de Coulanges, urge their nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity. The French moralist does not lag behind and desires his compatriots to accept their ‘national determinism’ in its ‘indivisible totality’, with its injustices as well as its wisdom, with its fanaticism as well as its enlightenment, its pettiness as well as its grandeur. Another, (Maurras) declares: ‘Good or bad, our tastes are ours and it is always permissible to take ourselves as the sole judges and models of our lives’. Once again, the remarkable thing here is not that such things should be said, but that they should be said by the ‘clerks’, by a class of men whose purpose hitherto has been to urge their fellow-citizens to feel conscious of themselves in what is common to all men, that they should be said in France by the descendants of Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Renan.