The absolute detachment of the mystic leads to another consequence which is equally in opposition to modern tendencies; it treats, that is to say, as an absolute zero a being who has at least the value of unity, to wit: the ego. If I aim at the welfare of all sentient beings indiscriminatingly, I aim also in some measure at my own, who am one of them; and moreover, it is for my own that I can labour to best advantage. This ego counts for something in this world, it is a unit in the sum. The pure love inculcated by mysticism, on the contrary, lets the ego go for nothing, after the manner of the muleteer, who, in reckoning his mules, always forgot to count the one he was sitting on; the missing mule never turned up except when he dismounted, so that he ultimately resolved to go forward on foot. The transcendent and chimerical morality of mysticism might be compared to a purely humanitarian theory of politics; it is indeed even more abstract. Patriotism, no doubt, leans upon a delusion when it regards one’s native country as the centre of the world, but does not humanitarianism lean not upon one but upon a whole series of illusions? In the item of illusions here below one must put up with the least false and most useful. Well, it is probably not wholly without utility that each nation in the universe should act for itself; if each should attempt to act exclusively for the universe as a whole and for the love of the whole, either it would not act at all or it would conceive the future of the universe practically on the model of its own future and would commit an uninterrupted succession of mistakes. Very frequently in this world unconscious and indirect collaboration is more efficacious than that which is conscious and direct. Men often do more for the best aims of humanity by directing their attention in a spirit of rivalry toward needs comparatively immediate but which for that very reason stimulate their efforts and their hopes, than by uniting for the attainment of an object so distant that it discourages them. In morals and politics one has not only to hit upon the best means of combining the forces of humanity, but also upon what is the best means of exciting human effort; and on that score there is something to be said even for the love of the parish in which one is born. One’s parish is at least a definite object: one knows where it is, one cannot lose one’s way, one may entertain a hope, nay even a certitude, of reaching it, and hope and certitude are great allies. And the same is true of self-love and love for those with whom one identifies one’s self. It is precisely this that mysticism ignores and by that means puts itself in opposition to the scientific spirit. For mysticism there is no compromise possible between the fact and its ideal which denies the fact. Logically mysticism ought to address its efforts toward total annihilation, much after the manner of the followers of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann.