A similar antagonism may be seen between the sentiment of mysticism and of allegiance to the state. The citizen who knows that the fate of his country lies in his arms, who loves his country with an active and sincere love, is a worshipper in a social religion. Great politicians have almost always been large and liberal minds. The ancient republics were comparatively non-religious for their time; the disappearance of monarchy coincides in general, in the history of mankind, with enfeeblement of faith. When everybody shall feel himself as equally and truly a citizen as anybody else, and shall be able to devote himself with an equal love to the good of the state, there will no longer be so great a store of unemployed activity, of surplus sensibility lying ready to the hand of mysticism. For the rest, let us magnify a little the sphere of human activity; not only the family and the state are nowadays demanding an increasingly large share of one’s attention and affection, but the human race itself is coming to be each day more and more intimately present to the mind of each of us. We find it more and more difficult even in thought to isolate ourselves, to become absorbed either in ourselves, or in God. The human world has become infinitely more human than formerly; all the bounds which separated men from each other (religion, language, nationality, race) are regarded already by superior men as artificial. The human race itself is coming to be recognized as a part only of the animal kingdom, the entire world claims the attention of science, offers itself to our love and opens for the devotees of mysticism the perspective of a species of universal fraternity. Just in so far as the universe thus grows larger, it becomes less and less insufficient in our eyes; and this surplus of love, which formerly mounted toward heaven in search of some transcendent resting place, finds ample room upon the surface of the earth and of heavenly bodies not unknown to astronomy. If the mystical tendency of the human mind be not destined completely to disappear, if it possesses any element of permanency, it will at least change its direction, and indeed, little by little is changing it. Christians were in no sense wrong in finding society in ancient times too narrow and the ancient world too cabined and confined under its dome of crystal; the very reason for the existence of Christianity lay in this vicious conception of society and of nature. To-day the one thing needful is to magnify the world till it shall satisfy the needs of man; until an equilibrium be established between the universe and the human heart. The aim of science is not to extinguish the need to love which constitutes so considerable an element of the religious sentiment, but to supply that need with an actually existing object; its function is not to put a check upon the outleap of human affection but to justify it.