on, to truth and, in
practice, to salvation.--Besides, this second conclusion, like the first
one, was due to recent experience. Henceforth it was evident that, in
political and social matters, ideas quickly descend from speculation to
practice. When anybody talks to me about stones, plants, animals and the
stars I must, to listen, be interested in these; if anybody talks to me
about man and society, it suffices that I am a man and a member of that
society; for then it concerns myself, my nearest, daily, most sensitive
and dearest interests; by virtue of being a tax-payer and a subject, a
citizen and an elector, a property-owner or a proletarian, a consumer or
a producer, a free-thinker or a Catholic, a father, son or husband,
the doctrine is addressed to me; to affect me it has only to be within
reach, through interpreters and others that promulgate it.--This office
appertains to writers great or small, particularly to the educated who
possess wit, imagination or eloquence, a pleasing style, the art of
finding readers or of making themselves understood. Owing to their
interposition, a doctrine wrought out by the specialist or thinker
in his study, spreads around through the novel, the theatre and the
lecture-room, by pamphlets, the newspaper, dictionaries, manuals and
conversation, and, finally, by teaching itself. It thus enters all
houses, knocks at the door of each intellect, and, according as it works
its way more or less forcibly, contributes more or less effectively
to make or unmake the ideas and sentiments that adapt it to the social
order of things in which it is comprised.

In this respect it acts like positive religions; in its way and on many
accounts, it is one of them. In the first place, like religion, it is a
living, principal, inexhaustible fountain-head, a high central reservoir
of active and directing belief. If the public reservoir is not filled
by an intermittent flow, by sudden freshets, by obscure infiltrations
of the mystic faculty, it is regularly and openly fed by the constant
contributions of the normal faculties. On the other hand, confronting
faith, by the side of that beneficent divination which, answering the
demands of conscience and the emotions, fashions the ideal world and
makes the real world conform to this, it poses the testing process
which, analyzing the past and the present, disengages possible laws and
the probabilities of the future. Doctrine likewise has its dogmas, many
defi