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.