Principles of western civilisation

306 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

leaving in the end scarcely a trace.’ We must probably go farther than Hegel’s explanation for the causes from which this result proceeded.? There were probably many causes. But prominent among them a place must be given to one which goes deeper than those usually mentioned by historians, and to which, in all probability, other causes were related ; namely, the abiding effect produced on the whole fabric of the social and intellectual life of the southern peoples by the closer contact which they had undergone with the ideals of that epoch of human evolution represented by the life of the Roman empire and the spirit of the ancient civilisations. Under these ideals the instinct to see the deeper principles of society in that complex and antithetical aspect, in which all the phenomena of the social and religious development of a world passing out from under the control of the hitherto ascendant present, must of necessity present themselves to the human mind, had obtained little room for development. The Latin mind tended, therefore, in all probability, to see truth—as, indeed, it still tends to see it—only in that more readily comprehensible, but also more elementary aspect in which it appears to be compressed into the severely consistent and logical forms which are, in reality, related to the governing principles of an earlier era of human evolution.

But when it became a question of enforcing this instinct of the Latin mind against the more northern peoples, we see how significant became again the part played by the military races of the north in continuing to hold the stage of history as the cosmic

1 Cf. Moeller, Hist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. divs. iii, and v. 2Cf. Philosophy of History, by G. W. F. Hegel, pt. iv. sec. ii. chap. 1.