Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 331

what has become the domain of ethics and religion, on the other, as has taken place nowhere else in our civilisation.* .

This result, entirely absent in countries where the standards of the pre-Reformation period still prevail,? largely absent, as yet, even in Germany and in German thought, where the development which has followed the Reformation has left the religious consciousness still deeply entangled with the theory of the State,* is itself the distinctive

1 Compare, in this connection, Professor Holland’s lucid explanation of the effect of recent tendencies in English thought as they apply to the current science of jurisprudence in England. The moral sciences he describes as tending in our time to fall into two grand divisions. The first division he classifies as ‘‘ Ethics.” In the second division, which he describes as possessing hitherto no received collective name, and which he proceeds to provisionally designate ‘‘ Nomology,” we are concerned, he says, simply with the science of the office of external regulation in the State. The complete dissociation of English jurisprudence from the first group is emphasised in these words: ‘‘ The moral sciences having thus been grouped under the head of Ethic, in which the object of investigation is the conformity of the will to a rule; and of Nomology, in which the object of investigation is the conformity of acts to a rule, we pass by the former as foreign to our subject, and confine our attention to the latter.” The laws with which it is concerned no longer relate to any kind of teleology of the State and its institutions, but are simply “‘general rules of human action enforced by a sovereign political authority” (The Elements of Jurisprudence, by Thomas Erskine Holland, ch. iii.). Compare with this Sir Frederick Pollock’s assertion, that in English thought the analytical branch of political science has become altogether independent of ethical theories. “‘And that is the definite scientific result which we in England say that the work of the past century has given us” (Hzstory of the Science of Politics, pp. 113-14).

2 For instance, at a conference of the bishops of Spain, held at Burgos in September 1899, seventeen principles of action in the State were formulated. “Amongst those enumerated in 2 summary given in the 7 7mes Were that ‘toleration should be confined to the narrowest limit allowed by the Constitution,’ that ‘no ecclesiastic should be punished by the ordinary civil courts of justice,’ that marriages by the Church should always have civil effect, that bishops should recover legacies from pious testators without any intervention of lay authority, and that all associations which are not Catholic should be prohibited.”

3 Cf. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, pt. iii. sec. ili, §§ 257-360 ; and Phzlosophy of History, Intro. and pt. iv. Hegel as yet saw in the post-Reformation development in the German State only ‘‘ the reconciliation of religion with legal