Principles of western civilisation

vin THE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 261

time amongst the candidates. And when the dignity of emperor was united with the powers of a reigning prince of first rank outside of Germany —as when the ruler in Spain, Naples, the Netherlands, and other dominions became the Emperor Charles V., after an election in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England had been his competitors—the Holy Roman Empire was in fact as well as in theory the principal symbol of universal politics in Western history.

Now as the evolutionist turns over at the present day the surviving records of this institution as it first becomes visible in Europe, nothing can be more clearly revealed than the nature of the position, as disclosed on almost every page, up to which the human mind had travelled at this point in the history of our civilisation. Nothing can also be clearer than the nature of the climax towards which it was being carried irresistibly forward. As he takes up, for instance, that remarkable document of the Middle Ages, the Capitulary of the year 802,’ correctly described as the foundation charter of the empire, the standpoint which underlies the working of the human mind is apparent in nearly every clause. The concept that the spiritual welfare of the world is of more importance than its temporal interests being accepted as unquestioned, there follows a series of steps, each to all appearance natural and inevitable, but to which all the controlling events in the history of Western civilisation for centuries in the future are about to become related.

The highest embodiment of human interests and activities in the world being the State, it is taken by

1 Henderson’s Select Historical Doceinents of the Middle Ages, ii. ii.