opposition to Aristotelian views: but as regards his philosophy he was essentially a schoolman, a dialectician, a bookworm. Kant held anything approaching to dialectics in such horror that, being on one occasion complimented upon 'The Critique ' of Pure Reason' as a masterpiece of dialectics, he flamed up in a fury, declaring that his whole experience in criticism had been directed to destroying for all time those dialectics in which pure reason is enmeshed and entangled.

The fifth foil is Plato. Physically it is difficult to conceive a greater contrast than that between Agathocles, nicknamed Plato on account of his broad shoulders, a handsome, parsleycrowned athlete of the Isthmian games, and the dainty philosopher of Königsberg, his tiny person, fragile and puny, cased in velvet, belaced and beruffled. But the two intellects were so alike that, as one critic has pointed out, Plato's philosophy was, as it were, a glorious sketch which Kant worked up into a solid monumental structure.

We can unfortunately do no more than hint at Chamberlain's last great work, the Goethe,' which came out in the autumn of 1912. When it was announced, grave men, Germans, shook their heads and one competent critic said to the present writer, 'Goethe is like a squeezed orange. How can your friend deal with him?' Well, the book appeared-and conquered. It seemed that the orange was not yet exhausted. New criticisms, new views were brought to light, and the Germans who contend that they understand Shakespeare better than we do, had to confess that an Englishman had revealed to them a new Goethe. As one critic wrote, here was the man who was 'predestined' to be the exponent of the great poet, philosopher, scientist, statesman. Chamberlain's early scientific studies, his deeply philosophical mind, equipped him fully for the work which he had undertaken these made him able to show Goethe's greatness his knowledge of mathematics and of exact science enabled him to detect where Goethe failed. The book is a grand example of biography, natural history, philosophy, and criticism. Is it too much to hope that some scholar, worthy of the task, may give England an adequate version of a masterpiece drawn, to use an expression of Goethe's own, 'from the depths of humanity'?

REDESDALE.

UTOPIAN TOLERATION

I. More's English Works. Cawood, Waley, and Tottell. 1557. 2. More's Latin Works. Basle. 1563.

3. Tres Thomae. By THOMAS STAPLETON. Douai. 1588.

4. The Life of Sir Thomas More. By his son-in-law, WILLIAM ROPER. Singer's Edition. 1822.

5. Fragmenta quarundam Thomae Mori Epistolarum ad Johannem Cochlaeum. Lipsiae. 1536.

6. Opus epistolarum D. Erasmi. Basilea. 1529. Also the noble edition by Mr. P. S. ALLEN. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1906. In Progress (to the year 1519 at present).

7. Renaissance et Réforme. Par D. NISARD. Paris. 1877. 8. Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More. By the REV. T. E. BRIDGETT. Burns and Oates. 1891.

9. Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII. Edited by J. S. BREWER and J. GAIRDNER. Volumes I. to IX. Wyman.

10. History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. By J. A. FROUDE. Longmans, Green,

and Co. 1900.

II. Lollardy and the Reformation in England. By J. GAIRDNER. Volumes I. and II. Macmillan. 1908.

12. The Oxford Reformers, John Colet, Erasmus and Thomas More. By F. SEEBOHM. Longmans, Green, and Co. 1911.

THE

HE ancients and the medievalists ignored an idea which permeates the whole of our social philosophy, the idea of progress. As M. Delaville has shown in his suggestive 'Essai sur l'Histoire de l'Idée de Progrès,' not only the philosophers but even the lawyers of antiquity and of the Middle Ages erred, as the founders of the great religious orders erred, in trying to substitute uniformity for variety, tradition for invention, and stability for movement. In these respects we have outgrown the wisdom of Greece and the sagacity of Rome. But we may find matter for thought in the reflection that the freest and most enlightened nations of antiquity, the nations rich beyond all others in vigour and originality of individuality, understood by freedom something quite

The

different from that which the term conveys to our ears. medieval ideal, like the classical, lay in the past, and the best hope for men was to recover something of what they had once possessed. In the twentieth century the Golden Age is fondly believed to be coming, but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries all thinkers looked backwards.

At first sight it seems a strange phenomenon that before the Renaissance no independent work had appeared for nearly fifteen hundred years on such an important subject as the ideal State-none since the time of Cicero if we except the De 'Civitate Dei' of St. Augustine and the 'De Monarchia' of Dante. In these two treatises Platonic influence is easily discerned the Monarcha of Dante's work is Plato's heaven-born statesman. The reason is that until after the Renaissance there was no conscious desire for moral or political speculation. Under the world-empire of Rome the absence of independent political life combined with the vast development of municipal law and administration left little room for the dreams of philosophers. The world-emperor ruled over the world-empire; that was enough for the Roman lawyers. Imaginary and impossible States had for them not a vestige of interest. Speculation as to the form or the end of government was scarcely possible-was certainly unpractical-so long as men deemed the Holy Roman Emperor the successor of the Caesars. All were quite content to accept unquestioningly the theory of the Holy Roman Empire. Loyalty to king or feudal lord was habitual or natural, unless the rule was very oppressive, or unless their immediate lord rebelled.

Travellers tell us that in Arctic regions a vessel sometimes lies for a long time firmly bound in a vast field of ice. The sailor who week after week surveys from the masthead the monotonous expanse of whiteness sees an apparently solid surface, motionless and immovable, yet all the time the ice is steadily drifting to the south, carrying with it the embedded ship. At last, when warmer climes are reached, that which in the night seemed a rigid mass is in the light of dawn a tossing mass of ice-blocks, through which the vessel finds her homeward path. So it was throughout the Middle Ages. Beyond question these ages were largely unpolitical; even so the human mind was not content to do without a living and active political theory. Speculation was not so energetic as in modern times; yet a few had been pondering over the conditions of member

ship of the national States just then arising. Such a thinker was Marsilius of Padua, whose remarkable book, Defensor 'Pacis,' published in 1325, marks a stage in the growth of medieval toleration. In it the writer asserts the complete authority of the civil power and the purely voluntary nature of religious organisation. He therefore necessarily repudiates every kind of political claim put forward on behalf of the ecclesiastical organisation, and with this repudiation he exposes the iniquity of persecution. The rights of the citizens,' concludes Marsilius,' are independent of the faith they profess; ' and no man may be punished for his religion.' St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose never protested more powerfully on behalf of liberty of conscience.

The voice of Marsilius of Padua awoke no responsive echo. In medieval times the alliance between Christianity and the Empire became so firmly welded that the Church was not a State, it was the State. The State as such was merely the secular side of the universal ecclesiastical corporation. The Church took over from the Roman Empire its theory of the absolute jurisdiction of the sovereign authority. It developed this doctrine into the plenitudo potestatis of its head, who was the ultimate dispenser of law, the sole legitimate source of all earthly power. There were struggles between the Pope and the Emperor, but the contest lay between two officials, never between two separate and distinct bodies. There was no quarrel between Church and State in our sense of the term ;-this statement is as true of Dante and Marsilius as it is of Boniface and Augustinus. The vice of the medieval State, like that of the classical, was that it united Church and State in one. The fundamental idea of the medieval mind was that of a uniform single empire-it never contemplated the absurdity of several empires-resting entirely upon a Christian basis. The medieval basis of unity was undoubtedly religious. No heretic, no schismatic, no excommunicate could possibly enjoy the rights of citizenship. This principle, founded on the code of Justinian, formed the ground of the claim of the Pope to bind and unloose the allegiance of the subject to the Holy Roman Emperor, a claim that brought almost all his woes upon the head of the unfortunate Roman Catholic. Herbert Spencer teaches us that evolution lies largely in the change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, but a medieval mind could grasp no such conception. Till the days of Machiavelli

politics and theology are practically synonymous terms. There was little toleration practised, for such a conception was never grasped by the people.*

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that new birth of the human spirit which we call the Renaissance took place. Man conceived a passionate desire for extending the limits of human knowledge and for employing his powers to newer and better advantage. The general ferment and the shaking of men's traditional beliefs extended to all departments of human thought, even to the fundamental questions of society itself. It was towards the close of the Middle Ages that the enormously powerful influence of Greek art and literature began to mould the world. Admiration for antiquity became the hall-mark of the Renaissance. Art and literature threw off to a very large extent the forms of medievalism and looked for all their inspiration to the models of the classical world. The dominant intellectual note of the age was freedom-freedom from the restraints which had been imposed upon men's thoughts and actions by the methods and dogmas of the schoolmen, and freedom to revel in every species of activity which the untrammelled spirit of the ancients had suggested. The free critical methods of the new movement are readily discernible in the doctrines of the time. While, however, each man of letters asserted his freedom to his own opinions, he had but little interest that others should enjoy the same measure of toleration; this forms a marked characteristic of the scholars of the New Learning.

While men's minds were thus speculating, the grand geographical discoveries of the age assisted in upsetting the medieval pre-conceived notions as to world-empire. Men indeed, to use M. Taine's picturesque phrase, opened their eyes and saw. They saw the physical bounds of the universe suddenly and enormously enlarged. For the discoveries of Nicholas de Cusa and of Nicholas Copernicus shadowed forth the secret of the universe. The New World, in a sense not far different from Canning's, did undoubtedly redress the balance of the Old. The New World, or rather the New Worlds, were added to the Old, and the conception of an apparently limitless

*The reader will find these matters ably developed in Dr. Figgis's From Gerson to Grotius.'