Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/223

 Bavaria on the one side, and Charles the IVth on the other; the codification of Bavarian law and the issue of the Golden Bull were at all events attempts in the direction of civilisation in accordance with the highest existing ideal.

The foundation of legal studies in the Universities, the attempts by legal means to control the customs of private war,—private war being itself an example of the strength of the idea of rights,—the proclamation of the public peace from time to time in Germany by emperors who had the will but not the power to enforce it, and the multiplication of central tribunals in the place of local ones, are examples of the same. No doubt they are developments, evolutions of the unconscious progress of civilisation; that I am not enough of a philosopher to dogmatise about, but if they were, that is the line which the development or evolution took. The middle ages proper, the centuries from the year 1000 to the year 1500, from the Emperor Henry II to the Emperor Maximilian, were ages of legal growth, ages in which the idea of right, as embodied in law, was the leading idea of statesmen, and the idea of rights justified or justifiable by the letter of law, was a profound influence with politicians. It may seem fanciful, but I cannot help adding a parallel illustration. The scholastic philosophy was an attempt to codify all existing knowledge under laws or formulae analogous to the general principles of justice. It was no attempt, as is sometimes said, to bind all knowledge with chains to the rock of S. Peter, or even to the rock of Aristotle; just as right is one and indivisible, and all rights are referable to it (if we only knew where to find it) as the ultimate touchstone and arbiter, so Truth is one and indivisible, and the medieval philosophy found its work in reconciling all existing knowledge logically with the One Truth which it believed itself to possess. What logic was to the philosopher legislation was to the statesman and moralist, a practical, as the other was a theoretical, casuistry; an attempt to justify all its conclusions by direct reference to first principles.

You may tell me, if this is true, the age of which you are speaking ought to have been a scientific age, or at least