612 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



after, and his native hue of resolution has heen sicklied over by 

 thought." True, and with this increase of self-consciousness have in- 

 creased the binding force of the subjective feelings upon which right 

 and wrong depend ; we expect more of ourselves, and we expect more 

 of our fellow-men. " Three hundred years before " (I am quoting 

 again from Mr. Shorthouse), " in the child-like unconsciousness of 

 spiritual conflict which the unquestioned rule of Rome for so long 

 produced, it had been possible, in the days of Boccaccio, for cultivated 

 and refined society to shut itself up in some earthly paradise, and, sur- 

 rounded by horrors and by death, to spend its days in light wit and 

 anecdote, undisturbed in mind, and kept in bodily health by cheerful 

 enjoyment ; but the time for such possibilities as these had long gone 

 by." And if this was true of life in the seventeenth century, as com- 

 pared with the fourteenth, with how much greater force does it apply 

 to life in the nineteenth century ! 



I will approach the same subject from another point of view. It 

 is possible to allow in fact, it is impossible to deny that conscience 

 has not lost its force, notwithstanding the apparent weakening of the 

 supernaturalism to which it has been usual to ascribe its origin and 

 binding force. But the necessity of recognizing some supreme per- 

 sonal will is often urged as a mental necessity, at least as a convenient 

 theory. If the Supreme Being did not exist, it would be necessary 

 to invent him. We can often see our own fallacies in a clearer light 

 by comparing them with modes of thought in the past, now recognized 

 to be no longer sound. And this struck me very forcibly the other 

 day when I was reading Dante's pleading for the maintenance of the 

 supreme power of the emperor in the middle ages. These arguments, 

 I thought, in the " Be Monarchia," are exactly the arguments we hear 

 urged every day in favor of the existence of a personal will in the 

 government of the universe. Yet it may be possible that, as society 

 has managed to exist and to improve without the existence of the 

 former, so our moral and religious life will continue practically unal- 

 tered without the conscious recognition of the latter. I will illustrate 

 by extracts. 



Dante points out what may be called the physical necessity for a 

 single monarch : " Since the whole heaven is regulated with one mo- 

 tion, to wit, that of the primum mobile, and by one mover, who is 

 God, in all its parts, movements, and movers (and this human reason 

 readily seizes from science) ; therefore, if our argument be correct, 

 the human race is at its best state when, both in its movements and in 

 regard to those who move it, it is regulated by a single Prince, as by 

 the single movement of heaven, and by one law, as by a single motion. 

 Therefore, it is evidently necessary for the welfare of the world for 

 there to be a Monarchy, a single Princedom, which men call the Em- 

 pire." * 



* (i 



De Monarchia," Book I, chap. ix. 



