ABSTRACT
The period of history which is commonly called ‘modern’ has a mental outlook which differs from that of the medieval period in many ways. Of these, two are the most important: the diminishing authority of the Church, and the increasing authority of science. With these two, others are connected. The culture of modern times is more lay than clerical. States increasingly replace the Church as the governmental authority that controls culture. The government of nations is, at first, mainly in the hands of kings; then, as in ancient Greece, the kings are gradually replaced by democracies or tyrants. The power of the national State, and the functions that it performs, grow steadily throughout the whole period (apart from some minor fluctuations); but at most times the State has less influence on the opinions of philosophers than the Church had in the Middle Ages. The feudal aristocracy, which, north of the Alps, had been able, till the fifteenth century, to hold its own against central governments, loses first its political and then its economic importance. It is replaced by the king in alliance with rich merchants; these two share power in different proportions in different countries. There is a tendency for the rich merchants to become absorbed into the aristocracy. From the time of the American and French Revolutions onwards, democracy, in the modern sense, becomes an important political force. Socialism, as opposed to democracy based on private property, first acquires governmental power in 1917. This form of government, however, if it spreads, must obviously bring with it a new form of culture; the culture with which we shall be concerned is in the main ‘liberal’, that is to say, of the kind most naturally associated with commerce. To this there are important exceptions, especially in Germany; Fichte and Hegel, to take two examples, have an outlook which is totally unconnected with commerce. But such exceptions are not typical of their age.
