ABSTRACT
Amongst those intellectual forces which tended during the sventeenth century to relax the dogmatic spirit with its belief in absolute truths, it is no longer possible to overlook the doctrine of interest and the genuinely politico-historical mode of thought for which it prepared the way. The doctrine of interest, by accepting as a supremely natural impulse the egotistical right that each State possessed to look at the European community of States with its own eyes and re-fashion it according to its own needs, led directly towards Relativism. There were now just so many intellectual views of the European power-relations, as there were European States with separate political interests; and the political intelligence that wished to weigh these up found itself obliged (even if it might in the process generally also be guided by its own wishes) to concentrate on judging the various pictures purely empirically and without prejudice according to the same standard, i.e. according to the standard of the forces that were actually in operation. Looked at more deeply and closely, it was the genuine European development itself, with its juxtaposition of free and independent States, that was eventually bound to produce this Relativism—for the doctrine of interest was only a reflex of it. But events do in fact constantly operate only through the medium of reflexes, ideas and intellectual habits of this kind, and it is to a great extent this that always assures the shaping and effective force of intellect.
