the (Spanish) world-monarchy, and, finally, the universal dominion of the
Pope. The Church should be superior to the State, the vicegerent of God to
temporal rulers and to councils.


%4. Philosophy of the State and of Law%.

The originality of the modern doctrines of natural law was formerly
overestimated, as it was not known to how considerable an extent the way
had been prepared for them by the mediaeval philosophy of the state and of
law. It is evident from the equally rich and careful investigations of Otto
Gierke[1] that in the political and legal theories of a Bodin, a Grotius,
a Hobbes, a Rousseau, we have systematic developments of principles long
extant, rather than new principles produced with entire spontaneity. Their
merit consists in the principiant expression and accentuation and the
systematic development of ideas which the Middle Ages had produced, and
which in part belong to the common stock of Scholastic science, in part
constitute the weapons of attack for bold innovators. Marsilius of Padua
(_Defensor Pacis_, 1325), Occam (died 1347), Gerson (about 1400), and the
Cusan[2] _(Concordantia Catholica_, 1433) especially, are now seen in a
different light. "Under the husk of the mediaeval system there is revealed
a continuously growing antique-modern kernel, which draws all the living
constituents out of the husk, and finally bursts it" (Gierke, _Deutsches
Genossenschaftsrecht_, vol. iii. p. 312). Without going beyond the
boundaries of the theocratico-organic view of the state prevalent in
the Middle Ages, most of the conceptions whose full development was
accomplished by the natural law of modern times were already employed in
the Scholastic period. Here we already find the idea of a transition on the
part of man from a pre-political natural state of freedom and equality into
the state of citizenship; the idea of the origin of the state by a contract