historic importance of what is called the classic renaissance. It indicates the beginning of an historic reversion that corresponds in the opposite direction to what occurred in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era. The classic renaissance freed anew the scientific spirit of the ancients from mediaeval metaphysics and therefore created the sciences; rediscovered some basic political and juridical ideas of the ancient world, among them that of the indivisibility of the State, which destroyed the foundations of feudalism and of all the political orders of the Middle Ages; and gave a great impetus to the struggle against the political domination of the Church and toward the formation of the great states. France and England have been in the lead, and for two centuries Europe has been wearying itself imitating them. After the movement of political unification followed the economic. Look about you: what do you see? A world that looks more like the Roman Empire than it does the Middle Ages; it is a world of great states whose dominating classes have almost all the essential ideas of Graeco-Latin civilisation; each, seeking to better its own conditions, is forced to establish between itself and the others the strictest economic relations and to bind into the system of common
