Not only then do we find from the whole condition of Western Europe that the movement of opinion transcends in importance all political agitation; but we find that everything points to the necessity of establishing a spiritual power, as the sole means of directing this free yet systematic reform of opinion and of life with the requisite consistency and largeness of view. We now see that the old revolutionary prejudice of confounding temporal and spiritual power is directly antagonistic to social regeneration, although it once aided the preparation for it. In the first place it stimulates the sense of nationality which ought to be subordinate to larger feelings of international fraternity. And at the same time, with the view of satisfying the conditions of uniformity which are so obviously required for the solution of the common problem, it induces efforts at forcible incorporation of all the nations into one, efforts as dangerous as they are fruitless. [This Republic consists of the Italian, Spanish, British, and German populations, grouped round France as their centre] My work on Positive Philosophy contains a detailed historical explanation of what I mean by the expression, Western Europe. But the conception is one of such importance in relation to the questions of our time, that I shall now proceed to enumerate and arrange in their order the elements of which this great family of nations consists. Since the fall of the Roman empire, and more especially from the time of Charlemagne, France has always been the centre, socially as well as geographically, of this Western region which may be called the nucleus of Humanity. On the one great occasion of united political action on the part of Western Europe, that is, in the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth century, it was evidently France that took the initiative. It is true that when the decomposition of Catholicism began to assume a systematic form, the centre of the movement for two centuries shifted its position. It was Germany that gave birth to the metaphysical principles of negation. Their first political application was in the Dutch and English revolutions, which, incomplete as they were, owing to insufficient intellectual preparation, yet served as preludes to the great final crisis. These preludes were most important, as showing the real social tendency of the critical doctrines. But it was reserved for France to co-ordinate these doctrines into a consistent system and to propagate them successfully. France then resumed her position as the principal centre in which the great moral and political questions were to be worked out. And this position she will in all probability retain, as in fact it is only a recurrence to the normal organization of the Western Republic, which had been temporarily modified to meet special conditions. A fresh displacement of the centre of the social movement is not to be expected, unless in a future too distant to engage our attention.