any other,
governs the external fortunes of the world. Through long periods of
time the historic life of the human race was active in Western Asia
and in the lands bordering on the Mediterranean which look towards the
East: there it laid the foundations of its higher culture. We may
rightly regard as the greatest event that meets us in the whole course
of authentic history, the fact that the seats of the predominant power
and culture have been transplanted to the Western lands and the shores
of the Atlantic Ocean. Not merely the abodes of the ancient civilised
nations, but even the capitals which were the medium of communication
between East and West, have fallen into barbarism; even the great
metropolis, from which first political, and then spiritual, dominion
extended itself in both directions over widespread territories, has
not maintained its rank. It was due to this tendency of things,
combined with a certain geographical cause, that neither could the
medieval Empire attain its full development, nor the Papacy continue
to subsist with unimpaired authority. From age to age the political
and intellectual life of the world transferred itself ever more and
more to the nations dwelling further West, especially since a new
hemisphere was opened up to their impulses of activity and extension.
So it was that the chief interests of the Pyrenean peninsula drew
towards its ocean coasts; that there grew up on either side of the
Channel which separates the Continent from Britain, the two great
capitals in which modern activity is chiefly concentrated; that
Northern Germany, together with the races which touch on the North Sea
and the Baltic, developed a life and a system of their own; it is in
these regions latterly that the universal spirit of the human race
chiefly works out its task, and displays its activity in moulding
states, creating ideas, and subjugating nature.

Yet this transmission, this transplanting, is not the work of a blind
destiny. While civilisation in the East succumbed and died out before
the advance of races incapable of culture, it was welcomed in the West
by races possessing the requisite capacity, which by their inborn
force gave it new forms and indestructible bases for its outward
existence. Nor have the nations and kingdoms arisen each from its
mother earth, as it were in obedience to some inward impulse of
inevitable necessity, but amid constant assimilation and rejection,
ever repeated wars to se