erated, and a common Civilization defined and
established. Egypt is one such starting point, Syria another, Greece a
third, Italy a fourth, and North Africa a fifth,--afterwards France and
Spain. As time goes on, and as colonization and conquest work their
changes, we see a great association of nations formed, of which the Roman
empire is the maturity and the most intelligible expression; an
association, however, not political, but mental, based on the same
intellectual ideas, and advancing by common intellectual methods. And this
association or social commonwealth, with whatever reverses, changes, and
momentary dissolutions, continues down to this day; not, indeed, precisely
on the same territory, but with such only partial and local disturbances,
and on the other hand, with so combined and harmonious a movement, and
such a visible continuity, that it would be utterly unreasonable to deny
that it is throughout all that interval but one and the same.

In its earliest age it included far more of the eastern world than it has
since; in these later times it has taken into its compass a new
hemisphere; in the middle ages it lost Africa, Egypt, and Syria, and
extended itself to Germany, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. At one
time its territory was flooded by strange and barbarous races, but the
existing civilization was vigorous enough to vivify what threatened to
stifle it, and to assimilate to the old social forms what came to expel
them; and thus the civilization of modern times remains what it was of
old, not Chinese, or Hindoo, or Mexican, or Saracenic, or of any new
description hitherto unknown, but the lineal descendant, or rather the
continuation, _mutatis mutandis_, of the civilization which began in
Palestine and Greece.

Considering, then, the characteristics of this great civilized Society,
which I have already insisted on, I think it has a claim to be considered
as the representative Society and Civilization of the human race, as its
perfect result and limit, in fact;--those portions of the race which do not
coalesce with it being left to stand by themselves as anomalies,
unaccountable indeed, but for that very reason not interfering with what
on the contrary has been turned to account and has grown into a whole. I
call then this commonwealth pre-eminently and emphatically Human Society,
and its intellect the Human Mind, and its decisions the sense of mankind,
and its disciplined and cultivated state Civiliz