between  the  generation  of  new  social  classes  and  the  first  manifesta-
tion of  their  tendencies.  Considered  in  this  way,  it  is  the  opening
of  the  fourteenth  century  that  we  must  fix  upon  as  the  time  when
the  organic  industry  of  modern  society  began  to  assume  a  charac-
teristic quality.  All  the  chief  tokens  of  civilization  indeed  concur
in  marking  that  era  as  the  true  origin  of  modern  history.  The  in-
dustrial expansion  was  then  signalized  by  the  universal  legal  admis-
sion of  communities  as  general  and  permanent  elements  of  the
political  system,  not  only  in  Italy,  where  it  had  happened  some
time  before,  but  throughout  Western  Europe,  where  the  event  was
sanctioned  by  various"  titles  in  England,  France,  Germany,  and
Spain ;  and  the  fact  is  marked  and  confirmed  by  the  vast  insurrec-
tions which,  in  almost  every  country,  and  especially  in  Prance  and
England,  testified,  during  the  second  half  of  the  century,  to  the
nascent  force  of  the  laboring  classes  against  the  powers  which
were,  in  the  respective  cases,  specially  opposed  to  them.  At  the
same  period  the  great  institution  of  paid  armies  was  established  in
Italy ;  and  they,  marking  a  phase  of  industrial  life  among  modern
peoples,  are  as  important  in  the  organic  as  in  the  critical  connec-
tion. ■  Such  innovations  as  the  use  of  the  compass  and  of  firearms
coincide  with  other  tokens  of  commercial  activity.  And  tlie  same
impulsion  is  traceable  in  the  department  of  the  arts,  which  we  can
hardly  carry  back,  in  their  modern  aspect,  further  than  Dante  and
Petrarch  in  poetry,  and  the  works  of  their  time  in  painting  and


684  POSITIVE  PHILOSOPHY.
