He is attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as such.

The central problem is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to it.

Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals.

Church and State have become transposed in their significance.

The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.
The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior to organized society.