Carolingianism, and more of Caesarism—more of a popular dictatorship. While in modern France Empire has meant autocracy instead of representative government, in Germany it has meant a greater national unity and a federal government in the place of a confederation. The modern German empire is at once like and unlike the old Holy Roman Empire. It is unlike the old medieval Empire; for it has no connexion with the Catholic Church, and no relation to Rome. But it is like the Holy Roman Empire of the 17th and 18th centuries—for it represents a federation, but a more real and more unitary federation, of the several states of Germany. The likeness is perhaps more striking than the dissimilarity; and in virtue of this likeness, and because the memory of the old German Kaiserzeit was a driving force in 1870, we may speak of the modern German empire as the successor of the old Holy Roman Empire, if we remember that we are speaking of that Empire in its last two centuries of existence. The modern “Empire of Austria,” on the other hand, does not connote an empire in the sense of a federation, but is a convenient designation for the sum of the territories ruled by a single sovereign under various titles (king of Bohemia, archduke of Austria, &c.) and unified in a single political system.[1] The title of Emperor was assumed, as we have seen, through an historical accident; and, though the Habsburgs of to-day are personally the lineal descendants of the old Holy Roman emperors, they do not in any way possess an empire that represents the old Holy Empire. In England, of recent years, the term “Empire” and the conception of imperialism have become prominent and crucial. To Englishmen to-day, as to Germans before 1870, the term and the conception stand for the greater unity and definitely federal government of a number of separate states. For the German, indeed, Empire has meant, in great measure, the strengthening of a loose federal institution by the addition of a common personal superior: to us it means the turning of a loose union of separate states already under a common personal superior—the King—into a federal commonwealth living under some common federal institutions. But the aim is much the same; it is the integration of a people under a single scheme which shall be consistent with a large measure of political autonomy. We speak of imperial federation; and indeed our modern imperialism is closely allied to federalism. Yet we do well to cling to the term empire rather than federation; for the one term emphasizes the whole and its unity, the other the part and its independence. This imperialism, which is federalism viewed as making for a single whole, is very different from that Bonapartist imperialism, which means autocracy; for its essence is free co-ordination, and the self-government of each co-ordinated part. The British Empire (q.v.) is, in a sense, an aspiration rather than a reality, a thought rather than a fact; but, just for that reason, it is like the old Empire of which we have spoken; and though it be neither Roman nor Holy, yet it has, like its prototype, one law, if not the law of Rome—one faith, if not in matters of religion, at any rate in the field of political and social ideals.
Authorities.—See, in the first place, J. Bryce, Holy Roman Empire (1904 edition); J. von Döllinger, article on “The Empire of Charles the Great” (in Essays on Historical and Literary Subjects, translated by Margaret Warre, 1894); H. Fisher, The Medieval Empire (1898); E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by J. B. Bury. It would be impossible to refer to all the books bearing on the article, but one may select (i.) for the period down to 476, Stuart Jones, The Roman Empire (1908), an excellent brief sketch; H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit (1883–1888); O. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (Band I., Berlin, 1897–1898, Band II., 1901) (a remarkable and stimulating book); and the two excellent articles on “Imperium” and “Princeps” in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890); (ii.) for the period from 476 down to 888, T. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders (1880–1900); F. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter (1886–1894; Eng. trans., London, 1894–1900); E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, II. i. (1901); J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire (1889); (iii.) for the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, W. von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit (1881–1890); J. Zeller, Histoire d’Allemagne (1872–1891); R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Medieval Thought (1884); S. Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers (1874); J. Jannsen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (1885–1894); L. von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (1839–1847), and Zur deutschen Geschichte. Vom Religionsfrieden bis zum dreissigjährigen Krieg (1869); and T. Carlyle, Frederick the Great (1872–1873). On the fall of the Roman Empire and the transition to the modern German Empire see Sir J. R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein (1878); H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte (1879–1894); and H. von Sybel, Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs (1890–1894, Eng. trans., The Founding of the Germ. Emp., New York, 1890–1891). For institutional history, see R. Schröder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (1894). On the influence of the Holy Roman Empire upon the history of Germany, see J. Ficker, Das deutsche Kaiserreich (1861), and Deutsches Königtum und Kaisertum (1862); and H. von Sybel, Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich (1861). (E. Br.)
EMPIRICISM (from Gr. ἔμπειρος, skilled in, from πεἶρα,
experiment), in philosophy, the theory that all knowledge
is derived from sense-given data. It is opposed to all forms
of intuitionalism, and holds that the mind is originally an absolute
blank (tabula rasa), on which, as it were, sense-given impressions
are mechanically recorded, without any action on the part of
the mind. The process by which the mind is thus stored consists
of an infinity of individual impressions. The frequent or invariable
recurrence of similar series of events gives birth in the
mind to what are wrongly called “laws”; in fact, these “laws”
are merely statements of experience gathered together by
association, and have no other kind of validity. In other words
from the empirical standpoint the statement of such a “law”
does not contain the word “must”; it merely asserts that such
and such series have been invariably observed. In this theory
there can strictly be no “causation”; one thing is observed
to succeed another, but observations cannot assert that it is
“caused” by that thing; it is post hoc, but not propter hoc.
The idea of necessary connexion is a purely mental idea, an
a priori conception, in which observation of empirical data
takes no part; empiricism in ethics likewise does away with the
idea of the absolute authority of the moral law as conceived by
the intuitionalists. The moral law is merely a collection of
rules of conduct based on an infinite number of special cases in
which the convenience of society or its rulers has subordinated
the inclination of individuals. The fundamental objection to
empiricism is that it fails to give an accurate explanation of
experience; individual impressions as such are momentary,
and their connexion into a body of coherent knowledge presupposes
mental action distinct from mere receptivity. Empiricism
was characteristic of all early speculation in Greece. During
the middle ages the empiric spirit was in abeyance, but it revived
from the time of Francis Bacon and was systematized especially
in the English philosophers, Locke, Hume, the two Mills,
Bentham and the associationist school generally.
See Association of Ideas; Metaphysics; Psychology; Logic; besides the biographies of the empirical philosophers.
In medicine, the term is applied to a school of physicians who, in the time of Celsus and Galen, advocated accurate observation of the phenomena of health and disease in the belief that only by the collection of a vast mass of instances would a true science of medicine be attained. This point of view was carried to extremes by those who discarded all real study, and based their treatment on rules of thumb. Hence the modern sense of empirical as applied to the guess work of an untrained quack or charlatan.
EMPLOYERS’ LIABILITY, and WORKMEN’S COMPENSATION.[2]
The law of England as to the liability of employers in
respect of personal injuries to their servants is regulated partly
by the common law and partly by statute; but by the
Employers’ Liability Act 1880, such exceptions have been
grafted upon the common law, and by the Workmen’s Compensation
Act 1906, principles so alien to the common law have been
applied to most employments that it is impossible now to present
any view of this branch of the law as a logical whole. All that
can be done is to state the nature of the liability at common law.
