Principles of western civilisation

Il THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 91

see governments to be concerned. The only aspect in which the meaning of our civilisation as a system of social order, destined to hold its place in the future, could be set forth in a really scientific light must, as we perceive, necessarily present us throughout Western history with the spectacle of these ruling classes or majorities moving and ordering the world in the endeavour to reach their own ends ; and yet everywhere encountering the effect of a slow subordinating process of evolution ever consistently preventing those ends from being attained. But we find no presentation in Sidgwick’s writings of any consistent science of society conceived in this sense. It is merely to the theory of the political State that we always return in the end.?

In modern Germany, when we regard the history of the movement which has come down from Kant through the Hegelian development, we have a striking presentation of the result of the prevailing tendency. The two extreme and opposing phases’ which this movement may be said to have reached in Germany have now one characteristic feature in common. In the phase which has reached its expression in the materialistic interpretation of history, the theory of the existing collective State and the ascendency of the interests of its members is, aS a matter of course, presented as the whole science of society. Yet, in the opposing interpretation of history to which the Hegelian development has carried a section of German thought, the meaning of the evolutionary process in history has come to be almost as closely associated with the purposes

* Compare Sidgwick’s position in this respect with the development to be noted, e.g, in Professor Giddings’ Elements of Sociology, ch. xxiv.