Principles of western civilisation

I THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 95

the ascendency of the interests of the present, expressing themselves through the State, becomes once more the ultimate fact to which every principle of society and of human life is made subservient. As the mind, with such a conclusion in view, reverts to the meaning of that characteristic principle of the subordination of the present to the future which we saw to have governed the evolution of life from the beginning; as we begin to perceive the application to the science of society of that great conception, which German idealism struggled for 150 years to bring to the birth in coherent utterance, namely, that the history of the world is the history of the ideas by which the subordination of the individual to a world-process infinite in its meaning has been effected ;—the character of the position in modern thought begins to impress the imagination. For, as we catch sight of what must be the real meaning of the great process of life which has developed towards our Western democracy; as we perceive the significance of the fact that that process of life has come to occupy the place it fills on the stage of the world only in virtue of some deep-seated and inherent principle of fitness in the stress out of which it has come; as we begin to realise something of the nature of the organic, subordinating, and integrating principles which must be resident in it—principles involving the subordination of the individual and all his interests, and even those of whole movements and epochs of time to the ends of a process of life moving forward through the slow cosmic stress of the centuries ; nay, as we see how it is those same principles, which must continue to control our developing