Principles of western civilisation

CEVAP TE Rois THE PHENOMENON OF WESTERN LIBERALISM

WHEN we have become conscious, however. imperfectly, of the nature of the position defined in the last chapter, the interest of the situation will, in all probability, be felt to deepen as soon as the attempt is made to carry the analysis a stage farther. When it is once realised that the development in Western history which has slowly carried our civilisation towards the forms of Democracy cannot, of necessity, be expressed in any mere theory of the State, or in any of those current formulas in which the interests of the individuals, comprised within the limits of political consciousness, are conceived as the dominant factor in human evolution ; the mind turns instinctively to scrutinise the phenomenon of Western Liberalism as a whole, How is it that the meaning of the progressive movement which it represents has come to be interpreted to us in the terms in which we have thus found it to be set forth in current thought ? Nothing can be more remarkable than the position to which modern Liberalism has been actually reduced in practice by the endeavour to present it as a movement resting under all its forms on a theory of existing interests in the State. The 97 H