Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM III

scended that of the utilitarian interests of all the existing members.*

In all this it is of the first importance to keep in mind the character of the revolution in England which had produced the movement in thought we are here regarding. That revolution represents, we must always remember, not, indeed, the attempt to set forth the theory of human development as a theory of the utilitarian interests of the existing members of society. It represents, in effect, rather the first profound effort of the human mind to entirely disengage principles, the claim of which on the individual was conceived as transcending that of all interests included within the limits of political consciousness, from all theories whatever of the political State with which they had been hitherto entangled. The deep import of the spectacle is, in short, unmistakable. Masked beneath the assumptions of the time, still undefined and unanalysed in men’s minds, there lies hidden in the process in progress a new principle of society. We are really watching a development in which the principles of government are being completely disentangled from those of absolute ethics; the overwhelming significance of the transition consisting, as the evolutionist begins to distinguish, in the fact that the governing principles of the social process are thereby, for the first time in human history, being projected altogether beyond the control of merely political consciousness. Hobbes in this light is to be regarded as the first social theorist who marked

? Locke considered the power of legislators always limited by one principle : “The rules that they make for other men’s actions must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of nature, z.e. to the will of God.” —Two Treatises of Government, book ii. ch.xi.