Principles of western civilisation

112 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

off the domain of positive law in society from the region of ethics—in which there continued to be still involved the larger and fundamental principles of “Society” as a whole. And he began the process, as Sir Frederick Pollock with insight points out, unconsciously and of necessity, through trying to make legal supremacy the final and conclusive standard of political right.

It is from this point forward that we have now to watch the development of one of the most remarkable situations in the history of thought. What we have seen so far has been the theory of the utilitarian State beginning to be disengaged from those larger principles of human conduct in society which had hitherto included it. But what we have now to watch is a development in which we see this same theory of the utilitarian State, as it becomes thus differentiated, gradually tending in Western thought to be accepted, by itself alone, as the whole science of our social evolution. Gradually dissociated in the minds of men from the fundamental assumptions to which it was related at the outset, and upon which rested, as we have seen, the central and characteristic doctrines of modern Democracy, it becomes slowly developed through the literature of the French Revolution into that theory of Western Liberalism which, as it culminates at last in England in the writings of John Stuart Mill, must excite the amazement of every mind which has mastered, in the light of the modern doctrine of evolution, the nature of

1 Cf. History of the Science of Politics,iv. But as a consequence of his position, Hobbes has had the fate of appearing henceforward in a development of Western thought, the real significance of which is only beginning to be

understood, as the intellectual father of the mechanical and frankly materialistic school of social theory.