Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM 113

the system of life unfolding itself in Western civilisation. Asifineffect, says Nietzsche—speaking from his own point of view—as if the whole train of ideas leading to the modern development towards Democracy, and springing from the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation, is not a self-contained system, a view of things consistent and complete in itself! “ As if we could break out of it a fundamental idea and thereby not break the whole into pieces !”?

As we turn our faces now from the period of Locke onwards, we have in view, in the subsequent history of Western thought, a spectacle so extraordinary that, if it were not presented in the clearest outline, it must have appeared to verge on the incredible.

The first aspect of this development presents itself as we behold the ideas which Hobbes had set in motion in England obtaining a wider currency on the continent of Europe. The theory of government and of conduct developed by Hobbes was soon taken up, and, in many of its leading features, expanded by Spinoza. Yet we notice at once a certain difference beneath the surface. The utilitarian theory of the State is, it may be distinguished, already tending to be developed on the Continent as a self-contained science of society, apart from those fundamental assumptions with which it was at first associated in England. Hobbes’ theory of the ultimate causes of human conduct in selfishness is on its way, in the hands of Spinoza, to be developed into that complete self-centred equilibrium of ethical principles which later, in the hands of Bentham and John Stuart Mill, was to be considered as revolving in all its phases round the central conception of the en-

1 Cf. The Twilight of the Idols, by Friedrick Nietzsche. I