Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM II5

development, away from the position of Locke, is proceeding in thought. It is the theory of the utilitarian State alone which is coming to be regarded as embracing the whole science of society. And in the science of society, as thus conceived, no essential connection is assumed to exist between the principles on which it is made to rest and those ideas with which we observed the principles of society to be: involved in the minds of the civil revolutionists in England in the midst of the religious movement of the seventeenth century. The principles of modern Democracy, which in England in that century were based on certain fundamental assumptions without which they were regarded as having absolutely no meaning, are coming, it may be observed, to be accepted as standing entirely alone, on their own merits and in their own right. Outward forms of words serve to mask the transition which is taking place, but the character of the process is unmistakable. By the end of the eighteenth century the intellectual conception of Western Liberalism, as we see it presented in the literature of the French Revolution, has come to represent simply the theory of the political State, It is already detached from history and from the development in our civilisation which produced it.

1 A closer insight reveals immediately that the remarkable confusion of thought and theory which marks the period of the French Revolution, results largely from the fact that we find the theorists in Various stages of a transition, from the fundamental assumption underlying the principles of Hobbes and Locke, which was destined to be fully accomplished only at a later period. Excepting Turgot, most of the Encyclopzedists may be regarded as thinkers who regarded the concepts of the system of belief associated with our civilisation as having no meaning which extended beyond the range of political consciousness. But in Rousseau we have an intermediate stage of great interest, in which the nature of the process that is proceeding is revealed with great clearness, Rousseau went so far in one direction that he wished to have an established