Principles of western civilisation

Iv WESTERN LIBERALISM 11g

As we follow from this period forward through the nineteenth century the history of the movement in thought which, with gradually increasing concentration, has endeavoured to express the meaning of the social process in Western history by a mere theory of the political State, the result appears striking in the last degree. Although, as we shall see later, it is impossible on a review of history to resist the conclusion that the course of political development, both in England and the United States, during the nineteenth century, did not cease to be controlled and directed at every point by the profound conviction to which Burke gave utterance —the conviction that the principles of Democracy, which find their ultimate expression in the materialistic interpretation of history, are not the principles of that Democracy which our civilisation is destined to realise—yet there is to be found no accepted synthesis of knowledge in which this conviction attained to scientific expression. We have in sight in England for nearly a century the remarkable spectacle of the almost complete disappearance beneath the surface of thought of that great stream of tendency which is carrying our civilisation forward, and the rise, first of all into ascendency, and then into close and authoritative association with the theory of Liberalism, of that utilitarian

because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London relative to that Event, by the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 1790).