Principles of western civilisation

120 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

school of social and moral philosophy described in the last chapter.

In the absence of such a synthesis, it may be observed that it is everywhere the conception of the political State alone—the conception of its economic and business welfare, and of the ascendency of the interests of the individuals comprising it—which is presented, in the prevailing school of English thought, as the science of society. In that long utilitarian movement, described in the last chapter as more and more closely identifying itself throughout the nineteenth century with the philosophy of Liberalism in England, it is the theory of the ascendency of the interests of the present which has become the whole science of society. In the movement which extends from Hume and Adam Smith, almost down into the time in which we are living, we have, as we saw in the last chapter, all the steps, in which this transition has been accomplished, clearly before us.

As this movement expresses itself at last in England in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, the theory of the ascendency of the present has become absolute. The evolutionist sees that the ruling meaning of the social process in Western history must be that of a process in which the present is being subordinated to the future. Yet in Mill’s conception of progress it is the ideal of the ascendant present in a stationary State which is set before us as the saszmum bonum in political development. We see the restriction of population advocated by means of prudential restraints; the rivalry of the modern State condemned because of its “unpleasantness” to the individual; the theory

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