Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM 123

attract the attention of observers; the grave symptoms which accompany the phenomenon of depopulation, on the one hand; the still graver symptoms which are associated with the ascendency of the conception of the political State as expressing itself under the ethics of militarism, on the other ;may be summed up in a single sentence. They are the symptoms of a people in whom the social consciousness is, as it were, in process of slow contraction upon itself, and, therefore, of a people in whom that consciousness is again tending, as in the ancient civilisations, to be no longer projected beyond the principles and interests of political society.

In the position towards which evolutionary science has carried us, we see the race being lifted forward by irresistible causes towards a condition in which the consciousness of the winning sections must be more and more surely projected beyond the plane of merely political consciousness ; toward a condition in which a political consciousness is, beyond doubt, destined, in the end, to be transformed into a cosmic consciousness. Yet in recent French thought it may be observed on all hands how the tendency sets in the opposite direction. We observea thinker like Renan surveying the problems of the modern world with a scarcely concealed consciousness of a troubled future, and yet with so little perception of the meaning of the great process of life which has culminated in the forms of Western Democracy, that he seems to have no clearer message to deliver than that religious beliefs are a surviving phenomenon destined to die slowly out undermined by primary instruction.’ We observea writer like Arséne

1 Studies in Religious History.