Principles of western civilisation

124 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Dumont viewing with concern in modern France that result, which Mill and leaders of the Manchester school actually wished to see accomplished in England, namely, the general restriction of births. We see him discussing the ominous phenomenon of depopulation and the consequent failure of the French people to preserve their ancient place in our civilisation ; and yet seeking to carry forward his analysis of the condition of his times only to the superficial assertion that ‘‘des deux termes de la contradiction entre la démocratie et la religion, c'est bien ce dernier qui doit étre éliminé.”* We see the development in modern thought which began with Darwin more and more surely presenting the history of the evolutionary process in human society as the history of the conceptions which are subordinating the individual and society alike to the meaning of a process infinite in the future; and yet have to observe this writer with nothing better to offer the mind of modern France than the conclusion that “l’hypothése Dieu est insoutenable et d’elleméme s'élimine par la seule action des causes qui l’ont produite.”* M. Dumont sees perfectly clearly the relation to the problem with which he is struggling of the fact that “homme sait fort aisément éviter la fécondité en conservant le plaisir.’* But of the relationship of the same principle of the ascendency of the present to the problem in the great evolutionary drama in progress in Western history he has no conception. In current French thought “Vhypothése Dieu s’élimine.” And so in France, in the theory of society which accompanies the

1 Dépopulation et Civilisation, par Arstne Dumont, c. xxv. 2 Tbid. 3 Jbid., p. 31.