Principles of western civilisation

126 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

must in the end swallow up the capitalist.”! Social Democracy in Germany “denies wholly and unreservedly any spiritual purpose in the universe.” It is optimistic simply because it believes in a better world now and here.” Inthe movement represented by John Stuart Mill in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in England there was lacking what may be termed the full intellectual consistency which was necessary to carry its principles to their complete logical development. But in Marx this has been supplied, and the inherent and inevitable attitude of antagonism to the whole system of religious belief on which our civilisation is founded is at length clearly in sight.

There has been reached, in short, the stage of frank political materialism. It is not by accident, therefore, but of strict logical necessity, that we find the Sozzaldemokrat anticipating in Germany, with Arsene Dumont in France, the day when “‘l’hypothése Dieu” shall be “expelled from human _ brains.” For it is inherent in the Marxian position, that in a condition of society in which the interests of the present are considered as in the ascendant; in which, therefore, the economic factor is conceived as the ruling factor in human history; and in which, consequently, the sphere of law, morality, and economic action are coincident and co-extensive ;—there should be absolutely no place or meaning for the principles and conceptions by which—if the meaning of the evolutionary process as presented in the preceding chapters be not entirely misinterpreted—the present and all its interests are to be conceived as being

1 German Social Democracy, by Bertrand Russell, p. 14. 2 OP. cit. p. 94.