Principles of western civilisation

132 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

history beyond all theories of the State, economic or political; beyond the content of all theories whatever of interests in the present.

In France of the present day we appear to have, neither in the Revolution nor in the counterrevolution, any synthesis of thought which can be said to represent the characteristic meaning of our Western civilisation. In the Revolution we appear to see only M. Dumont’s contradiction, “la democratie et la réligion,” with the conviction in the mind of its exponents that of these two terms “‘it is indeed the latter which must be eliminated.” And in the counter-revolution, so far as it exists in France, we appear to be only carried back to the principles of society as these were presented in medieval Europe before the upheaval which created the modern world.

In Germany, as in England, the great movement of thought which produced such transforming results in the sixteenth century has continued to run its course. But we may already dimly perceive how profoundly the interpretation of that movement already differs in modern Germany and in modern England. As we shall see clearly later, it has begun to flow in those two countries in widely different channels, the courses of which are tending to be increasingly divergent. In Germany both the Revolution and the counter-revolution have tended to reach their current expression in conceptions of the omnipotence of the political State. In the Revolution which has found its current expression in Marxian social Democracy, resting on the materialistic interpretation of history, one of the terms of M. Dumont’s contradiction is already