Principles of western civilisation

Vv THE PROBLEM 137

Stripped of all metaphysical swaddling-clothes and reduced to its plainest terms, the conception with which we are confronted in modern evolutionary science as applied to the process of social progress is this. The history of the world has become, in the last analysis, the history of the development of the conceptions by which the individual is being subordinated to the meaning of a world-process infinite in its reach—the history of a development in which we are concerned with a creature moving by inherent necessity towards a consciousness no longer merely local, or national, or political, but cosmic, and from whom the subordination in progress must, in the last resort, be demanded in terms of his own mind. It is, therefore, in the meaning of the great social systems founded on the conceptions which are effecting this process, and not in any petty theory of the State conceived as an organisation of the political or economic interests of the existing members of society, that science will have to find in the future the controlling principles of the process of social development which the race is undergoing. Our first duty is, accordingly, to endeavour to understand as an organic whole the process of life represented in our civilisation.

It has been pointed out by Professor Marshall * that one of the principal results of recent work in

seule pourra déterminer un jour la trajectoire de l’évolution sociale” (Les Luttes entre Sociétés Humaines, par J. Novicow, p. 175).

Compare with Professor Marshall’s statement that our first duty in the study of social forces is ‘‘never to allow our estimates as to what forces will prove the strongest in any social contingency to be biassed by our opinion as to what forces ought to prove the strongest” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xi.)

1 «‘ The Old Generation of Economists and the New,” by Alfred Marshall, op. Cut.