Principles of western civilisation

138 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the study of society, even in its economic relations, is to bring home to the mind the conclusion that the panies variety and complexity of natural forms with which we are concerned therein is compatible with a remarkable latent simplicity of governing principle. If we apply this direction in a wider sense it will lead us, in endeavouring to consider the social process in our civilisation as an organic unity, to take up at the outset a position sufficiently detached to allow at first only the bolder outlines of the evolutionary process to fall full and clear upon the mind. What, therefore, as viewed from such a position, is the nature of the governing principle which is distinctive and characterene of the process of social development in our Western era? And whither is the principle of social efficiency which that process represents tending to carry us in the future ?

If we turn to the process of social order presented in the civilisation of our Western era, one of the first facts concerning it with which we are confronted, is the almost overwhelming strength of the conviction in the general mind, that our civilisation not only represents a type of social life which quite different in principle from that of the Greek and Roman worlds which preceded it, but that it represents a type which is entirely exceptional in history. Although the fact of the unbroken continuity of Western civilisation from the Greek and Roman times down into our own is one of the commonplaces of knowledge, yet an immovable general instinct, going deeper than the outward facts of history, conceives the system of civilisation beginning with our era as separated from that which