Principles of western civilisation

v THE PROBLEM 143

When we pause for a moment and regard closely the scientific principle of extraordinary interest which here emerges into view, we begin to perceive the significance and magnitude of the class of phenomena which must accompany its slow rise into prominence as the controlling cause in the second epoch of social evolution. Along the frontiers where the first stage merges into the second, and where society itself begins to pass under the control of its own future, the imagination catches sight for the first time of the stupendous reach of the world-drama, towards the real study of which science has scarcely more than begun to advance.

When the evolutionist stands in history in the midst of the period preceding the rise of the civilisation of our era, there slowly awakens in his mind the consciousness that the interest with which the dim instinct of many generations of men in our Western world has tended to surround this period in the past, is likely to be equalled if not surpassed in the literature of science in the future. For he begins to realise that it is in this period that he is, in reality, looking along the border zone where the principles of the two processes which dominate the whole span of human evolution run into and overlap each other.

On the one side, in the great civilisations of the ancient world, we have the highest phase of an era of human development of enormously prolonged duration, the immense, world-evolving stress of which the imagination can only feebly picture. It is the culminating period of that epoch of time in which the present was always in the ascendant, and