Principles of western civilisation

Vv THE PROBLEM 147

epoch of the social process, where we observe the individual simply passing under the control of the existing social organisation, there rises before it a picture of the opposition, stubborn, sullen, indefinitely prolonged, which has accompanied this first stage of subordination, and of the immense range of phenomena through which the process has been gradually effected. Out of the resulting resistance there has arisen all the great systems of custom, of social morality, and of law, in operation throughout the world around us; the function of which has been to subordinate the individual merely to the interests of political society,

Yet the resistance which the individual offered to a process subordinating him to the existing political organisation—a resistance from which proceeds even now all the more profound and tragic impulses throughout the whole realm of art and literature—can be, it is perceived, nothing more than the feeble anticipation of that resistance which organised society will itself offer in the second stage to a process which must in the end subordinate it to the interests of a future beyond the limits of its political consciousness.

Nay more, as the efficiency of the individual, gua individual, has been—as every master-worker in the art and the literature of the emotions always intuitively perceives—itself the measure of the intensity of the resistance offered to the process subordinating him to organised society,’ so

* The profound transition which all the standards in art, in literature, and the drama are slowly undergoing in the modern world is one of the most interesting subjects of study to the evolutionist who has grasped the relation-

ship to each other of the governing principles of the two eras of human evolution here described. The character of the transition will be more fully