Principles of western civilisation

226 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

cide is the nature of the antinomy which has been opened in the human mind. We are not in the presence merely of the result of humanitarian feeling. We are watching the first influence on the human mind of concepts by which human life has become related to principles which transcend all the limits of the present, and to responsibilities beside which feelings and interests related to the present become dwarfed and shrunken to insignificant proportions. A concurrent first and also outward symptom of the fundamental change in the stand-point of the world proceeding beneath the surface of society, of which the profounder effects were also as yet remote in the future, was that immediately indicated in the new relation of the human mind to the institution of slavery. It has been a main end of endeavour in a previous chapter to help the mind to clearly realise, how that, despite all the later magnificence of the Greek and Roman States, these civilisations represented the governing principle—raised at last to its highest expression —of that epoch of social evolution in which all prevailing institutions were related to the same ultimate fact, namely, that no human interest was recognised as transcending the interest of the existing social order. There were two principal forms in which this fact expressed itself. Within the restricted and privileged circle of this social order the remainder of the world was considered, disguised though the fact may have been under the outward forms of a comparatively high civilisation, as little more than ‘“‘a vast hunting ground and preserve in which men and their works