Principles of western civilisation

238 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP. VII

peoples ; which is to question not simply the right of kings, but of majorities; nay, the right of force itself, that last basis upon which every ideal that men had hitherto known in the world had ultimately rested.

It is a world to all appearance sunk many degrees below the level of the civilisations which it succeeded, a world scarcely to be distinguished in its outward features from primitive barbarism, a state of social order in which feudalism—that protest.of barbarism against itself, to use the expressive simile of Hegel—is still to reach its fullest development. But it is a new world; a world like the wrack of a giant nebula in space, its chaos and disorder invisibly caught in the sweep of an integrating principle infinite in reach. Through unmeasured epochs of time there has come down to us the sound of that struggle, still with us, in which the individual and all his powers and interests are being broken to the ends of a social efficiency visibly and consciously embodied in the State. But now into the vortex of a vaster struggle, a struggle in which the interests of society itself are destined to be broken to the ends of an efficiency beyond the furthest limits of its political consciousness, we are about to witness being slowly drawn, all the phenomena of Western thought and of Western action ; all the content of politics, of philosophy, and of religion in our Western world.