Principles of western civilisation

240 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

intellect to grasp the character of the development which here begins to unfold itself in society beneath our eyes.

We have seen how that throughout the first epoch of social evolution all the forms of society and of the State, and of every institution upon which the State and society rested, had borne upon them the impress of a single fact, namely, the ascendency of the present. In such conditions, therefore, every human institution may be said to have constituted a kind of closed imperium, in which the ascendant interests and the ruling passions were those through which the present was able to express itself in its highest potentiality. What we have now to witness is the spectacle of all these closed imperiums, in which the present hitherto ruled omnipotent in thought and action, being slowly broken up by a cause acting on the foundations upon which they rested; while the human energies hitherto imprisoned within them are released into an entirely new order of progress. In the result we have to witness the gradual development in Western history of such conditions of social efficiency as were not only unimagined in the world in the past, but which were impossible under any organisation of society which had hitherto prevailed.

As the character of the new process becomes visible it may be seen to consist essentially in the development throughout the whole social organisation of the conditions of a free conflict of forces, this conflict possessing two well-marked and characteristic features. It is, in the first place, as has been said, a free conflict of forces such as in