Principles of western civilisation

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reach, in intensity, and in efficiency has never before prevailed in human society. But it is, in the second place, a free conflict, the efficiency, and even the very existence, of which is dependent, nevertheless, on a single condition, namely, that the controlling meaning to which human consciousness has become related is no longer in the present time. The distinctive life-principle of the conflict, under all its changing features, is, in short, that, as the controlling principles of human consciousness and of human responsibility are no longer in the present, it has, therefore, become impossible to shut up again the human will in any system of thought, of action, of government, or even of religion, through which the tyranny of the forces tending to express themselves in the present could once more become absolute and omnipotent.

It is only as the inter-relation of these two features of the modern phase of the evolutionary process becomes visible to the mind that the tendencies of the developing type of life represented in our Western civilisation can be fully grasped. All Western history, down to the time in which we are living, is but the record of the successive phases of the slowly widening struggle in which the foundations of the closed imperiums through which the ascendant present had hitherto expressed itself are being broken up and dissolved. As a step towards understanding the nature of the process in its later and more important aspects, it is necessary now to concentrate attention for a short space on that first and stupendous phase of it which precedes the rise of the modern world. It

is a phase in which we have the history of the R