Principles of western civilisation

244 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

process being as yet in the present time, all the ends to which the religious consciousness relates are either directly or indirectly connected with the interests of the existing individual as a member of the social order present around him. It is the stage in which the interests with which religion is concerned, and the interests with which politics are concerned, are as yet, to all intents and purposes, coincident and coextensive.

The great secret, in short, on the brink of which Maine was standing, and towards the elucidation of which he saw the course of modern inquiry was tending, was, we begin to see now—if we may anticipate a conclusion the significance of which we shall understand more clearly in a later chapterthat it has been the projection of the controlling principles of human consciousness beyond the present, which is breaking up all the imperiums through which the omnipotent present would otherwise shut down upon us; and which has given us, in the result, the era of that free conflict of forces in which our modern progressive societies have taken their rise.

As soon as we thus hold in hand the clue to the evolutionary drama upon which the curtain continues to rise in Western history, we are in a position to understand something of the nature of the phenomena upon which our attention is now to be concentrated. The meaning of the conflict which underlies the developmental process in progress in the world around us, is that it is a conflict in which the present has become envisaged with the future in a struggle in which it is destined to be eventually subordinated to the future. But the