Principles of western civilisation

vu THE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 251

lines will the solution begin to develop itself? Will that free play of forces within the present, which alone can emancipate the future, out of which the larger future can alone be born, and towards which the whole process of human development appears to have moved, remain, after all, umachieved ? Are the activities of the human will really destined to be thus imprisoned again in a new tyranny? Is the human mind in the end—beaten, baffled, disillusioned—destined to retrace its steps, and to abandon the conviction that what it has come to call its spiritual welfare is indeed more important than its temporal interests? Is it really destined to return again to that self-centred standpoint in the present beyond which the world appeared to have moved ¢ Or is our Western world, beneath it all, to be carried forward by forces larger than it wots of to an entirely new synthesis of knowledge, hidden as yet from view below the horizon of thought ?

As the evolutionist looks the problem here defined in the face, it is impossible to escape a sense of its containing magnitude. Our whole Western world has moved, he sees, into the shadow of a crisis which must gradually engage all its interests, which must pass through many phases, and which can only develop slowly as the entire range of the world’s activities are drawn into its influence. That the human mind should indeed go backward, and, reversing the tendency of the evolutionary process, should return again to the standpoint of the epoch out of which it has moved, would seem hardly possible. For when the imagination, with such an alternative before it, travels again over the outlines of the evolutionary process, it is only to note how