Principles of western civilisation
252 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.
inherent therein appears to be the principle of the ultimate shifting of the controlling centre of human consciousness out of the present time. The conviction at length only holds the intellect with increased strength that in this matter the human mind cannot go backward again even if it would. Yet wherein lies the solution? How is the race to rise to a sense of direct, personal, and compelling responsibility to a principle cosmic in its reach—to a principle which must of necessity transcend every power and purpose included within the limits of political consciousness—and yet be so occupied with its present as to set free therein the play of its highest powers? How are we to witness the controlling principles of human consciousness projected out of the present; and yet see opened within the present that untrammelled play of all human powers and activities which alone can emancipate the future, that unrestricted rivalry of all human energies such as has never been in the world before, and towards which the whole process of evolution seems to have moved ?
This is the problem to which our Western civilisation has to address itself. It is the problem in the solution of which there becomes visible in time a difference destined at length to divide by a clear line of demarcation, never again to be crossed, the meaning underlying the sum of all Western things from the ultimate significance underlying all other forms and phases whatever through which human activities have come to express themselves. It is the problem which, in the method of its attempted solution, begins in time, even in our Western world, to differentiate, as by an in-