Principles of western civilisation

vir THE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 263

as it were, within a closed circle in the State towards an ideal, the effect of which must be, to all appearance, to actually bring it back again to the stage described by Maine; to a condition, that is to say, in which a rule of religion and a rule of law must become again one and identical.

We have in sight, in short, in the climax towards which the events of history appear to be carrying us, the endeavour of the world to express once more in a political ideal in which a rule of religion necessarily tends to become again coincident with a rule of law, a concept the meaning and potentiality of which is absolutely irreconcilable with such an ideal. For, if we have been right so far, the new concept is one from which there must proceed, as its most profoundly significant evolutionary result, a fundamental and characteristic distinction, ever widening as human development continues, between the whole sphere of civil and political law (of which the characteristic is that it remains limited by the horizon of the State), and the whole sphere of ethics and religion (of which the characteristic is that it has now come to be related to principles the meaning and operation of which transcend the limits of political consciousness).

As we regard the situation attentively, the nature of the central position upon which the human mind is slowly converging grows into definition. We have actually in view, we perceive, all the steps by which it is about to reach the climax of that crisis which we saw foreshadowed at the beginning of the chapter, as the concept, by which the controlling principles of human consciousness begin to be projected out of the present time, rises into ascendency in the