Principles of western civilisation

Fs WESTERN CIVILISATION cuam

interest included within the bounds of civil consciousness, to rise supreme over every power and purpose for which the temporal State as such exists. No forms in which the tyrannies of the ancient world could have imprisoned the energies of the human intellect or of the human will could, to all appearance, have possessed such an illimitable potentiality of absolutism. We have advanced, in short, to the heart of the first great crisis of the human mind in the history of the development in which it becomes the destiny of the present to pass under the control of the future in our Western civilisation.

In the first centuries of the era in which we are living, we saw how the leading crises of the system of belief which had become associated with our civilisation were but the outward expression of a single fact. There was represented in them, we saw, the effort, again and again repeated, to close the antithesis which had been opened in the human mind; and, by so doing, to bring the world back again to that equilibrium within the horizon of existing consciousness which was represented in the philosophy of the ancient world. So now, even where the nature of the supreme concept to which the human mind has become related is clearly visible beneath all the events of history, we see the process still caught, as it were, within the closed circle of the State, still involved in conditions in which a rule of religion must, by inherent necessity, become a rule of law, enforced in the last resort by civil penalties. To all appearance, the movement in which there was involved the infinite potentiality of the emancipation of the future