Principles of western civilisation

ix ZLHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 289

of the present, has, of necessity, been for the strongest competitive forces to become absolute, and so to suppress in time those conditions of really free conflict out of which the most effective future could arise. This has been the key, as we saw, to that condition of the world which culminated in the ancient civilisations.

If we have been right so far, the significance of Western civilisation from the beginning of our era has been related toa single cause ; namely, the potentiality of a principle inherent in it to project the controlling principles of its consciousness beyond the present ; and so ultimately to operate in breaking up all the closed imperiums in government, in action, in thought, and in religion, through which the omnipotent present had hitherto been able to become absolute. The controlling principles of human responsibility being no longer confined within the present, the evolutionary significance of the social process in Western history consists, in short, in its tendency to produce the condition of such a free rivalry of forces as has never been in the world before; by rendering it impossible to shut up again the human will in any system of government, of action, or of thought, through which the tyranny of forces expressing themselves within the limits of political consciousness could once more become absolute. It is upon the conditions of the worldembracing struggle in which the future is thus to be emancipated, and in which the hitherto prevailing ascendency of the present in the world is destined to be ultimately broken, that the attention of the mind has now to be fixed.

No situation can be of more absorbing interest U