Principles of western civilisation

290 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

to the evolutionist than that which presents itself to him when, with the conditions of the remarkable problem foreshadowed in the previous chapters fresh in his mind, he watches now the activities of our Western world being slowly drawn into the influence of that modern struggle from out of which, at the end of centuries of strife, there is to emerge gradually into view the first rough outlines of the master-principle of a new world. It is to be a world in which every cause, and institution, and opinion will in the end hold its very life at the challenge of such criticism and competition as the human mind has never known before. But it is to be a world, withal, in which the entire phenomena of progress must continue to be related to a single underlying life-principle, namely, that the ultimate controlling principles of human action have been projected beyond the content of all systems whatever of interest or of authority within the limits of political consciousness.

Now as we regard the conditions towards which our Western world has moved at the close of the Middle Ages, it may be observed that the ideal which has come once more to hold the human mind is that of a universal empire resting ultimately on force. The universal empire is indeed no longer an empire in which the ideal of men is that the strongest material interests in the present should become absolute and omnipotent. It is a universal empire in which a particular belief has become absolute; in which it is again conceived that a rule of religion should, in the last resort, be a rule of civil law; in which it is considered that the State itself exists now for no higher end than that all its