Principles of western civilisation

x THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 291

machinery, and purposes, and powers should be devoted to establishing and maintaining throughout the world the sway of one accepted and authoritative interpretation of absolute truth, which the human mind has come to place higher than any interest whatever comprised within the limits of political consciousness.

What we have now to watch is the tremendous concept upon which this ideal rested in the minds of men—a concept still entangled, as we may perceive, in the theory of the State, still allied to the principle of universal force, and, therefore, as we may see, still imprisoned within the closed circle of the yet ascendant present—moving now at last in Western history towards a realisation of that potentiality which has been inherent in it from the beginning. In the resulting revolution we are destined to witness our civilisation carried far beyond the content of any synthesis of knowledge which the human mind had as yet imagined, and to see the systems of thought representing the new spirit, themselves impelled, by forces greater than they understood, towards a goal of which they had no perception at the beginning, and of which the full significance is even as yet but dimly realised by the Western mind.

It has been usual in the past in nearly all studies of the period in which the Middle Ages merge into the modern world to consider this epoch of upheaval as dating from, or at all events as inseparably associated with, the movement taking its rise in Italy towards the end of the fourteenth century, and known as the Renaissance. As the evolutionist looks long and closely at the history of the Italian