Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 295

process in which the whole period of the era in which men were living, contained as yet scarcely more than the opening phase of a world-drama in which the present was being slowly envisaged with a future to which it was to be subordinated, and in which every principle of the human mind was destined in the end to be broken to the ends of a social efficiency beyond the furthest limits of political consciousness ;—had not dawned on the imaginations of men.

All the main tendencies of the Renaissance, as a movement liberating the human mind ; all the characteristic spirit of inquiry which produced the revival of art, of literature, and of research throughout Europe; all the nascent movements in science and in political philosophy which implied, as we shall see later, although men did not know it at the time, the beginning of the separation of the theory of the State from the principles of ethics and religion ;—were results destined, each and all, to contribute their meaning later in the developing process of our civilisation. But we have in none of these things, as yet, the life-principle of the movement which is to carry the world forward into that stage of development towards the brink of which it has now advanced. The revival of the knowledge of the ancient civilisations; the discovery of the world of which Columbus had dreamed; the outlook on that infinite universe which the works and theories of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo had already brought within range of the human imagination; the printing press which was soon to spread rapidly the new tendencies in knowledge from mind to mind ;—were all influences in Western thought