Principles of western civilisation

ix ZHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 301

within the closed circle of the State, and in a tyranny greater than has ever prevailed in the world before. It is, therefore, the evolutionist sees, the profound sense of some inherent contradiction between the condition of the religious consciousness as it has become thus organised throughout the world, and the essential meaning of the antithesis opened in the individual mind, whereby the sense of human responsibility tends to be projected beyond all systems of authority whatever expressing themselves through the present, which gives to the concepts of the movement now in progress throughout the Western world that distinctive and characteristic meaning which they may be perceived to possess. The closer we look at the position involved, the more striking does the nature of the situation now developing in Europe appear to the mind. The observer here, as in a previous chapter, will do well to put aside all questions as to the place of particular organisations of the religious consciousness in the controversy in progress. The real problem involved is, he sees, one of the development of the religious consciousness itself. It proceeds directly from the nature of the great antinomy being gradually defined in the world, in which the controlling meaning of the evolutionary process is tending to be ultimately projected beyond the present. It isa problem therefore which has become developed, step by step, in Western history as the human mind has slowly closed with the cosmic concept, that what it has come to know as its spiritual welfare is of more importance than its temporal interests. The solution is, as yet, far beyond the vision of the disputants on either side. Throughout the whole of