Principles of western civilisation

ix LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 309

As we watch from this point forward the development towards modern history of the two sides of the antinomy in which the infinite future is being slowly ranged in conflict through every phase of human activity with the still ascendant present—and of which the ultimate significance is destined to be the emancipation of the future in such a free conflict of forces as has never been in the world before —we begin to have a clearer view of the outlines of the stupendous problem which has been involved from the beginning in the projection of the centre of significance in the evolutionary process out of the present.

On looking back over the remarkable position which has so far resulted from the first contact in Western history of the human mind with the concept that what it has come to know as its spiritual welfare is of more importance than temporal interests, we see now that there is only one way in which the controlling principles of the religious consciousness can be ultimately projected beyond the content of all systems of authority whatever in which the ascendant present has hitherto been able to imprison the human spirit. The Western mind, we begin to realise, is destined, sooner or later, to rise to a conception of the nature of truth itself different from any that has hitherto prevailed in the world. It must conceive truth at last, we perceive, as being capable of being correctly presented in the human process in history, only as we see it presented in all forms of developing life ; namely, as the net resultant of forces which are in themselves apparently opposed and conflicting.

Such a conception of truth is, in reality, quite