Principles of western civilisation

310 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

new to the world. It is entirely foreign to all those conditions of mind which are peculiar to the childhood of the race, and which still continue to be characteristic of the childhood of the individual. It was a conception completely alien to the genius of the ancient civilisations. Profoundly as it has already come to modify, as we shall see later, the institutions, the deeper mental processes, and the attitude of the religious consciousness amongst those peoples to whom the future of the world, to all appearance, now belongs, it still remains altogether foreign to the vast majority of our fellowcreatures, and even to a considerable proportion of the less advanced peoples included among modern nations. But it is to such a conception of absolute truth, held not simply as an’ intellectual principle, but as the ultimate controlling conviction of religious consciousness, that we see the Western mind now about to be compelled to rise, as it begins at last to move towards that universal empire which has been inherent in Western civilisation from the beginning of our era—a universal empire in which the future is to be at last emancipated in a free and necessarily tolerant conflict of forces; but a conflict, nevertheless, in the stress of which every cause and opinion and institution is to hold its life only at the challenge of such criticism and competition as has never been possible in the world before.’

One of the most remarkable periods in Western history is that included in the centuries which immediately followed the movement known as the

1 Compare the position in Matural Rights, ch. viii., by D. G. Ritchie, with that in Schlegel’s Phzlosophy of History (Robertson), and E. Caird’ Philosophy of Kant, vol. ii. (e.g. pp- 365-372):