Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 327

It is only in the first light of the principle of Projected Efficiency, as applied to the social process in history, that we begin to see the nature of the right in which the peoples to whom the future belongs will hold the world:—The world in which the future is to be emancipated is to be a world in which every cause, and institution, and opinion, and interest will hold its very life at the challenge of such criticism and competition as has never been known before. But it is to be a world, nevertheless, in which all the phenomena of progress, and of the free conflict which prevails, remain related to a single under-lying cause; namely, that the ultimate controlling principles of human action have been projected beyond the content of all systems whatever of interest or of authority in the present. It is in the highest degree important to note here, in passing, the significance of the conditions in which this result was attained. It has been pointed out that the necessary fact accompanying the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process out of the present, has been the attainment by the human mind of such a conception of truth as was absolutely unknown to it during the epoch which culminated in the ancient civilisations, and as remained entirely foreign to it during almost seventeen centuries of our era; namely, the conception of truth as the net resultant of forces and standards apparently in themselves opposed and conflicting. It was, accordingly, among the peoples where the vast conflict of the movement following the Reformation reached its most characteristic development that the conditions tending most to produce this result prevailed. It was among the English-