Principles of western civilisation

328 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

speaking peoples of England and America—constituting the representatives of the most purely German of the political systems which sprang from the ruins of the Roman empire, constituting in particular the only large group of northern peoples who attained to political maturity free from the old-world shadow of the ancient civilisations,! and almost free from the old-world spirit of the Roman law,°—that this result of the Reformation, transforming in its future consequences, slowly, but only slowly, began to be visible in our Western world. It is in this projection of the controlling centre of the religious consciousness of our civilisation out of the present, expressing itself in a principle of tolerance, held in the last resort as a religious conviction, and therefore itself becoming iron at the point at which its own standard of tolerance is threatened, that we have the most remarkable, as it is the most characteristic, result of the evolutionary process in our Western world. We shall presently have to deal with it in its wider aspect as a cause behind all the phenomena of modern progress. But the movement which has produced it has been so prolonged; its effects are so deep, so far-reaching, and on so large a scale; they still lie, moreover, so largely in the future ;that no system of modern philosophy has as yet seen it whole. And the intellectual process, which in the modern era of our civilisation has progressed side by side with the historical process in which the result has been accomplished, has itself been on

1 Cf. Comparative Politics, by E. A. Freeman, pp. 46, 47.

2 Cf. Civilisation during the Middle Ages, by G. B. Adams, p. 325. Cf. also Bryce’s “Roman and English Law” in Studies in History and Jurisprudence, E. ii.