Principles of western civilisation

330 WESTERN CIVILISATION cuar.

intellect, to find, in the interests of the existing political State alone, the sole ruling principle in our social evolution. This development takes its way through the literature of the French Revolution into the Utilitarian conceptions of Bentham and the Mills; and in its turn it may be said to have reached, as Laveleye has correctly pointed out, its last logical inferences in Western thought in the purely materialistic theories of Marxian socialism.' Down to the present time the Latin mind in our civilisation has tended to swing between the extreme logical expression of the concepts underlying these two ideals—between the principles of the pre-Reformation period, in which the Church is regarded as the ultimate and supreme power in the organisation of civil authority, and the principles of the polity of the ancient civilisations, in which the materialistic State is regarded as containing within itself the whole theory of human ends and interests.. It is principally in the English-speaking world that the profound evolutionary significance of the larger synthesis of knowledge which lies between these two developments is becoming visible. The first aspect of it has already, with insight, been distinguished by Sir Frederick Pollock in the assertion referred to” —that the characteristic result of all recent English thought as applied to the science of society has been a clearly defined progress, not towards the ideals of either of these movements, but towards such a complete separation of all the field of analytical political science, on the one hand, from

1 Cf. The English Utilitarians, by Leslie Stephen, vol. ili. pp. 224-237. 2 History of the Science of Politics, pp. 113-14.