Principles of western civilisation

332 WESTERN CIVILISATION cuar.

mark of the advanced stage which the evolutionary process has reached in the English-speaking world. It is the necessary accompaniment and the outward sign of the actual accomplishment of that vast transition we have been here describing, in which, with the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process out of the present, a rule of law has been finally differentiated from a rule of religion. It is a result the completion of which marks the beginning of an entirely new era of synthesis in Western thought.

But its meaning is as yet scarcely at all understood outside the pale of the English-speaking world,’ where it is giving to our modern progress a certain double aspect which is responsible for one of the most curious illusions of our time. Mr. Bryce has remarked on one of the little understood phenomena of the current life of the United States of America, namely, the entire dissociation of the religious consciousness from all forms of civil authority, existing side by side with an intensity of belief in the acceptance of the form of religious belief associated with our civilisation, and of the standards of conduct which it prescribes, as one of the main causes with which a great national destiny is identified.» By many, however, who have for right,” and ‘‘no religious conscience in a state of separation from, or perhaps even hostility to secular right” (Philosophy of History, pt. iv. sec. iii. nee Frederick Pollock justly notes how entirely misunderstood on the continent of Europe is the precision and abstraction which the English school has succeeded in giving to technical terms in the analytical branch of political Science as a result of its entire separation from the domain of ethics (cf. History of the Science of Politics, pp. 114, 115).

* For instance: ‘So far from thinking their commonwealth godless, the

Americans conceive that the religious character of a government consists in nothing but the religious belief of the individual citizens, and the conformity