Principles of western civilisation

ix LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 333

long followed under one of the phases of thought here discussed, the ever increasing concentration in the English-speaking world of the social mind on the utilitarian aspect of the political sciences, and the theory of the State which it involves, there is a continuous tendency to imagine—that emptiest of all dreams to the evolutionist who has once perceived the nature of the process in which human development is involved—that the direction of advance in Western history is, therefore, again to subordinate all human activities, as in the ancient civilisations, to political consciousness as expressed in the State.? The real secret of our Western world—the cause, as we shall see directly, of all its extraordinary and ever-growing efficiency in history—consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the controlling centre of the evolutionary process therein has been at last projected altogether beyond the content of political consciousness.

We are living, in short, in Western history in the midst of a movement in which through the whole realm of art, of ethics, of literature, of philosophy, of politics, and of religion, there runs the undertone of a cosmic struggle in which now, not only the individual and all his powers, but society itself, with all its aims and efforts, is being slowly broken to the ends of a social efficiency no longer included within the limits of political consciousness. It is in the processes of this struggle, the

of their conduct to that belief. They deem the general acceptance of Christianity to be one of the main sources of their national prosperity, and their nation a special object of the divine favour” (Zhe American Commonwealth, by James Bryce, vol. ii. ch. cvi.)

1 This is the idea against which Mr. Herbert Spencer may be perceived to be struggling in the Essays included in The Man versus the State.