Principles of western civilisation

334 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP. IX

single acts of which extend themselves over centuries, that Natural Selection is already discriminating between the living, the dying, and the dead among modern peoples. It is a world in which, with the passing of the present under the control of the future, there is being accomplished for the first time in the development of the race the emancipation of the future in the present. It is the world, therefore, in which all the imperiums in which the present had hitherto strangled the interests of the greater future, are in process of slow disintegration, and in which we have, in consequence, entered upon an era of such a free rivalry of forces as has never been before in the history of the race.

It is to the consideration of such a world that we have now to address ourselves. There are, proceeding from the conditions here described, two leading facts of our time, the significance of which will in all probability be fully visible within a century to come. The first is, that the leading place in our'civilisation has passed to the peoples amongst whom there has first been accomplished this result of the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process out of the present, in the long drawn out struggle which has here been described. The other result, already becoming visible beneath the profoundly complex life of the United States of America, constitutes probably the most pregnant and remarkable fact in modern history. It is that the actual life-centre of the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation has been definitely shifted for the present within the pale of the activities of these peoples.