Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 339

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The movements which have been developing beneath the face of history, and to which these outward results are related, are still more remarkable. This vast advance has been accompanied by conditions of the rapid disintegration of all absolutisms within which the human spirit had hitherto

een confined. In a world moving towards the emancipation of the future in such a free conflict of forces as has never been possible before, all the speculations, the opinions, the beliefs, and the institutions through which the ascendant present had hitherto shut down on the activities of the human mind, have tended to be more and more deprived of the support of those organised imperiums in human affairs through which the present had imposed itself upon the world in the past.’ It has been the age of the unfettering of discussion and of competition ; of the enfranchisement of the individual, of classes, of parties, of opinions, of commerce, of industry, and of thought. Into the resulting conditions of the social order all the forces, powers, and equipments of human nature have been unloosed. It has been the age of the development throughout our civilisation of the conditions of such rivalry and strenuousness, of such conflict and stress, as has never prevailed in the world before.

It is, however, the actual vitality, the undoubted permanence of the principle from which this progress proceeds, which finally leaves the deepest impression on the mind. When we realise, however dimly, the real nature of the ultimate principle in which all the movement around us has its origin; when we stand

* Cf. ‘The True American Spirit in Literature,” As/antéc Monthly, vol. Ixxxiv., Charles Johnston.