Principles of western civilisation

340 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

in the midst of the rushing tide of the life of New York or Chicago, and catch sight of the actual relationship between the deep-seated, inherent antinomies of the English-speaking world as they were discussed in the last chapter, and the fierce stress and freedom of American life, industry, and progress at the present day ;—an overwhelming sense of the character of the future takes possession of the mind. It is the principles of our Western civilisation as here displayed, and no others, that we feel are destined to hold the future of the world. It is not into the end but into the beginning of an era that we have been born. One of those fateful turning periods in which a new determining principle has begun to operate in the evolutionary process has been passed. Weare living in the midst of a system of things by the side of which no other system will in the end survive as a rival in the world.

What, then, is the nature of this cause which is at work in our Western world, and which has simultaneously affected with such stupendous results so many spheres of human activity? What is this new ruling principle which appears to have risen into the ascendant in Western history? There can be no doubt as to what the answer to this question must be. We are in sight of the working in the world of that principle with which the civilisation of our era had been pregnant from the beginning, and which was slowly born into the world during the long stress of the development described in the previous chapters. By the gradual projection of the controlling meaning of the evolutionary process beyond the bounds of political consciousness, and by the resulting dissolution of all the absolutisms in which