Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 341

the hitherto ascendant present had strangled the future, we are being brought into contact with the first results of the actual working in history of the most effective cause of progress that has ever prevailed in the world. And it is inevitable that before the virility and efficiency of the system of social order proceeding from it, all other systems whatever must in the end go down.

In the midst of the reconstruction that has been taking place in the modern world—a reconstruction so profound that entire systems of thought have, as we have seen, mistaken for a time even the direction in which we have been moving—it is not easy for the mind to grasp at once the reach of the process which thus connects all the apparently complex phenomena of change and progress of our time with an underlying principle of the evolutionary process so simple and yet so far-reaching. Let us see now if it is possible to bring directly home to the mind some conception of the manner in which this principle actually works, as the determining cause behind the phenomena of modern progress.

Now it is necessary to keep in view from this point forward a fact the overshadowing significance of which will be more clearly realised in the next chapter. It may be distinguished that, as the result of the developments described in the preceding chapters, the evolutionary process must in the next stage in Western history carry us into the midst of a Supreme struggle, the outlines of which are already in sight. The controlling principle to which all the events of social development must become related as this struggle defines itself is very remarkable. It involves nothing less than the challenge of the