Principles of western civilisation

342 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

ascendency of the present in the economic process in the whole domain of human activities throughout the world.

There is no department of the activities of our time which seems to the ordinary observer to be more remote from, and to have less association with, the principle of the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process outside the limits of political consciousness, than that which is embraced in the economic life of our civilisation. By large numbers of observers, and even by many who would not necessarily be prepared to assert with Marx that the economic factor is the ruling factor in human history, the department of affairs with which economic theory is concerned is regarded as a sphere of human activity peculiarly self-centred. The world to which the science of political economy relatesthe science which Bagehot described as tending to become in England simply the science of Business or of the Great Commerce'—is, in short, the world in which the rule of average commercial self-interest in the existing political conditions of civilisation is regarded as ultimately supreme. No department of human activity would seem to be more completely occupied with the present; and, therefore, to be altogether more remote from the action of the principle we have been describing. Nevertheless, all the world-shaping conflict in the domain of religion, of thought, of politics, with which we have so far been occupied is but preliminary to the vast struggle towards which the modern world moves ;

1 The Postulates of English Political Economy, by the late Walter Bagehot, with preface by Alfred Marshall, p. 7-