Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 353

peoples, than the application of science to the general affairs of life. But the results obtained in applied science are themselves the product of certain conditions in thought, and in the cultivation of pure science, which have only recently come to prevail in our civilisation, They are conditions which have resulted directly from the ascendency in our civilisation of the conception that emerged out of the conflict described in the last chapter.

It is only necessary to look through the current literature of the European peoples to realise how peculiar and how strictly circumscribed these conditions in reality are. If we regard, in the first instance, the existing educational controversies of the peoples who have not passed through the development described in the last chapter, it may be perceived, when all due allowance is made for explanations that may be offered, how the scope of research and inquiry has remained restricted on every hand by the standards that have continued to prevail. Yet, on the other hand, when the mind is carried in the opposite direction it is confronted with a fact scarcely less significant. This is the inevitableness with which a purely intellectual demand for freedom carries us back once more to a mere theory of the interests of the individuals comprised within the limits of political consciousness. For as we see how inherent in the problem of human evolution is the fact that there is not, and that there never can be, any purely intellectual sanction for the submission of the individual to a world-process in which he has absolutely no interest; so we see that a purely intellectual demand for freedom of thought must

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