Principles of western civilisation

354 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

always, in the last resort, be bounded by the claims and tyrannies of interests within the limits of political consciousness. We return, in short, quickly and inevitably under such standards to schemes like those of ‘the scientific breeding of the human race,” and that class of proposals with which the Greeks were so familiar,’ the inner mark and meaning of which is simply the ascendency of the present in the evolutionary process.

We are, in short, confronted amongst the advanced peoples with the almost startling fact, as underlying the conditions of intensity towards which these peoples move, that the principles of intellectual tolerance, just as the principles of religious tolerance, and—as we shall see directly—the principles of political tolerance, can only be held, in the last resort, as a conviction of the religious consciousness. They must proceed, that is to say, from a sense of responsibility to principles transcending the claim of any system of ideas, of thought, of knowledge, of authority, or even of welfare, embodied within the limits of political consciousness.”

1 Cf. Plato, Rep. v.

2 Nothing is the cause of deeper misunderstandings between the English mind and the French mind, in the existing conditions of the world, than the adhesion at times of the French people to the principle that loyalty to the State, or to its institutions, or to parties, or even to the welfare of individuals, should be held to override loyalty to the deeper-lying principles of our social evolution which transcend the limits of political consciousness. The difference of standards within our civilisation in this respect is already so marked, that it may often be distinguished in art as expressed in literature. For instance, a standard common in the literature of the novel in France, is one in accordance with which loyalty to the welfare of the local or personal is represented as opposed to this deeper social principle, while it is nevertheless presented by the artist as the overruling motive with which the reader’s sympathies are expected to be enlisted. Employed by Rudyard Kipling in his earlier writings (probably under the influence of his Indian environment), the effect on the general English mind, ¢.g. in the tale Thrown Away, is so foreign, that it quite interferes with the artistic result as intended by the writer.