Principles of western civilisation

356 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the results in question are due, depends, as yet, almost entirely on the peoples who have passed through the full stress of the development described in the preceding chapters.

No observer, preserving his position of detachment and looking through the history of thought and research in England, the United States, and Germany for a century past, can doubt the enormous potentiality in the world of the principles with which he sees the human mind therein being equipped. Whatever the attitude may be towards the principles underlying the change in standards which has taken place in our civilisation, there can be no doubt as to the influence of the spirit that is behind the modern search after truth in intensifying all the conditions of progress, or of the fact that the peoples amongst whom that spirit first became dominant have received a long start in the modern worldprocess. But so far only the general tendencies resulting from the development described in the last chapter have been considered. It is as we watch the larger process of emancipation which has been inherent in our civilisation from the beginning, broadening out at last under these conditions into the full stream of modern tendencies, that we begin to realise the real nature of the forces making for the intensity of the social process amongst the advanced peoples. It is when we get to the heart of the political revolution, which for nearly two centuries has been in progress in Western society—that revolution which has been bringing the people into the modern world-conflict on conditions of equal political rights, and which is carrying us into the midst of an era of economic

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