Principles of western civilisation

386 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

In the current literature of the time all kinds of Utopian dreams are indulged in as to the character of the future that is before us. We may, however, almost at a glance, put most of them aside as unreal and impossible. There can be no doubt as to the nature of the principles with which the future of the world is identified. It is by no broad pathway through Elysian fields of ordered ease that the peoples to whom the future of the world belongs are advancing to the goal which is before them. It is through conditions more strenuous than have ever prevailed in the world before.

The meaning of the evolutionary drama that is working itself out in Western history has been the same from the beginning. It continues to be the same as far as human eye can forecast the future. It is, so far as science is concerned with it, the great drama in which the tyranny of the present is being lifted, for the first time in the world’s history, from the shoulders of the human race. The principle which is accomplishing so tremendous an achievement is the projection of the controlling sense of human responsibility outside the bounds of political consciousness. But the principles with which the import of that process is necessarily identified in the present, are the principles of such a free conflict of forces as has never prevailed in the world before. The very standard of truth, in the presence of which the peoples who have won their way through it live and move, is a standard according to which truth itself can only be conceived as the net resultant of forces apparently opposed and in themselves conflicting. The conditions resulting are the only

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