Principles of western civilisation

CHAPTER XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE

WHEN the evolutionist, who has carried so far his survey of the process unfolding itself in Western history, pauses for a space at this stage and looks back over its meaning in the past, it is almost inevitable that a conviction of the unusual importance of the period towards which the world is moving should settle slowly upon the mind. However it may be regarded, it is, he perceives, on the whole impossible to conceive the development we have been discussing in the preceding chapters as any merely partial or secondary phase of the evolutionary process. The more clearly we distinguish, in relation to the past history of the race, the outlines of the fundamental problem with which the human mind is struggling therein, and the more thoroughly we have grasped the character of the essential unity under all its phases of the movement we have followed so far throughout our civilisation, the more clearly do we also perceive that in the development in progress under our eyes in Western history we are regarding the main sequence of events along which the meaning of the cosmic process in human history is descending towards the future. Transforming as has been the many sided con389