Principles of western civilisation

394 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

era of knowledge. In the clear, cold meaning of a simple scientific principle, as in the light of a new dawn, there stand revealed the outlines of that land through which the human mind has struggled to advance in the dark. Almost with a glance the intellectual vision takes in the whole content of the position to which Kant, central figure as he must always remain in Western thought, actually essayed to give us a plan in the gaunt and cumbrous survey of the Transcendental Philosophy.’

As we look backward and forward through the history of thought, the impression received by the mind at the outset continues to deepen. There has never before, in the process of our social evolution, emerged into view so great and so far-reaching a master-principle. It matters not in what direction we apply its meaning; the result is almost equally illuminative. As we understand the nature of the evolutionary problem that is being solved in the historical process in Western history, the line of demarcation which divides the meaning of our era from the ultimate significance of all other phases and all other epochs of human development stands out before the mind. When we perceive the central meaning of that era to be that it is the period in which the present is passing out under the control of the infinite, it is impossible to mistake the scientific import of phases of the process hitherto veiled in obscurity.

1 Many of what will be seen to be simple and obvious inferences from the position defined in the foregoing chapters could hardly be stated in better words than those in which they are set forth by Kant towards the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, after they have been reached as conclusions by the difficult road of the ‘‘ Transcendental Analytic” and ‘‘ Transcendental Dialectic.”” Compare, for example, pp. 502-508, 541-550, and 588-602 in Max Miiller’s translation, vol. ii. of Zhe Cretigue.