Principles of western civilisation

398 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

ness—is the ruling factor in human history, has become no more than an empty formula from which the meaning has vanished in the presence of the reality that we perceive to lie beyond it. The conception which Paul Bert wished to see the ruling principle in the development of modern France, namely, that our natural instincts—meaning thereby the instincts that are related to the past history of the race—are the real basis of conduct and morality, has become scarcely more than a formula of atavism. The correlative maxim in art—that the end of art is for its own sake, that is, for the sake of sensations related to the past experience of the race instead of for the sake of the meaning of the infinite process into which we are being drawn in the future—has become in turn merely a belated survival into the modern era. The meaning which the later Tolstoy, like the earlier Kant, has endeavoured to portray here also shines before us as a simple commonplace in the light.

And so the illumination continues. We see how empty of real meaning has been Herbert Spencer's attempt to explain the vast process in Western history that has resulted in the gradual differentiation of aim between the Church and the State, as if it represented hardly more than the survival into our time of that phase of the relations of the present to the past which he portrayed in his original theory of Ancestor Worship.’ We are, in truth, no longer

1 To Herbert Spencer the increasing difference of aim between the Church and the State in our civilisation is practically only a form of the question whether the living ruler, with his organisation of civil and military subordinates (as represented in the State), shall or shall not yield to the organisation (as represented in the religious consciousness) of those who represent dead rulers and profess to utter their commands; cf. Zecleszastical Jnstetutions, §§ 638-

641.