Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 401

by which the present, operating principally through the powers of the State, or through the compulsion of accepted standards of truth regarded as absolute, had hitherto strangled the future; the gradual opening, therefore, in the present of the conditions of such a free and tolerant conflict of forces as has never been in the world before, but a free conflict of which the very existence, nevertheless, depends at every point on the all-pervading influence in our civilisation of the concepts that continue to maintain the controlling meaning of the evolutionary process dissociated from all the interests and compulsions of the present, and in its condition of projection beyond the limits of political consciousness ;—all form the links in a process of related sequences which profoundly and permanently impresses the intellect. We appear, in short, in Western history to have reached the stage when the intellectual process is about to overtake the meaning of the evolutionary process which has pursued a course hitherto in advance of it; a stage at which all the stress and strenuousness of the modern world-conflict, instead -of being considered as something external to that system of belief which is associated with our civilisation, will be regarded by science as a natural phenomenon inherent in it from the beginning, and coming at last actually and visibly within the sphere of its highest meaning.

The historical process in our civilisation has reached the brink of consciousness. This is the pregnant fact which it is necessary to take into consideration in endeavouring to estimate the character of the impetus likely to be behind it in the stage in which it moves towards the great struggle of

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