Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 403

resounds ever in our ears as a sustained and worldintoxicating pean. We can, however, never clearly understand the nature of the relationship of the present to the future in our civilisation, until we have grasped the central fact from which the whole significance of this Western movement towards liberty in the last resort proceeds. It may be briefly put into the statement that :—

The setting free in the modern world of the activities of the individual as against all the absolutisms which would have otherwise enthralled them is, in its ultimate meaning, only a process of progress towards a more advanced and complete stage of social subordination than has ever before prevailed in the world.

It is, in short, only because there is involved in the freedom of the individual the development of those standards and forces by which the present is being subordinated to the future, that the movement towards liberty associated with our time attains to the importance it assumes in the modern science of society. It is not, therefore, with the “interests of the individual therein, nor even with those of classes, of races, or of nationalities, that we are primarily concerned. It is the meaning of the social process which is everywhere in the ascendant. It is to this dominant fact that all the tendencies of the prolonged development described in the previous chapters are ultimately related. All the steps towards a free conflict of forces — towards equality of conditions, of rights, and of opportunities, and towards the liberty and freedom of the individual under all forms,—are simply but stages of progress in an increasing process of social subordination. It