Principles of western civilisation

456 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

ment has centred from the beginning of our civilisation—the struggle of which the economic situation is itself but the latest phase—is essentially not a class war in the present, but a struggle in which the interests representing the hitherto ascendant present are being slowly envisaged in conflict with those representing the infinite future, to which they must be subordinated, there has been no conception in the Marxian presentation of socialism.

We are, therefore, face to face, under the phenomena of socialism also, with a significant position. It is that the consistent, thorough-going, but essentially superficial materialism which has of necessity accompanied the Marxian attempt to interpret our social development merely in terms of an economic conflict,—that is to say in terms of the present,and which has its correlative in more or less mechanical schemes for the regimentation of existing society, taking us, in effect, back to the principles of the ancient Greek world, is, of necessity, rejected by a large class of thinking minds throughout our civilisation as obviously falling short of a scientific interpretation of the process unfolding itself in our civilisation. It provides only a theory of society which is instinctively perceived to fail in that it finds no place or meaning for those characteristic qualities in the human process by which alone, as we see now, the winning peoples must, under the principle of Projected Efficiency, maintain their place in the evolutionary process; namely, the qualities contributing to success in that tremendous struggle to adjust the current interests of the world to a meaning which infinitely transcends them.

Now if we have been right in the view taken