Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 457

in these chapters of the character of the evolutionary process unfolding itself in Western history, nothing can be more certain than that the future, towards which the development in progress in our civilisation is carrying the world, must have this characteristic. We must be able to distinguish in it the principle of continuity which at once reconciles and extends both these, to all appearance, conflicting views. We must be able to see in it, at the outset, how the profound instinct of the Manchester school of thought in England, that the future of the world belongs to the principle of free competition, is reconciled with the equally profound instinct which has come to express itself through the theories of socialism, that the conditions of /azssez-faire competition in the phases just described are nothing more or less than conditions of barbarism representing the survival into modern economic history of the ruling principle of a past epoch of development, which now, under all the phases described, moves slowly towards its challenge in the world-process.

It will be recalled at this point how continuously in past chapters emphasis has been laid upon a significant fact of our civilisation. Western civilisation, we saw, has from the beginning of our era represented a state of social order in which all the forces that tend to become absolute in the present are, in a long process of development, being broken and subordinated to the larger meaning of the evolutionary process in a future which is infinite. In it, therefore, there is represented the antithesis of the ruling principle of the military civilisations of the ancient world, the ultimate meaning of which was that they expressed, in