Principles of western civilisation

64 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP, II

modern development in biology.. To have grasped, however imperfectly, its application, is to have caught a first glimpse of the nature of the extraordinary revolution which the evolutionary hypothesis is eventually destined to accomplish in the sciences dealing with the principles of human society. It is in the principle here discussed that we undoubtedly have the clue to those larger ruling causes that have controlled the course of progress at every point throughout the past history of life. But it is a principle which we have been, so far, regarding at work only in the lower stages of an ascending process. It is as we have now to watch life broadening upwards towards self-consciousness that we begin to understand how large a place on the stage of the world must henceforward be filled with phenomena arising out of the continued predominance of this principle. It is as we come slowly into view of a reasoning creature, reaching his full development only in conditions of social order in which the demands made by the future upon the individual and the present continue of necessity to grow ever more and more insistent and exacting; a reasoning creature, withal, endowed with the power of realising the present at the expense of the future ;—that we begin to perceive the real nature of the gigantic problem which lies at the base of all society, and towards the solution of which all human development moves.