Principles of western civilisation

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THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT

To any one who comes fresh from the study of the position we have been considering in the last chapter, the modern condition of the sciences dealing with the social phenomena of our civilisation must present features of unusual interest. We have seen in that chapter how the movement in progress in recent biological science is gradually bringing into prominence a principle round which the theory of the evolution of life, by Natural Selection, must now be considered to revolve. Stated in a few words, the effect of the perception of this principle is to bring us to understand how all previous ideas of a conciliation between the interests of the existing individuals of any progressive form of life and those of the majority of their kind, must give way to a conception of life as involved in a vast antinomy in which we see the present continually envisaged with the future, and in which it is never the present, but always the future which is of larger importance. We have seen how in this conflict it is only those forms of life among which the interests of the existing individuals have been continually subordinated to the greater interest of their kind in

the future that have come down to us as winning 65 EF