Principles of western civilisation

66 WESTERN CIVILISATION aos,

types, and how amongst every existing form destined to successfully maintain its place in the rivalry of existence, the conditions at any time prevailing must of necessity be those wherein the process in progress is weighted and controlled at every point, not by the interests of the present individuals, but by those of the generations yet in the future.

As the mind, with this position clearly before it, is concentrated now on the later phases of the evolutionary process in human history, and more particularly on the aspects of that process as they are presented in the complex social phenomena of the modern world, we become conscious that we are regarding one of the most remarkable spectacles which the history of knowledge presents.

If we recognise that we have before us in human society the last and most important phase of the evolutionary process in life; if, therefore, we consider that the law which we have beheld in operation from the beginning—that law which at every point in the process of progress necessitated the prevalence of conditions in which the interests of the present and the individual were subordinated to those of the future and the universal—cannot have been suspended in human society; if, indeed, we must rather consider that these conditions must be more directly operative, and this law, therefore, be more imperative in human society than ever before in the history of life ;—then there can be no doubt as to the nature of the position which confronts us at the threshold of the science of society. It would seem that the controlling fact to which we must discover every principle of the science of society to