Principles of western civilisation

TI THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 67

be related, is that the history of human development is, in the last resort, the history of the development of the principles by which there is being effected the subordination of the individual and the present to a process, the larger meaning of which is always in the future.

As the evolutionist looks the conclusion here stated in the face the enormous reach of its meaning begins to be visible to him. For it must be, he sees, in the fact here brought into view—namely, that the history of human development is to be regarded as the history of the development of the conceptions, by which the interests of the present are being subordinated to those of a process, the meaning of which is projected beyond the farthest limits of political consciousness—that we have the ultimate principle to which the philosophy of history is related. It must be primarily along the line of the operation of this principle of Projected Efficiency that Natural Selection is discriminating between the living, the dying, and the dead in human society. All the phenomena of our social development must, therefore, whether we be conscious of the fact or not, stand in subordinate relationship to it. For here, as elsewhere, we see that in the formula of existence for any type of social order destined to maintain its place in the future, the interests of all the visible world around us can have no place, except in so far as they are included in the larger interests of a future to which they are entirely subordinate,

It is when, with these facts in mind, we turn now to the condition of political theory associated with the current life of our civilisation, and to the system