Principles of western civilisation

UI THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 77

of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with the interests of the whole.”?

As the evolutionist, with the conception in his mind of human society as involved in the sweep of an antinomy, in which he sees all the tendencies of human development tending to be more and more directly governed by the meaning of a process in which the present is being subordinated to the future, rises from the study of Mill’s writings, the superficiality of the whole system of ideas represented profoundly impresses his mind. It is, he sees, as if the world represented in the era in which we are living had never existed ; as if we were transported back again into the theories of society of the ancient civilisations ; into the political conceptions of Plato and Aristotle.

That such a system of ideas should really express the meaning of our civilisation, or of our social progress as a whole, must be, he perceives, inherently impossible. For if the nature of the evolutionary process be not altogether misunderstood, if the principle of Projected Efficiency as applied to the evolution of human society be not entirely without meaning, the phenomenon of social progress as represented in human history must, he sees, have a meaning which altogether transcends the content of these conceptions. The process of development which our civilisation represents must be subject to laws more far-reaching than any which could be compressed within the narrow formule of such a theory of society. The very essence of the process of order represented in our Western world must be that there is within it some organic principle effecting the continued subordination and sacrifice,

' Utilitarianism, by J. S. Mill, p. 25.