Principles of western civilisation

80 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

If we look closely at the idea of social progress, which has held the mind of our Western world throughout the nineteenth century, its main characteristic may readily be distinguished. In nearly all the leading movements in thought we may see that the principles of our social progress have been presented as being, for the most part, those of a struggle between the present and the past. The theory of social development which we encounter in Western thought and politics during the nineteenth century is, therefore, a theory according to which existing interests are considered as passing out from under the control of the past towards an organisation of society in which the interests of the present are at last to be supreme in every particular. It is this theory of the ascendency of the present in the evolutionary process—a theory in which the relations of the present to the future have no place —that is represented in English thought in the movement which extends from Hume and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. It is the distinctive theory of social progress which has come down from the French Revolution, which continues to be represented in a multitude of forms in current French thought, and which in one of its phases has found its most characteristic expression in the current conceptions of social democracy in Germany.

Now, when with this fact in mind we turn in a different direction and follow that development in current thought which is presented to us for the most part in the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer, it is to find that the position with which we are confronted is even more remarkable than that which we have just been considering.

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