Principles of western civilisation

84 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

of sociological principles; and that the content of the human mind is, therefore, ultimately governed by its relations to a sociological process, the controlling meaning of which is not in the past, but in the future,—there is no discernment visible in Mr. Spencer’s theories.

We see how the significance of the principle underlying this fact meets us at every point in Mr. Spencer's theories. For instance, to have once grasped the nature of the position to which the biological sciences have advanced in our time, in bringing us to see the process of human development asa history of the progressive subordination of the present and the individual to the future and the infinite, is to perceive that the history of human evolution must present itself to science in the future as being primarily the history of the evolution in the human mind of the sanction for sacrifice. But as we see Mr. Spencer struggling with the stupendous class of phenomena to which this principle has already given rise in the human mind, and seeking to associate its meaning simply with the past history of the race, we have in sight a noteworthy spectacle. His explanation of the idea of sacrifice that projects itself with increasing insistence through all the creeds of humanity, becomes, accordingly, little more than a suggestion that it is to be accounted for as a survival from cannibal ancestors who delighted in witnessing tortures.. The extraordinary triviality and superficiality of the conception underlying such a theory is immediately obvious to any mind which has once caught sight of the meaning of the evolutionary process in human society as we are now

1 Data of Ethics, ch. viii.

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