Principles of western civilisation

11 THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 89

of the principles of human conduct impinges on the theory of social development has been the late Professor Sidgwick. No recent writer has perceived more clearly the nature of the cardinal difficulty which underlies that conception of the modern State which the Manchester school in England developed from the principles of the Utilitarians; namely, the difficulty inherent in the fact that there is resident in our civilisation an ethical principle which must ultimately render the modern consciousness absolutely intolerant of the fundamental principles of a purely business conception of “Society.” No mind in recent times, in reviewing the results obtained in modern thought—as it has advanced, on the one hand, through the conceptions here described, and, on the other, through that movement which has developed in Germany, Scotland, and England, through Kant and Hegel—has seen more accurately than Sidgwick’s the nature of the fundamental contradiction involved in all attempts to rationalise within the limits of political consciousness the conceptions of “duty” and “self-interest” in the individual.» And no modern student of social phenomena has arrived by more deliberate and cautious steps at a position in which that question which underlies the evolutionary position presented itself to him—the question whether it was not, after all, impossible to construct a scientific theory of ethics within such limits, and whether, therefore, in his own words, ‘“‘we were not in the last resort forced to borrow a fundamental and

1 Compare, for example, Political Economy and Ethics, by Venry Sidgwick, z ae on ‘‘ Political Economy” in the Déctzonary of Political Economy, “a Ci Outlines of the History of Ethics, pp. 259-283, and Methods of Ethics,

507-8.