Principles of western civilisation

go WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

indispensable premiss” from conceptions which transcended them."

But when we proceed to follow Professor Sidgwick through his writings, in which we might expect to find the application of such views to the science of society or to a science of the social process in history, we only find that we have once more returned to the science of the political State presented as the science of society. It is true that in his Elements of Politics we find a few sentences in which the view is advanced that the welfare of the community may be interpreted to mean the welfare, not only of the human beings who are actually living,” but of those who are to live hereafter. But, after this, we encounter in a book of 632 pages nothing to show that Professor Sidgwick had attained to any conception of the relation of this fact to the science of politics as a whole,® or to any law or principle of government, or to any principle of social development. Yet, if the principle of Projected Effciency be taken as applying to society, a fundamental fact of human evolution must be that the welfare of society in this larger sense is not coincident with, and can never be made coincident with, that of any of the classes or parties or majorities with which we

1 The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, p. 506. See also Professor J. S. Mackenzie’s Manual of Ethics, book it. ch. i. and ch. iv. 3rd ed., and ch, ii. 2nd ed.

2 Elements of Politics, by Henry Sidgwick, pp. 34, 35-

3 We might, for instance, have expected Sidgwick to have seen the meaning of the position which lies behind that characteristic tendency of recent English thought noted by Sir Frederick Pollock and Professor Holland (the expression, as we shall see later, of a deep-seated, though more or less unconscious, principle of our social evolution) which is accomplishing the complete differentiation of the analytical branch of political science from the science of ethics as a whole (cf. Pollock’s History of the Sctence of Politics, pp. 113-14, and Holland’s Zlements of Jurisprudence, ch. ii.