Principles of western civilisation

96 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP, III

civilisation, should it be destined to continue to hold its place in the stress of the world in the future ;—there rises at last in the mind an overmastering conviction of the extraordinary incompleteness and insufficiency of all the conceptions of the science of society we have been here considering. The nature of the main position in thought, which underlies that attitude of doubt, of hesitation, and even of revolt, which the younger and rising minds in so many schools of thought present to the social philosophy of the past, begins to be revealed tous. It is no question, we see, merely of faults, local or personal, in the systems of thought around us. We are regarding no merely passing phase of temporary interest, but a position in thought which separates two epochs in the intellectual development of the world.

For, as for a vast period of time the old philosophers constructed their systems of Ptolemaic cosmogony to centre in the observer and revolve ‘round the little world upon which he stood; so, down into the midst of the time in which we are living, we see the systems of social theory we have been considering similarly constructed to centre in the observer, similarly conceived to revolve round the petty interests which the same individual saw comprised within the limits of his own political consciousness. We have reached a crisis in thought where, to use words of Mr. Leslie Stephen, the scenery has at last become too wide for the dramawhere, through the roof of the theatre in which our theorists have unfolded these little conceptions of human progress, we see the eternal stars shining in silent contempt of such petty imaginings."

1 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i. p. $2.