Principles of western civilisation

6 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

already bear on their shoulders the burden of the principles with which the interests of the future are identified.

The controlling centre of the evolutionary process in our social history is, in short, not in the present at all, but in the future. It is in favour of the interests of the future that natural selection continually discriminates. The majority with which the principles that are working out the process of our social development are primarily concerned is a majority that never votes. It is that silent majority which is always in the future. The process of life included in Western history is, we begin to dimly distinguish, a process of development which is, beyond doubt, overlaid with a meaning that no school of scientific thought in the past has enunciated. Our Western civilisation, we are beginning now to understand, must be, over and above everything else, the history of a movement through which, in all the spheres of ethics, of politics, of philosophy, of economics, and of religion, there runs the dominating meaning of a cosmic struggle, in which, not simply the individual, but society itself is being broken to the ends of a social efficiency, which the human intellect can never more include within the limits of any theory of utilitarian politics in the State.

The extraordinary reach of this new masterprinciple in the science of society only continues to more deeply impress the mind on reflection. All the first attempts to apply the conception of evolution to human society—made, of necessity, by writers whose systems of thought were already practically formed before being influenced by the new know-