Principles of western civilisation

CHAPTER VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT

We can never hope to fully understand the principles of the world-drama which has begun to unfold itself in the civilisation of our era, or the nature of the interval which separates that civilisation from all the past history of the race, until the mind has obtained a clear intellectual grasp of the character of the process which culminated in the civilisations which preceded its rise.

As in the light of modern research the veil is being slowly lifted from the various phases—social, political, ethical, and religious—of the civilisations of the Greek and Roman peoples, the whole presents to the evolutionist a study, the interest of which not only equals, but exceeds, that for which a long series of generations of students in the past instinctively turned to it. In it we have outlined the culminating phases of that immense epoch of human development in which the present was always in the ascendant; the isolated pinnacles of achievement that rise above the silent and unfathomable ocean of prehistoric time which covers the long, slow struggle of the race upwards under the controlling principle of military efficiency. In it we have presented the study of a world in which

150

—