Principles of western civilisation

cuar. vi THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 151

the evolutionary process, already on the threshold of a new era, is yet about to exhibit, within the narrow limits which the mechanism of the past has imposed upon it, the very highest potentiality of the governing principle which has hitherto controlled it; and to display, in a comparatively brief period, and in almost every department of activity, the energy, the efficiency, and the domination of every form of human force capable of reaching its highest expression in the ascendant present.

In endeavouring to bring clearly into view the fact that in Greek and Roman history we have portrayed a type of civilisation in which the ruling causes in every department of social organisation are but projections through the various mediums of human activity of the single governing principle of the ascendency of the present, which found its highest outward expression in a military order of society ; it will be well to present to the mind for a short space a view of the relation of these civilisations themselves to the larger world-movement of which they form part. Who, it may be asked, are these Western peoples in whose life history the civilisation of Greece and Rome are themselves, in one sense, no more than passing incidents? Who are those peoples who are thus about to carry the military phase of evolution to its highest expression, and amongst whom, if we have been right in the previous chapter, there can alone be produced the vast historical mzHeu necessary for the rise into ascendency of the governing principle of that second epoch of human development in which the controlling centre of the evolutionary process is destined to be projected out of the present into the future ?