Principles of western civilisation

164 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

What, then, is this principle of social development? There can be little doubt as to the character of the answer which must be given to this question. What we come to see is that in the stage of the world’s development, in which every feature of social organisation is inevitably, and from the beginning, involved in the sweep of a vast, slowly developing military process, the institution of Ancestor Worship must be directly related to the controlling principle of the epoch. It was, we must come to see, through the type of social order developed from the institution of Ancestor Worship, and having for its central feature the conception of exclusive citizenship, and through this type alone, that it was possible to reach the culminating phase of that first epoch of human evolution in which the social consciousness is related to ends expressing themselves exclusively through the existing political organisation ; and of which the outward political ideal was of necessity the military State, ever grimly tending towards the only possible goal of its epoch—universal military conquest.

It may be observed, accordingly, that at the period when the tribal groups of the ancestors of the Greek and Roman peoples wandered into the territories upon which they afterwards founded the two last and greatest civilisations of the ancient world, they possessed that type of social organisation which, as already mentioned, prevailed at one time amongst all the leading peoples of the world. In it we have already clearly outlined, not only the fundamental conception which, throughout the whole period of Greek and Roman history, underlies the bond of citizenship; but also the direct evidence of