Principles of western civilisation

vi THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 169

upon each other amid the clash of arms and the stress of incessant warfare, the whole process of life is, to the evolutionist, characterised by a deeper meaning than he finds anywhere disclosed in merely political studies of these civilisations. All the details and features which he has spread before him in history relate, he sees, to the later stages of a world-process in which the final causes are innate, and of which all the master-principles have worked together from the beginning towards an end which is inevitable. .

When the City-State of the Greek and Roman civilisations appears in view, in the full processes of its life as revealed in history, it stands before us with all the essential characteristics that have distinguished the social organisation in its earlier stages now indelibly stamped upon it. The early type of caste society to which Homer introduces us—in which, to use words of Mr. Mahaffy, “the key to the comprehension of all details depends upon one leading principle, that consideration is due to the members of the class and even to its dependents, but that beyond its pale even the most deserving are of no account save as objects of plunder” ’—is verging at last towards the ideal of universal dominion; resting, however, ultimately on the same characteristic and vital concept as at the beginning, namely, that of exclusive citizenship. As we watch the steps in the transition in which the various elements of the originally isolated groups become the City-State, grouped round the common hearth of the State with an official priest-

1 Social Life in Greece, by J. P. Mahaffy, p. 44.