Principles of western civilisation

8 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

being carried a step farther, the content of the human mind is considered as related simply to past experiences either of the individual or of the race.! But, as we see now, the character of the evolutionary drama in progress in our civilisation can never more be viewed by the human intellect as dominated by such a ruling principle. It is, we see, the meaning, not of the relation of the present to the past, but of the relation of the present to the future, to which all other meanings are subordinate, and which controls all the ultimate tendencies of the process of progress in which we are living.

Since the great development of ideas to which Lessing, Herder, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel contributed, reached its full limits in Germany, and became in part discredited in the land which produced it, it may be perceived that Western thought, so far as it has endeavoured to rest itself on a scientific basis of phenomenology, has come to pursue a clearly defined line of development along which it has slowly contracted upon one central idea. Following this line of development in the movement begun in England with the English deists, carried still farther on the continent of Europe under the theories of the French Revolution, and in its return wave culminating in England in that utilitarian theory of ethics and of the State, in the ascendant in England during the greater part

1 Cf. Principles of Bzology, §§ 297-314; Principles of Psychology, $$ 223-273 and 430; Principles of Ethics, S§ 24-62.

2 We may, in short, apply to the future what Mr. Albion W. Small has so strikingly said of the individual in modern sociology: ‘‘ Sociology is still struggling with this preposterous initial fact of the individual. He is the only possible social unit, and he is no longer a thinkable possibility. He

is the only real presence, and he is never present” (American Journal of Sociology, vol. v. 4, ‘‘ The Scope of Sociology”).