Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 173

later period in Tacitus' we have the boast of an emperor? as to the men of other lands that the Roman State had admitted and absorbed as citizens. But this was not the real spirit of Rome. Rather, in the words of a recent writer, ‘“‘she protested, even while she admitted to her citizenship the Greek poets, the Asiatic and Egyptian sacred rites, the foreigners who thronged inside her walls and who ascended to her seats of honour. She detested every society which had not asked her permission to exist.”®

This was the true genius of the Roman State in the period of its vigorous life. It was the spirit which had made Rome the mistress of the world. It was the spirit which represented the inner life of that immense epoch of human development which had culminated in the ancient civilisations. It was the spirit which was representative of the epoch of force; the true world-spirit of the era of the merciless, material, but omnipotent present.

From the fundamental conceptions upon which the ancient State rested, there was, therefore, almost entirely shut out all view of these wider ideals of duty and obligation with which we are about to become familiar in the second epoch of social evolution. All those activities, for instance, which in the higher forms of religion spring from the individual’s sense of his relationship to the infinite and the universal tended in the ancient State to express themselves solely in relation to the ideals involved in the conception of exclusive citizenship. The entire con-

1 Tac. Anmn., lib. xi. c. xxiv. 2 Claudius in the Roman Senate. 3 «The Genius of Rome,” Quarterly Review, vol. clxxxxi.