Principles of western civilisation

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA 9

of the nineteenth century, we have the meaning of this central conception now clearly in view. In ethics it found its consistent expression in the unhesitating assertion that, in the last resort, human conduct required no principle of support whatever but that of self-interest in society well understood. This was the assertion which, developed in the theories of continental writers like Condorcet, Diderot, and Helvétius, reached in one of its phases in England its highest expression in the writings of John Stuart Mill.' It is an assertion which, under many forms, exercises at the present time a dominant influence in a wide range of ethical thought throughout our civilisation? Carried into the sphere of religion the same fundamental conception had its correlative affrmation equally clearly, and equally unhesitatingly expressed. This was that the direction of progress in our Western world was to empty the concepts of the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation of that distinctive quality which projected their meaning beyond the limits of political consciousness.*? Translated, finally, into a theory of our social development, it became that assertion now fully in view in the most widely read class of social literature in Germany, namely, that the interests of society being the same thing as

1 Cf. Utilitarianism, by J. S. Mill; also his System of Logic and Three Essays on Religion.

2 See The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, for the later position ; and Prolegomena to Ethics, by T. H. Green, iv., c. iv., particularly § 366, for a definition of the fundamental difficulty it has involved. One of the principal recent growing points in English thought of an opposing development has been supplied in the writings of Edward Caird.

% Compare James Mill’s Zthics, or his article in the London Review, 1835, quoted by Mr. Leslie Stephen in Zhe English Uteletarians, vol. ii. pp. 61, 62,

with Mr. Bernard Bosanquet’s essay on ‘‘ The Future of Religious Observance ” (The Civilisation of Christendom).