Principles of western civilisation

186 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

drawn-out first epoch of social evolution, when the present was always in the ascendant; and when every human force and activity tended to reach its highest expression in terms of the unrestrained and dominant present.’

As we regard this fact attentively, a natural principle of great interest emerges into view. It is, that the period of human evolution in which this class of zsthetic feelings and emotions must tend to reach their highest expression will be, therefore, that in which the epoch of the ascendency of the present culminates. Nay, further, and here the importance of the principle impresses the mind, it would seem that in the second epoch in which the present begins to pass out under the control of the future, and while as yet another and higher class of zsthetic emotions are nascent, a slowly increasing conflict—between the unrestrained expression of the zsthetic emotions which are related in their fullest intensity to the experience of the race in the first epoch, and the governing principles of the era in which the present is passing under the control of the future—will develop itself.

There may, accordingly, be traced throughout every leading phase of modern Western art the deepening shadow of this conflict. Its influence is perceptible in all that class of effort expressing itself in the literature of the emotions, in the higher

1 Compare, for instance, Darwinism, by A. R. Wallace, ch. x.; Phystological <sthetics, by Grant Allen; ‘‘ Beauty in the Eyes of an Evolutionist,” Sczence Journal, 1882; ‘‘ Thoughts upon the Musical Sense in Animals and Man,” by August Weismann, Zssays upon Heredity, vol. ii. (Eng. ts., Poulton and Shipley) ; Schopenhauer’s Zssay on the Metaphysics of Fine Art (Eng. trs., Saunders) ; ‘* Naturalism and 4ésthetics,” part i. ch. ii., Balfour's

foundations of Belief; with Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste.