Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 189

self-consciousness thus to realise itself unrestrained in its highest potency in art; and solely for its own sake and satisfaction. The standards in art were, as it were, but the highest expression in Greece of the universal standards in the era of the ascendency of the present; and it was, in the conditions which prevailed in the Greek world, and in these alone, that the esthetic emotions, having their roots in the past experience of the race, could attain their highest results and reach their culminating stage of expression.

It was, in other words, the same causes which rendered the Roman empire the culminating phase of the ideals of military dominion, that gave us in the Greek world the culminating phase in which art, for the time being, attained to what has been described as almost the highest limits of perfection. In each case we are in the presence of the controlling principle we have been discussing throughout. Under each form we have but reached the highest point of that epoch of development in which all human energies endeavoured to find their most unrestrained and forceful expression in relation to existing ends ; of that long stage of human evolution in which the ideals of every human desire included in the ascendant present tended to reach some form of culminating expression.

It is, therefore, as we have seen, this principle of the ascendency of the present which carries the inquirer into the inner meaning of every detail of the life of the ancient civilisations. The sacredness of life in the modern State, as compared with the ancient world, is still often explained as if it were related merely to different and more efficient