Principles of western civilisation

igo) WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP, a arene

the interests of its component members for the time being, the economic factor is, therefore, the ruling factor in human history ; and that all human beliefs and institutions are ultimately the outcome of economic conditions—that is to say, of the rivalry of interests between the existing members of society As formerly we used to be told that all economics were relative to history, so now, says Mr. J. Bonar,? we are asked to believe “that all history is relative to economics, men having been made what they are by economical causes.” *

The inter-relation of all these phases of thought, the clear and consistently developed premises upon which they rest, and the central conception from which they all proceed, are at once apparent. What they represent is a theory of progress in which the ascendency of the present is regarded as the ideal towards which we are travelling, and in which the struggle that this ascendant present maintains against the forms, the beliefs, and institutions under which the past had hitherto ruled it, occupies the whole field of intellectual vision. The theory of our social progress in all its parts becomes, in short, simply a theory of movement towards a fixed social and political condition in which this self-conscious and self-contained present shall be at last com-

' Cf. Capetal, by Karl Marx, c. i. s. 4, and German Social Democracy, by Bertrand Russell, 1. i. See Professor Achille Loria’s Les dases économiques de la constitution sociale (French translation by A. Bouchard) for the current Italian form of this doctrine.

* The Economic Journal, vol. viii. p. 443.

* Mr. Bonar’s remark on the doctrine goes to the root of the subject. “Both dogmas seem not so much obviously untrue as obviously beyond testing, for if all is tainted with relativity these dogmas themselves will be so tainted, and we could not have formulated either of them without unclothing ourselves of one epoch and rising above time and circumstance” (Zz. p.

443).