Principles of western civilisation

192 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

scend all the purposes for which our own lives and the life of the political State exist—was unknown in the ancient world. No sense of responsibility to principles transcending the meaning of the State had as yet projected the controlling aims of human consciousness out of the ascendant present.

This is the meaning of the ancient world. When all the details of the life of these civilisations are seen in their relation to the larger process of human evolution, the culminating effect, focussed through many mediums, is so unmistakable as to bring to the mind a sense of irresistible conviction as to their essential meaning. Looking back over the history of Greece and Rome, we may see that the characteristic features are related to a ruling principle the operation of which has woven a gigantic pattern through an immense period of human evolution; a pattern in which the life and history of these civilisations are themselves no more than local details. We see the history of these States now, not as some wonderful and mysterious page in the development of humanity that must be studied with a kind of awe apart by itself; but rather as the culminating phase of that epoch of human development in which the ruling end that is being attained is the subordination of the individual to existing society ; and in which the later governing principle by which existing society is itself destined to be subordinated to a meaning projected beyond the content of its political consciousness has not yet begun to operate.

It is the last stage of that epoch in which the content of human consciousness is as yet bounded by the horizon of the existing political organisation ; of that epoch in which the State, therefore, claims