Principles of western civilisation

196 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

“Society,” as society has hitherto been conceived, are now themselves about to be subordinated to the ends of a social process, the meaning of which can never more be included within the bounds of political consciousness.

The great drama upon which the curtain begins to rise in Western history is, in short, one which, by inherent necessity, must gradually envelop in its influence all the activities of society and of the human mind. For, as we have seen, the enormously prolonged conflict in which the individual has passed under the control of the existing social organisation—a conflict out of which has arisen all the phenomena of law and of government in the past, and out of which still proceeds some of the profoundest emotions with which the highest literature and the highest art continue to be occupiedcan furnish no more than a feeble anticipation of the phenomena which must accompany the passing of society itself under the control of interests projected beyond the farthest limits of its political consciousness. Into the cosmic sweep of such a process all the activities of the race in history must in time be drawn. It is a process, the duration of which must extend beyond the farthest reach of the imagination. The entire period of Western civilisation so far included in our era furnishes, as has been already stated, hardly more than room for the bare outlines of the main features of the problem which it involves to become visible in history.

When the imagination of the evolutionist is allowed to dwell on the features of that phase of history which opens before him in the first centuries of our era, he must gradually realise to what