Principles of western civilisation

198 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

ruled the present. It was the world where every form of human distinction and every essential of honour had hitherto rested on force; where a rule of force had made all labour degrading; where idleness was the sister of freedom; and where the social, the economic, and even the intellectual life had rested on a basis of slavery. It was the world in which the spirit of aristocracy resting ultimately on force, had breathed through every work of the political genius of the most gifted people the race had produced. It was a world in which a rule of force had culminated at last in the most colossal and ruthless expression of unrestrained force it was possible to reach—an empire of universal conquest, in which the chief and symbol of omnipotent military force had come at last to receive divine honours and to be worshipped as a god.

The omnipotence of the present was, therefore, written over all things. It was the present that had lived in Greek art. It was the present that had reasoned in Greek philosophy. It was the ruling present which had made virtue and enlightened pleasure synonymous for the individual, which had made virtue and enlightened self-interest synonymous in the State. It was the present which, conceiving, in the words of one of the noblest of the Romans, that every man’s life lies all within it,* had found the highest expression for virtue in the egoisms of Roman Stoicism. It was the present which, conceiving the existing world entirely occupied with its own affairs,” had found intellectual shelter for its vices under the name of Epicurus.

1 Marcus Aurelius, J/edztatrors, iii. x. 2 Cf. Cicero, De Nat. Deor., i. 44.