Principles of western civilisation

VIE THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 199

It was the forceful, passionate, dominating present which lived alike in Attic marble, in Greek song, and in the nameless institutions of Roman sensuality. It was the rule of the present which drove the greatest idealist of the Greeks to render his conceptions of truth and justice in their essences in the inexpressible imagery of the Phedrus. It was the present which, knowing no right or duty to anything higher in life than itself, had held the world in the spirit of the Roman zs czvzle ; of which the expression in the individual was the rights of the patria potestas; of which the culminating expression in the State was the empire of universal military conquest; of which the all-pervading expression in society was the institution of slavery in that form in which, to extend the description of Wallon, the central figure was a being possessing all the attraction of a man, and yet a human being to whom society stood absolved from every moral obligation of humanity, a being in whom and to whom all the wildest excesses, all the deepest degradations, were lawful, provided they were commanded by a master.

It was, in short, the world in which was represented the culminating age of that long epoch of human development, in which the significance that underlay every human institution, in the last analysis, was the conception that there were no rights and no responsibilities in man, no meaning and no significance in life, no hopes and no desires in existence, save such as were related to present ends. All the wants, the desires, the passions, the ambitions of men were correlated with the things which men saw around them. It was the world in which all the