Principles of western civilisation

200 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

theories of the State, all the ideals of art, all the principles of conduct, all the conceptions of religion, centred round the things which men hungered and thirsted for in that material and omnipotent present in which they lived.

It was in such a world and in such an environment that the evolutionist sees now projected into the minds of men an ideal, developed among an insignificant non-military people in an Eastern province of the Roman empire, involving the absolute negation of the ruling principle which had thus moved and shaped the development of the world in every leading detail of the past. The mind has to be able to state to itself in terms of modern Darwinian principles the nature of the worldprocess at work in human history, to realise the full significance of the transition which the acceptance of this ideal involved in the epoch of evolution which now opens.

There is no more imposing spectacle disclosed in the research into human origins, when we perceive the nature of the evolutionary process in history, than the growing definition in the human mind of the concepts by which the controlling consciousness of the race becomes destined to be projected at last beyond the content of all interests in the present ; and by which that consciousness becomes related at last, in a sense of personal, direct, and compelling responsibility, to principles which transcend the meaning of the individual, the present, the State, and the whole visible world as it exists.

Far back in the religious systems of early Egypt, while as yet the military process that was in time to envelop the northern world in its influence had