Principles of western civilisation

202 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

that become all that the gifted, the noble, the darling aristocrat of strength and perfection in the present are to the Greek. We follow the development of this conception in Jewish history till it grows greater than the nation, greater than all its present, greater than the race itself; till, associated at last with an ideal of self-subordination and self-abnegation which has burst all the bounds of the present and the material, while it has become touched with the profoundest quality of human emotion, it goes forth in the first century of our era to subdue that world in which the principle of the ascendency of the present has reached its culminating form of expression; to conquer the peoples able alone to provide for it a nitlieu in history—the peoples amongst whom a process of military selection, probably the most searching, strenuous, and prolonged that the race has undergone, has reached its climax.’

As the observer recalls at this point the principle of development which came into view in an earlier chapter—namely, that no progress could be made towards that second and higher stage of social evolution, in which the future begins to control the present, until natural selection had first of all developed a people or a type of society able to hold the world against all comers in the present—the significance of the conditions into which the new ideal has been projected begins to hold the imagination. For we see how far removed from each other

1 How to reconcile the two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable tendencies summed up in the words Hebraism and Hellenism is, says Professor Butcher, with insight, the problem of modern civilisation :—how to unite the Hebrew ideal, in which the controlling meaning, to which human consciousness is related, is projected out of the present, “‘ with the Hellenic conception of human energies, manifold and expansive, each of which claims for itself uninterrupted play” (cf. Some Aspects of Greek Genius, by S. H. Butcher, p. 45).