Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 203

are the terms of the antinomy. The peoples upon whom has devolved this new destiny in history are, of necessity, not allied to, but alien to, the spirit of the new ideal. They are in the nature of things the very pagans of the pagan world.* We have disclosed to view, that is to say, the terms of an evolutionary problem of the first order, evidently destined to become related to an immense sequence of phenomena in the future—a problem of sucha character that thousands of years must obviously elapse before its full outlines and magnitude can become disclosed on the stage of history.”

As the evolutionist, therefore, at the present day turns over the literature of the first centuries of our era, and follows, in the outward record of events therein, the contact of this ideal with every existing

1 Tt is necessary always to keep clearly before the mind a permanent fact, the import of which still underlies the meaning of Western history, namely, that the peoples among whom the development in progress in our civilisation is taking place represent by descent the great pagan stock of the world; the stock, that is to say, amongst whom the pagan spirit reached its fullest development and produced its most characteristic results. Compare in this connection ‘‘ Race and Religion in India,” by A. M. Fairbairn, Contemporary Review, No. 404; and ‘‘ the Influence of Europe on Asia,” by M. Townsend, op. czt. No. 422.

2 Throughout a long period in the past, during which the life and literature of Greece and Rome have been made the subject of close study by Western scholars, we may distinguish, on the whole, a certain consciousness of the contrast between the remarkable results produced by these civilisations in almost every department of human activity—and in particular between the general range and depth of the products of the Greek intellect—and the crudeness and grossness of the practical ideal which appear to be represented in the religious systems of the two peoples. If the mind has remained fully open to the effect, a comparison between the general ideas and conceptions expressed in the religious systems of Greece and Rome, and those which had already begun to so profoundly influence the human mind in other religious systems of the Eastern world, makes a marked impression on the observer. The clue to the contrast lies, however, as will be perceived, in the fact, upon which emphasis has been laid in the preceding chapters, namely, the relationship of the religious systems of Greece and Rome to the governing principle of that prolonged epoch of military selection which had culminated amongst the Western races.