Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 205

central fact underlying it as a whole there can be absolutely no doubt. An evolutionary principle of entirely new significance has begun to operate in society.

The time has gone by in our day when we can imagine that, in discussing in the name of science the meaning of the displays of ignorance and credulity, or of the savage paroxysms of human passions which have from time to time found expression throughout this movement, we are discussing the meaning of the movement itself. Beneath all these things we are concerned with a vast process of development, rising slowly through the centuries, the life-centre of which is still immeasurably remote in the future. The time has come when this phenomenon must be discussed in the same spirit of austere devotion to the truth, and therefore in that same attitude of passionless indifference to all preconceived opinions and beliefs whatever, which has now come to be the ideal, if not the characteristic, of the higher work of science in every other department of knowledge.

Now we can never understand the real significance of the development, which begins in Western history with the rise into ascendency of the influence of the new system of religious belief, until we get to the heart of a curious intellectual phenomenon of the ancient world. If we ask ourselves what was the ultimate meaning which the ancient philosophy was trying to express at the point in history in which it comes into contact with the new movement, the reply which we receive is of great interest. If we look round us at the present day at the literature of current thought, it may be noticed