Principles of western civilisation

210 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

been no Roman empire. The tendency which produced the results with which we are concerned was the expression, in reality, in each case of a process of dissolution. It involved a principle absolutely incompatible with, and antagonistic to, the life of the civilisation with which the results are identified.

This is the first great truth respecting the philosophy of the ancient world which we have to grasp in all its applications. Yet we have to get farther even than this. The development which had taken place in the ancient philosophy was not only incompatible with the life-principle of the civilisation which had produced it: it contained no life - principle in itself. There remained absolutely unrepresented in it the principle which was to constitute the characteristic evolutionary significance of the movement about to begin in the world. But it is only when we turn now and observe the relation of the ancient philosophy to the new movement opening in history that we come to understand, on the one hand, why this was so ; and to perceive, on the other hand, wherein lay the distinctive principle of that movement which was to constitute it an evolutionary force of the first order in the world,

Now it will probably be seen at no remote period in the future, when the study of the human mind is approached from the stand-point of sociological principles, rather than from the introspective stand-point of the individual, that there is one distinguishing characteristic of the Christian religion to which all the phenomena thereof with which science is concerned are essentially related. We have present in