Principles of western civilisation

218 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

principle of the movement now in progress in the world."

The significance of the position here being developed is unmistakable. The fundamental concept which it involves, as we shall realise more clearly later on, is nothing less than the expression, for the time being, in the individual mind of that larger principle of the evolutionary process, which, if we have been right in the position reached in the previous chapters, is destined in time to control all the phenomena of history. For, by the concept of the entire insufficiency of any conduct, however meritorious, and of the utter inability of the individual, in respect of his own nature, to rise to the standard of duty required of him, we see that we have now opened in the human mind an antithesis which it becomes impossible to bridge again in any scheme of ethics conceiving a self-centred equilibrium in the present time; or in any standard of duty in which virtue is made to correspond to conformity to the conditions of the existing world around us. There is involved, in reality, nothing less than the definite passing of the controlling centre of human consciousness out of the present. The only concept by which an equilibrium in such an antagonism can be again restored must involve, not only a rise of the individual consciousness to the cosmic; but a sense of relationship to the cosmic as direct, as personal, and as compelling as any by which the human mind has hitherto been related to the present.

1 It may be remarked how the change extended to the conception of the Deity; Greek and Roman deities were not, on the whole, regarded as holier than men. ‘‘ Est aliquid, quo sapiens antecedat deum. TIlle naturae beneficio,

non suo, sapiens est: ecce res magna, habere imbecillitatem hominis, securitatem dei” (Seneca, Zpist. 53).