Principles of western civilisation

220 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

So far, however, from the antithesis itself tending to disappear, what we begin to see is that its real seal cance consists in the fact that, under whatever form it may continue, it is destined to endure; nay, that it constitutes the growing feature of human evolution, and that its essential meaning involves that it can never be closed in any equilibrium of the human mind ringed within the rim of the present, or within any boundaries of political consciousness, however widely conceived.

As, in the light of the fundamental meaning of this antinomy, we follow now under a multitude of forms the long early struggle throughout the world of the new movement with the spirit of the ancient philosophy, it is remarkable to observe how the clear scientific principle underlying it begins to stand out at every important crisis. We distinguish at once, for instance, even beneath all the phenomena of ignorance and credulity in the time, the outlines of the great cosmic principle which rises through the schisms, the movements, and the controversies of the period of the early history of the movement. It is almost startling, for instance, to find that nearly all the leading doctrines eventually condemned as heresies in the early history of the Christian movement may be reduced to a single meaning. They nearly all, we may distinguish, represent the attempt to bring back the point of view of the human mind to that state of equilibrium between the individual and the conditions of the existing world, which formed the characteristic principle underlying all human institutions, in that epoch of evolution of which the life of the ancient civilisations represented the highest phase. They nearly all represent, there-