Principles of western civilisation

256 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

apparently destined to dissolve all those tyrannies through which the present had hitherto expressed itself, has gradually moved with the centuries towards an ideal which has begun to hold the imagination of the world.

There is no more striking spectacle in history, when we are able to appreciate its meaning, than that presented during the first thirteen centuries of our era, when—in the midst of the races in whom a world-process of military selection has culminated, and with all the instincts, the passions, and the ideals of an epoch of military stress of unimagined length still close behind it—we see the human mind slowly passing under the influence of the greatest evolutionary principle to which life has yet been subjected; when, with as yet no clear idea of the nature of the vortex into which its activities are being drawn, we see it struggling with the phenomena which successively arise as this evolutionary principle gradually impinges on the whole life of these military races through the medium of a single idea—the concept that the welfare which the world has now come to describe as spiritual is of more importance than temporal interests. To understand the spectacle presented by our civilisation during this period we must, as far as possible, detach our standpoint from all the conditions of time and place. Centuries, countries, peoples, races, nationalities, throughout this period in Europe, all present the same face to us. It is the same problem with which they are all struggling. It is towards the same culminating crisis of the first phase of the problem with which the human mind has now become confronted that