Principles of western civilisation

28 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

conflict throughout the world under the lowest possible standards of human life and human labour.!

The profound materialism of this final conception, which—blind to the significance of the principle which our civilisation represents, and blind, therefore, to the meaning of the causes for which that civilisation has wrought and suffered for a thousand yearscontemplated the lower sections of the race extinguishing the higher, simply by reason of their ability to wage an economic struggle on more purely animal conditions, could hardly be carried farther. In it we see the conception of the ascendency of the present in the modern economic process which led James Mill in the early decades of the nineteenth century to assert that there was no place in the theory of society for a moral sense, as it was not required to discern “ Utility,”? carried, as it were, to its final expression in the worldprocess. This is the position in Western thought with which an era closes.’ In the current literature of the social revolt throughout our civilisation, we only see, as it were, the theories of the middle decades of the nineteenth century carried to their

| National Life and Character, chaps. i.-iii.

> Mr. Leslie Stephen, speaking of this polemic of James Mill against the moral sense theory in the dispute with Mackintosh, says justly, that it “reveals the really critical points of the true utilitarian doctrine. Mill would cut down the moral sense root and branch. The ‘moral sense’ means a ‘ particular faculty’ necessary to discern right and wrong. But no particular faculty is necessary to discern ‘utility... . The utility is not the ‘criterion * of the morality, but itself constitutes the morality ” (Zhe English Utilitarians, by Leslie Stephen, vol. ii. p. 321).

* In it we see how, to use John Morley’s words, ‘‘great economic and social forces flow with a tidal sweep over communities that are only half conscious of that which is befalling them” (Zhe Life of Richard Cobden, vol. ii. ch. xx.)

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