Principles of western civilisation

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA 29

logical application. It is, in reality, the governing idea of Bentham, the Mills, and the group of writers who developed the theories of the Manchester school in England, that we encounter again in Loria’s conception, as applied to modern Italy, of the dominance of the economic factor in society;* in Marx’s conception, as applied to our civilisation at large, of the materialistic interpretation of history; in Nietzsche’s conception, as applied to the occupying classes in modern Germany, of the superlative claims of the Uebermenschen.? The point of view may be altered according to the nature of the interest concerned; but the essential conception is the same in all cases—the ascendency of the present in the economic process in history.

The relation to each other of all the phases of thought and action here discussed will be evident. They are all but the closely related aspects of the influence on the human mind of a single conception, the meaning of which may be said to have dominated the theory of our social progress through the democratic development of the nineteenth century, namely, that the controlling centre of the evolutionary process in the drama of human progress is in the present, and that the ascendency of the interests of the present is the end toward which the whole order of our social and political development moves. This is the conception from which the intellectual foundations have been removed.

1 Les bases économigues de la constitution sociale (Bouchard). 2 The Twilight of the Idols, and Zarathustra.