Principles of western civilisation

CHAP. II PROJECTED EFFICIENCY 31

departments of social philosophy in the past; namely, the conception that there can be such a thing as a true science of human life and progress apart by itself. There cannot be, we must understand, such a science regarded as an isolated section of knowledge ; or in any other sense than as a department of higher biology. All that class of effort which has endeavoured to advance to the meaning of the social process in history through an introspective study of the individual mind belongs to an era of knowledge beyond which we must be considered to have advanced. Our social progress constitutes only the last and highest phase in the history of life. There has been only one process of development throughout. Every phase of the social life around us, political, economic, and ethical,’ however self. centred and self-contained it may appear to the beholders themselves, occupies, and will apparently for ever occupy, strictly controlled and subordinate relationship to this central process of development. We must, in short, put away from us, once and for all, the idea that we can understand any part of this process as an isolated study. Its last human details—those with which the social sciences are concerned, and those in particular which carry us down into the midst of Western progress—can, like all those which have preceded them, only be studied with profit by science when we understand something of the nature of the pro-

* The distinction made by Huxley (Oxford: Romanes Lecture, 1893) between the cosmic process and the ethical process is entirely superficial. As Huxley afterwards pointed out in a note to the lecture, it must be taken that the social life and the ethical process in virtue of which it advances towards perfection are part and parcel of the general process of evolution (cf. Evolution and Ethics, note 20, p. 114).