Principles of western civilisation

72 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the ruling factor in human history. And in the theory of conduct which we see taking shape side by side with this view, the science of morality, just as we encounter it later in the theories of James Mill? and in the conceptions of current social democracy in Germany, becomes, in consequence, simply the science of the interests of the individuals in the well-ordered State. ‘La science de la morale,” in the words of Helvétius, “n’est autre chose que la science méme de la législation.” *

As we follow the history of this self-centred movement in Western thought, as it tends to more and more closely associate itself with the modern theory of democracy, it is the same spectacle which continues to be presented to view. The science of human society must be, as the evolutionist sees it, the science of the principles through which the whole visible world around us is being subordinated to the ends of a process in which the interests of the individual and of the present alike form a scarcely perceptible link. Yet nowhere in the movement before us, as we watch it gradually expanding now into the main stream of Western thought, is there to be discovered any statement whatever of the principles of society as conceived in such a sense.

In England the history of the great intellectual movement, in which the principles of modern democracy have been developed into something like the form in which they have come down to the current generation, may be said to have begun with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. As the evolutionist

1 Cf. Analysts of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, by James Mill, ch. xxiii. vol. ii. ; and Fragyent on Mackintosh, by the same author. * Del Esprit, ti. 17, C. H. Helvétius.