Principles of western civilisation

II THE POSITION IN MODERN THOUGHT 8&

beginning to understand it. Yet we see that Mr. Spencer's conclusion here is but the expression of the fundamental idea which runs through all his _ System of theory. It is but the same conception of the relations of the present merely to the past that we have in his theory of the origin of religions from ancestor worship and a belief in ghosts.) It is still the same conception which runs through his theory of Ecclesiastical Institutions, in which all the comparatively insignificant influences which he attributes to this class of phenomena are, so far as they have any scientific meaning at all, made to revolve round one principle, namely, their influence in tending to establish the authority of the past over the present.” Their relation to that deeper principle of human evolution, the subordination of the present to the future, does not come within the purview of Mr. Spencer’s mind.

But it is as we watch Mr. Spencer developing his principles into a theory of human society as we see it around us in the modern world, that we realise to the full how essentially that theory, in all the leading features we have been considering, corresponds to the theory of social development of the earlier school of English utilitarianism. In his Pokttecal Institutons it is again only the theory of the emancipation of the present from the past that we have in view. The characteristic principle of the social process in recent Western history, as Mr. Spencer enunciates it, is practically the same as the Mills conceived it to be. Our social evolution, that is to say, is regarded, in effect, as a struggle between the interests

? Principles of Sociology, §§ 60-210. * Ibid. §§ 622-627.