Principles of western civilisation

12 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP. eee

of its own ascendant interests ;—has each passed definitely into the background never more to receive the authoritative assent of the human intellect to its premises. It is the shadow of the infinite future which rests now on the process of progress. It is to the future and not to the past that the theory of development has now become primarily related. We see now how true was the instinct with which the half-reluctant Schopenhauer dimly perceived the greatness of Kant in his hold upon the infinite! For amongst the winning sections of the race, the direction of development at every growing point of the human mind, whether we be conscious of it or not, must, we see, be along the line where the present is being increasingly drawn into the sweep of an integrating process, the controlling meaning of which is once and for ever projected beyond the content of all theories of the interests of society as included within the limits of merely political consciousness. It is impossible to look round us in our civilisation at the present time without perceiving how farreaching is the process of change involved in such a shifting of the centre of significance in thought as is here involved. Systems of theory that have nourished the intellectual life of the world for centuries have become in our time in large part obsolete. They may retain for a space the outward appearance of authority. But the foundationsupon which theyrested have been bodily undermined. It is only a question of time till the ruin which has overtaken them will have become a commonplace of Western knowledge. If attention is directed to the tendencies in pro-

1 Studies in Pessimism, a series of essays by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, p. 34.