Principles of western civilisation

: WESTERN CIVILISATION aie

opinions and modes of thinking of society.”! There is no era in Western history which can offer any parallel in this respect to the period in which we are living. There is no department of knowledge dealing with man in society, however authoritative its traditions, however exclusive and self-contained its position, which is not separated now by an immense interval from its stand-point fifty years ago. The modern doctrine of evolution is only the last of a long chain of sequences. But the changes which it has already effected in the tendencies of the deeper processes of thought altogether exceed in import any previously experienced. Even its general results have a significance which immediately arrests the attention of the thoughtful observer. The final aspect of authority ar. completeness which it has given to the work a omplished by a set of revolutionary tendencies in thought, which for four centuries have struggled with the most conservative elements in our civilisation has so profoundly influenceu the average mind, that the culminating effect of the revolution has been felt almost as if the meaning of the whole movement had been compressed into the lifetime of a single generation. The Western intellect has, as it were, passed at last through the initiatory phase of what Hegel called the terrible discipline of selfknowledge. The tendencies which John Addington Symonds beheld slowly transforming our civilisation —the audacious speculation, the bold explanatory studies, the sound methods of criticism, the free range of the intellect over every field of knowledge*

1 System of Logic, by John Stuart Mill, vi. c. x. 2 The Renaissance in Italy, by John Addington Symonds, vol. vii. c. xiv.