Principles of western civilisation

4 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

that the overwhelming weight of numbers, as of interests, in the evolutionary process, is never in the present. It is always in the future. It is not the interests of those existing individuals with which all our systems of thought and of political science have concerned themselves, but the interests of the future, which weight the meaning of the evolutionary process in history. We are, in other words, brought face to face with the fact that, in the scientific formula of the life of any existing type of social order destined to maintain its place in the future, the interests of these existing individuals, with which we have been so preoccupied, possess no meaning, except so far as they are included in, and are subordinate to, the interests of a developing system of social order the overwhelming proportion of whose members are still in the future.

Never before has a principle of such reach in the social sciences emerged into view. We look at all the processes of our civilisation in an entirely new light. How far we are carried beyond all existing theories of the phenomenon of modern democracy is at once apparent. For in nearly all these theories the observer perceives that he is always in the presence of the same fact. The intellectual outlook everywhere shuts down around him along one definite line, namely, that which marks the horizon bounding the interests included within the limits of the political consciousness of the existing individuals. Almost all the systems of political and social theory which endeavoured during the nineteenth century to formulate for us the principles behind the unfolding of the processes of Western democracy have been constructed