Principles of western civilisation

390 WESTERN CIVILISATION cHAP.

flict we have followed through the past, it can, therefore, hardly be regarded as more than the prelude to the wider and more conscious phase of the struggle towards which the world is converging. The development we have been considering has evidently inherent in it an enormous impetus. But it has been hitherto a movement which can hardly be said to have risen to consciousness in the intellectual processes of our civilisation. It has involved of necessity developments, alike in religious thought and in political theory, which could only have yielded their real meaning in the stern analysis to which they have been subjected in the actual stress of the evolutionary process in history. If existing indications are not misinterpreted, an epoch of analysis of exceptional significance is drawing to a close in Western history, and we have travelled to the verge of a new era of synthesis. In endeavouring to estimate the impetus behind the social transformation to be accomplished in the stage towards which the historical process is advancing, it is desirable, therefore, that we should, in the first place, briefly consider a position in thought in which we see, as it were, the world-process itself trembling on the brink of consciousness. Now if we endeavour to detach the mind from all preconceived ideas on the subject, nothing can well be more remarkable than the spectacle which is presented, when we reflect for a moment on the position that has been reached in relation to existing systems of Western thought, if the principles we have so far endeavoured to set forth be accepted as correct. If we turn at the outset to the domain of pure thought, and take first that great movement which began in