Principles of western civilisation

x1 TOWARDS THE FUTURE 393

mind, on the one hand, or in the evolution of the social process as it was understood, on the other. To others, equally positive, Kant’s conclusions, nevertheless, appeared in some manner to have plumbed the deepest depths of human consciousness. And so the controversy, advancing to no permanent conclusion through the Hegelian development, remained suspended in modern thought.

It is almost startling to observe now the effect which is produced when we look at Kant’s conception in the light of the ruling principle of the evolutionary process as we have endeavoured to set it forth in the previous chapters. By one bound the mind springs, as it were, to the very centre of Kant’s position. For if, indeed, all the phenomena of our Western world are related to the ultimate fact that the controlling centre of the evolutionary process therein is being projected out of the present ; if, indeed, it is no longer the relations of the human mind to the past, but to the future of the evolutionary process that has become of the first importance in the study of the development which the race is undergoing ; if, in short, we are living in Western history in the midst of a movement in which, as has been said, there runs through the whole realm of art, of ethics, of literature, of philosophy, of religion, of politics, and of economics, the deep cosmic note of a struggle in which the individual and society alike are being slowly broken to the ends of a social efficiency which can never more be included within the limits of political consciousness,—then the meaning towards which Kant endeavoured to lift his generation has become no more than the simple commonplace of a new