Principles of western civilisation

xt TOWARDS THE FUTURE 395

As we follow the path which the human mind has taken through the various movements in Western thought that have succeeded each other from the period of the Reformation onwards, we appear to have in sight a phenomenon of striking interest. We seem to see, as it were, the conscious intellectual process in our civilisation slowly overtaking the meaning of the evolutionary process which, independent of that consciousness, has been taking its way through history in advance of it.’ And, as in the first efforts of the Greek mind to interpret the physical cosmos, we see how childlike, how limited, and how intensely local have been many of the ideas of the first stages. With the ascendency, for instance, in Western thought of the conception that there is nothing in the human mind but what is related to past experience, and that there is nothing in the theory of social progress but what is related to the interests of the individuals comprised within the limits of political consciousness, we see how completely, at first, the central meaning of the evolutionary drama in progress in our Western world has, of necessity, been missed. For, in the midst of a process in which the present is passing out under the control of the larger future, the direction of development at every growing point of the human mind amongst the winning peoples must have been in the line along which the present is being gradually drawn into the meaning of the future. It is not to the past, but to the future that our position in the present has become primarily related. It is to the principle of Projected Efficiency in

1 Cf. The Critical Philosophy of Kant, by Edward Caird, pp. 366 ef seq.,

vol. ii.