Principles of western civilisation

396 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the social process that every other principle whatever must ultimately stand in subordinate relationship. We see, therefore, after what futile issues, whole movements in philosophy, in ethics, in religion, have been directed. We see in what a closed circle, ever turning inward upon itself, the leaders have travelled in quests vain from the beginning. That great movement in Western thought which began with the English Deists, which was developed on the continent of Europe in the eighteenth century under various forms of Rationalism, and which, in its return influence on English thought, culminated in England in the utilitarian theories of ethics and of the State, stands revealed to us in the new light shrunken of the meaning its leaders dreamed of. Almost with a single glance the mind takes in its limited relationship to the reality it endeavoured to interpret. To conceive, as that school of thought has done under one of its aspects, that the direction of progress in our Western world was to empty the concepts of the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation of that distinctive quality which projected their meaning beyond the limits of political consciousness’; to imagine, therefore, that conduct in the last resort required no principle of support in the evolutionary process, but that of self-interest well understood’; or as Hume, anticipating Bentham, put it, that morality demanded, not self-denial, but “just calculation” ;° to dream therefore, as the

1 Cf. German Culture and Christianity, their Controversy, 1770-1880, by Joseph Gostwick, pp. 18-59.

2 Cf. Princples of Morals and Legislation, by Jeremy Bentham, c. i.-iv. ; Utilitarianism, by J. S. Mill, c. ii. ; Date of Ethics, by Herbert Spencer, §§ 92-98; and Zhe English Utilitarians, by Leslie Stephen, vol. i. c. vi. vol. li. p. 313, to end.

3 Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, by David Hume.

'

ETSI PTS