Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 399

primarily concerned in discussing the phenomena of the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation, in relation to a fact upon which a huge fabric of trivial theory has been constructed by writers who have followed Mr. Spencer’s lead in this matter; namely, the fact that there is to be distinguished in the concepts of that system of belief ideas which may be held to represent survivals from a past stage in the development of the race. It is the relation in which these ideas stand to the future, and not to the past, which has become of overshadowing importance in the study of the evolutionary process. It is with their significance as anticipations, and not as survivals, that we have become concerned. They represent, we see now, but the first points of attachment, along the line of which human consciousness has begun to be drawn into the ever-increasing sweep of an integrating process, of which the controlling meaning is not in the past but in the future.

The central idea, in short, around which Mr. Spencer constructed his theory of human development in the Syx#thetic Philosophy, namely, that the meaning of the evolutionary process in history lies in the progress of the struggle between the present and the past, has been relegated to a place in the background. The central principle of the evolutionary drama in progress in the world, namely, that it is the meaning of the struggle between the future and the present which controls all the ultimate tendencies of progress, and into which all the phenomena of history are being gradually drawn, has remained, we see, outside the field of Mr. Spencer’s vision.

1 Cf. The Evolution of the Idea of God, by Grant Allen.