Principles of western civilisation

Front matter

I O [

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

Chapter I Page

The Close of an Era . . . . . . i

CHAPTER n

The Shifting of the Centre of Significance in THE Evolutionary Hypothesis — The Principle OF Projected Efficiency ... -31

CHAPTER in The Position in Modern Thought ... 68

CHAPTER IV The Phenomenon of Western Liberalism . . loi

CHAPTER V The Problem . 140

CHAPTER VI The Ascendency of the Present . . . -155

CHAPTER VII

The Passing of the Present under the Control

OF the Future 200

VI CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII

PAGE

The Development of the Great Antinomy in Western History: First Stage 246

CHAPTER IX

The Development of the Great Antinomy in Western History: Second Stage . 296

CHAPTER X The Modern World-Conflict 344

CHAPTER XI Towards the Future 398

INDEX 525

PRINCIPLES OF WESTERN CIVILISATION

CHAPTER I

It would be impossible for any informed observer at the present time, in the midst of our Western civilisation, to remain altogether unconscious of the character and dimensions of a vast process of change which, beneath the outward surface of events, is in progress in the world around us. The great controversies, scientific and religious, which filled the nineteenth century, have broadened out far beyond the narrow boundaries within which the specialists imagined them to be confined. The older antagonists in many of these controversies still continue, as they will doubtless continue to the end, to confront each other in the same attitudes of opposition as at the beginning. But the general mind is no longer closely engaged with the past aspects of these disputes. It is becoming more and more preoccupied with the larger problems beyond, which the new knowledge has brought fully into view, and with the immense social and political issues which are now seen to be ultimately involved.

The precursor of every great period of social and political reconstruction has invariably been, as John Stuart Mill has pointed out, "a great change in the opinions and modes of thinking of society." ^ There is no era in Western history which can offer any parallel in this respect to the period in which we are living. There is no department of knowledge dealing with man in society, however authoritative its traditions, however exclusive and self-contained its position, which is not separated now by an immense interval from its standpoint fifty years ago. The modern doctrine of evolution is only the last of a long chain of sequences. But the changes which it has already effected in the tendencies of the deeper processes of thought altogether exceed in import any previously experienced. Even its general results have a significance which immediately arrests the attention of the thoughtful observer. The final aspect of authority and completeness which it has given to the work accomplished by a set of revolutionary tendencies in thought, which for four centuries have struggled with the most conservative elements in our civilisation, has so profoundly influenced the average mind, that the culminating effect of the revolution has been felt almost as if the meaning of the whole movement had been compressed into the lifetime of a single generation. The Western intellect has, as it were, passed at last through the initiatory phase of what Hegel called the terrible discipline of self-knowledge. The tendencies which John Addington Symonds beheld slowly transforming our civiHsation — the audacious speculation, the bold explanatory studies, the sound methods of criticism, the free range of the

1 System of Logic, by John Stuart Mill, vi. c. a.

intellect over every field of knowledge ^ — have all but accomplished the first stage of their work.

The extraordinary reach of the changes which the evolutionary doctrine is, to all appearance, destined to accomplish is not as yet fully perceived by any school of thought. But, if the attempt be made to grasp the apphcation of what we may now distinguish to be one of its central principles, some general idea may be obtained of the remarkable character of the results towards which our Western world is rapidly moving.

Hitherto nearly all the systems of political and social philosophy that have controlled the mind of our civilisation, and all the schemes of human conduct and of human interest which they have involved, have had one leading feature in common. They have been all considered, in effect, to revolve round a fixed and central principle; namely, the interests of the existing ' individuals considered either separately as individuals, or collectively as members of poUtical society. But the point of view in all these attempts has been altered by a revolution, the significance of which is without any parallel in the history of thought. For what we are coming to see is that, if we accept the law of Natural Selection as a controlling principle in the process of our social evolution, we must, by inherent necessity, also accept it as operating in the manner in which, in the long run, it produces the largest and most effective results. Our attention throughout the course of human history has been concentrated hitherto on the interests of the individuals who for the time being comprised what we

1 The Renaissance in Italy, by John Addington Symonds, vol. vii. c. xiv.

call society. Yet what we are now brought to see is that the overwhelming weight of numbers, as of interests, in the evolutionary process, is never in the present. It is always in the future. It is not the interests of those existing individuals with which all our systems of thought and of political science have concerned themselves, but the interests of the future, which weight the meaning of the evolutionary process in history. We are, in other words, brought face to face with the fact that, in the scientific formula of the life of any existing type of social order destined to maintain its place in the future, the interests of these existing individuals, with which we have been so preoccupied, possess no meaning, except so far as they are included in, and are subordinate to, the interests of a developing system of social order the overwhelming proportion of whose members are still in the future.

Never before has a principle of such reach in the social sciences emerged into view. {We look at all the processes of our civilisation in an entirely new light. How far we are carried beyond all existing theories of the phenomenon of modern democracy is at once apparent. For in nearly all these theories the observer perceives that he is always in the presence of the same fact. The intellectual outlook everywhere shuts down around him along one definite line, namely, that which marks the horizon bounding the interests included within the limits of the political consciousness of the existing individuals. Almost all the systems of political and social theory, which endeavoured during the nineteenth century to formulate for us the principles behind the unfolding of the processes of Western democracy, have been constructed bodily within this narrow foreground. Through all the literature which has come down to us from the Revolution in France, through nearly all the present literature of the social revolt in Germany, through all the theories of that school of social philosophy long dominant in England, developed by Bentham, Austin, James Mill, Stewart, Malthus, Grote, Ricardo, and J. S. Mill, there runs one fundamental conception into which all others are ultimately fitted ; namely, that the science of society is the science of the interests of those capable at any particular moment of exercising the rights of universal suffrage, and that the interest of society is always the same thing as the interest of the individuals comprised within the limits of its political consciousness.

Yet what we see now is that the theory of society as a whole has been lifted to an entirely different plane. For if there is one principle more than another which the evolutionary hypothesis tends to set forth in a clear light it is that the forces which are shaping the development of progressive peoples are not primarily concerned with these interests at all. The winning peoples who now inherit the world are they whose history in the past has been the theatre of the operation of principles the meaning of which must have at every point transcended the meaning of the interests of those who at any time comprised the existing members of society. JTNay, more, the people in the present who are already destined to inherit the future are not they whose institutions revolve round any ideal schemes of the interests of existing members of society. They are simply the peoples who already bear on their shoulders the burden of the principles with which the interests of the future are identified.

The controlling centre of the evolutionary process in our social history is, in short, not in the present at all, but in the future. It is in favour of the interests of the future that Natural Selection continually discriminates. The majority with which the principles that are working out the process of our social development are primarily concerned is a majority that never votes. It is that silent majority which is always in the future. The process of life included in Western history is, we begin to dimly distinguish, a process of development which is, beyond doubt, overlaid with a meaning that no school of scientific thought in the past has enunciated. Our Western civilisation, we are beginning now to understand, must be, over and above everything else, the history of a movement through which, in all the spheres of ethics, of politics, of philosophy, of economics, and of religion, there runs the dominating meaning of a cosmic struggle, in which not simply the individual but society itself is being broken to the ends of a social efficiency, which the human intellect can never more include within the limits of any theory of utilitarian politics in the state.

The extraordinary reach of this new master-principle in the science of society only continues to more deeply impress the mind on reflection. All the first attempts to apply the conception of evolution to human society — made, of necessity, by writers whose systems of thought were already practically formed before being influenced by the new knowledge — have.

we see, moved within the circle of an idea inherited from the past which is no longer tenable. The ruling conception which dominated nearly all theories of our social development in the nineteenth century was that the central feature of our social progress consisted in the struggle between the present and the past. This is the conception which expressed itself with such emphasis in the social writings of the English Utilitarians in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. But it was also the central principle around which Mr. Herbert Spencer, as an early exponent of the doctrine of evolution, constructed the theory of social and political development set forth in his Synthetic Philosophy.^ It is the leading idea which expresses itself in Mr. Spencer's conception of the modern development towards industrial democracy.2 It is the idea, continually reiterated, which underlies his theory of ecclesiastical institutions as forms through which the rule of the past expresses

' Spencer's dispute with the Utilitarians (cf. Principles of Ethics, §§ 21-H0) never included any difference on this account. It was, in effect, only a difference between that Utilitarianism (as represented by James and J. S. Mill) " which recognises only the principles of conduct reached by induction," and the Utilitarianism (as represented by Spencer) " which deduces these principles from the processes of life as carried on under established conditions of existence" (^Principles of Ethics, § 21). Spencer's theory of social development remained throughout, even on its ethical side, simply a theory of movement towards " an associated state," where " the lives of each and all may be the greatest possible in length and breadth " (§ 48). It was, that is to say, a theory of the realisation of the interests of the ascendant present, contemplating an eventual state of social order in which there should be no social claims at variance with the claims of the individual (cf. § 49, Principles of Ethics') .

^Cf. Principles of Sociology, §§ 434-582.

itself.i It is the fundamental conception upon which he has built his principles of psychology, in which — Hume's idea^ being carried a step farther — the content of the human mind is considered as related simply to past experiences either of the individual or of the race. 3 But, as we see now, the character of the evolutionary drama in progress in our civilisation can never more be viewed by the human intellect as dominated by such a ruling principle. It is, we see, the meaning, not of the relation of the present to the past, but of the relation of the present to the future, to which all other meanings are subordinate, and which controls all the ultimate tendencies of the process of progress in which we are living.*

Since the great development of ideas to which Lessing, Herder, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel contributed, reached its full limits in Germany, and became in part discredited in the land which produced it, it may be perceived that Western thought, so far as it has endeavoured to rest itself on a scientific basis of phenomenology, has come to pursue a clearly defined line of development along which it has slowly contracted upon one central idea. Following this line of development in the movement

^ Cf. Principles of Sociology, §§ 583-660.

2 Treatise on Human Nature, i. and iii.

'Cf. Principles of Biology, §§ 297-314 ; Principles of Psychology, §§ 223-273 and 430 ; Principles of Ethics, §§ 24-62.

* We may, in short, apply to the future what Mr. Albion W. Small has so strikingly said of the individual in modern sociology : " Sociology is still struggling with this preposterous initial fact of the individual. He is the only possible social unit, and he is no longer a thinkable possibility. He is the only real presence, and he is never present" (^American Journal of Sociology, vol. v. 4, "The Scope of Sociology").

begun in England with the English deists, carried still further on the continent of Europe under the theories of the French Revolution, and in its return wave culminating in England in that utilitarian theory of ethics and of the state, in the ascendant in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century, we have the meaning of this central conception now clearly in view.- In ethics it found its consistent expression in the unhesitating assertion that, in the last resort,, human conduct required no principle of support whatever but that of self-interest in society well understood. This was the assertion which, developed in the theories of continental writers like Condorcet, Diderot, and Helvetius, reached in one of its phases in England its highest expression in the writings of John Stuart Mill.^ It is an assertion which, under many forms, exercises at the present time a dominant influence in a wide range of ethical thought throughout our civilisation. ^ Carried into the sphere of religion the same fundamental conception had its correlative affirmation equally clearly and equally unhesitatingly expressed. This was 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

1 Cf. Utilitarianism, by J. S. Mill ; also his System of Logic ani. Three Essays on Religion.

2 See The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, for the later position ; and Prolegomena to Ethics, by T. H. Green, B. iv. u. iv., particularly § 366, for a definition of the fundamental difficulty it has involved. One of the principal recent grovring points in English thought of an opposing development has been supplied in the writings of Edward Caird.

lO WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAr.

limits of social consciousness.^ Translated, finally, into a theory of our social development, it became that assertion now fully in view in the most widely read class of social literature in Germany, namely, that the interests of society being the same thing as the interests of its component members, for the time being, the economic factor is, therefore, the ruling factor in human history ; and that all human beliefs and institutions are ultimately the outcome of economic conditions — that is to say, of the rivalry of interests between the existing members of society.^ As formerly we used to be told that all economics were relative to history, so now, says Mr. J. Bonar,^ we are asked to believe " that all history is relative to economics, men having been made what they are by economical causes." *

The inter-relation of all these phases of thought, the clear and consistently developed premises upon which they rest, and the central conception from which they all proceed, is at once apparent. What

1 Compare James Mill's Ethics, or his article in the London Review, 1835, quoted by Mr. Leslie Stephen in The English Utilitarians, vol. ii. pp. 61, 62, with Mr. Bernard Bosanquet's essay on "The Future of Religious Observance" (^The Civilisation of Christendotri).

' Cf. Capital, by Karl Marx, c. i. s. 4, and German Social Democracy, by Bertrand Russell, 1. i. See Professor Achille Loria's Les bases iconomiques de la constitution sociale (French translation by A. Bouchard) for the current Italian form of this doctrine. ^ The Economic Journal, vol. viii. p. 443.

* Mr. Bonar's remark on the doctrine goes to the root of the subject. " Both dogmas seem not so much obviously untrue as obviously beyond testing, for if all is tainted vifith relativity these dogmas themselves will be so tainted, and we could not have formulated either of them without unclothing ourselves of one epoch and rising above time and circumstance " (^Ibid. p. 443) .

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA II

they represent is a theory of progress in which the ascendency of the present is regarded as the ideal towards which we are travelling, and in which the struggle that this ascendant present maintains against the forms, the beliefs, and institutions under which the past had hitherto ruled it, occupies the whole field of intellectual vision. The theory of our social progress in all its parts becomes, in short, simply a theory of movement towards a fixed social and political condition in which this self-conscious and self-contained present shall be at last completely emancipated from the past in conditions in which the gratification of the desires, and the furtherance of the interests, of the component individuals shall have been made as complete as possible.^

1 Compare the chapter " Of the Stationary State," J. S. Mill's Political Economy, book iv., with Marx's Capital, chaps, i. s. 4, and cxxxii. ; also with Spencer's Principles of Ethics, §§ 48, 49. Mr. James Bonar thus describes the causes which tended to impress the German socialists with the idea that all social progress is nothing more than economic progress: "What impressed the German socialists- — -Marx, Lasalle, Engels, Kautsky — was the demonstrably economic character of many political changes of the last 300 years. In the course of industrial changes the mediaeval landowners gave up their power to the capitalists, and the capitalists to the employers of labour. Therefore, said the German socialists, all is due to a change in the prevailing form of production. Where agriculture prevails we have a territorial aristocracy, a certain political system, and certain social institutions and laws ; where commerce prevails we have another system ; where manufacture, a third. This explains the rise of the middle classes into political power, but also the advance of the working classes as a power that will displace them and be (as we are told it ought to be) all in all. As in the economic theory of Marx and Engels all value is from labour, so on the great scale of politics all power is to be with the labouring class. Economic progress is thus the only real progress ; the essence of all history is economics ; the essence of all economics is labour " ( The Economic Journal, vol. viii. No. 32).

There has been no system of ideas that has ever held the mind of the world from which the intellectual basis has been so completely struck away. That theory of human religions which so many minds have followed and surpassed Mr. Spencer in developing merely as a theory of survivals in the present ; that theory of psychology, developed from Hume to Huxley, in which the content of the human mind is viewed simply as a condition in which the present is related to past experience either in the individual or in the race ; that widely prevalent conception of social progress developed from Voltaire to Marx as a movement towards a state in which the self-conscious present is to be finally organised towards the complete expression of its own ascendant interests ; has each passed definitely into the background never more to receive the authoritative assent of the human intellect to its premises. It is the shadow of the infinite future which rests now on the process of progress. It is to the future and not to the past that the theory of development has now become primarily related. We see now how true was the instinct with which the half-reluctant Schopenhauer dimly perceived the greatness of Kant in his hold upon the infinite.^ For amongst the winning sections of the race, the direction of development at every growing point of the human mind, whether we be conscious of it or not, must, we see, be along the line where the present is being increasingly drawn into the sweep of an integrating process, the controlling meaning of which is once and for ever projected beyond the content of

1 Studies in Pessimism, a series of essays by Arthur Schopenhauer translated by T. Bailey Saunders, p. 34.

all theories of the interests of society as included within the limits of merely political consciousness.

It is impossible to look round us in our civilisation at the present time without perceiving how far-reaching is the process of change involved in such a shifting of the centre of significance in thought as is here involved. Systems of theory that have nourished the intellectual life of the world for centuries have become in large part obsolete. They may retain for a space the outward appearance of authority. But the foundations upon which they rested have been bodily undermined. It is only a question of time till the ruin which has overtaken them will have become a commonplace of Western knowledge.

If attention is directed to the tendencies in progress beneath the surface of events in the political life of the time, the impression made on the mind by the position in thought here described cannot fail to continue to be deepened. Any one who has mastered what may be described as the psychology of Western politics in the modern period, must have been impressed at some stage of his study — and probably all the more so if he has been able to detach himself from the local egoisms of nationality — with the world-wide influence which the system of ideas behind the political party representing the cause of progress in England has exercised on the development of our civilisation during that period.

The political party in England which has been most closely identified with the cause of progress in the past has inherited what is beyond doubt, and judging it from many standpoints widely removed

14 WESTERN CIVILISATION CH.U>.

from each other, the greatest tradition in politics which our civilisation has produced. The movement with which that party is associated is directly related to almost all the principal results included in the modern drama of progress. From the period of the English revolution in the seventeenth century — the events of which were held to have justified Pitt in the minds of his contemporaries, and even before the close of the century which followed, in describing the doctrine of the right of princes, otherwise than as derived from the people, as already "sunk into contempt and almost oblivion " ^ — down to the modern period — in which the industrial and political expansion of England and the United States have rendered all recent political and economic science scarcely more than a study or a criticism of the principles under which that expansion has taken place — it is the ideas associated with the movement which the party of progress in England represents

1 The words were used in the House of Commons in 178S, in the debate on the right of the Prince of Wales to the unrestricted regency. The following is the account given in the Buckingham Memoirs: " Mr. Pitt asserted that the right of providing a remedy for the suspension of the regular powers of Government rested solely with the people. . . . The language, he held, upon this occasion is remarkable not only for its constitutional soundness, but for the perspicuity with which it states the actual question in contest, stripped of all disguises and evasions. 'To assert the inherent right of the Prince of Wales to assume the government is virtually to revive those exploded ideas of the divine and indefeasible authority of princes which have so justly sunk into contempt and almost oblivion. Kings and princes derive their power from the people ; and to the people alone, through the organ of their representatives, does it appertain to decide in cases for which the constitution has made no specific or positive provision ' " (A/emoii's of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, vol. ii. p. 39).

that have been in the ascendant in the process of poUtical development throughout the world.

It is the conceptions of the included movement which are registered in the constitutional documents in which the people of the United States have expressed their political convictions. It is mainly the theories of society evolved in the still earlier phase of the struggle in England between the principle of authority and the popular will that were put into circulation in France by Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot, D'Alembert, and which we follow towards our own time through the subsequent literature of the French Revolution .^ It is the prestige of the theory of government as evolved in this movement, and principally among the English-speaking peoples, that has dominated the modern development towards democratic institutions throughout the world. All the principal landmarks in modern thought, from Hobbes onward, including Kant's Critique and the Darwinian hypothesis itself, have direct relations to fundamental intellectual conceptions of this movement.^ In whatever light we regard it, we are bound to consider the movement, as a whole, as the channel

1 Cf. Natural Rights, by David G. Ritchie, chap. i.

2 Kant's work in the Critique presented itself to its author (cf. Kant's Introduction to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic) as a criticism of Hume's fundamental position that the content of the human mind is related to experience. This is the position which has been closely associated with the utilitarian movement in England, and which has since received its most characteristic expression in English thought in Mr. Herbert Spencer's philosophy. The principal conception upon which the Darwinian hypothesis is based took shape in Darwin's mind after reading Malthus's Theory of Population, one of the most characteristic productions of the EngUsh Utilitarians (cf. Life and Letters of Darwin, by his son, F. Darwin, vol. i.).

through which, in modern times, the main stream of the evolutionary process has come down through Western history. The system of ideas associated with it, is that under which the most important development in modern history has taken place — the process of expansion in which a few millions of the least significant of Western peoples have, within two centuries, become a fourth of the white population of the world, and under which some five-twelfths of the human race have passed under the direct influence of their government, laws, and institutions. ^

If, however, at the opening of the twentieth century, we look in England at the party which has

1 The total population of the United States and Dependencies, and of the British Empire with Dependencies and Protectorates, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was 522 millions. Speaking of the position of the white races at the beginning of the twentieth century Sir R. Giffen says : "The population of Europe and of nations of European origin, like the United States, might now be put at something over 500 millions. The United States themselves might be put at nearly 80 millions ; Russia in its recent census showed a population which must already have grown to about 135 millions; Germany about 55 millions; the United Kingdom, with the self-governing colonies of Canada and Australasia and the white population of South Africa, 55 millions ; Austria-Hungary, 45 millions ; France, 40 millions ; Italy, 32 millions ; Spain and Portugal, 25 millions ; Scandinavian countries, 10 millions ; Holland and Belgium, 10 millions ; and other European countries, 20 millions. A century ago the corresponding figure to this 500 millions would not have been more than about 170 millions. . . . The development was for the most part not uniform among the European populations. It was most marked in the Anglo- American section. The increase here was from >i population of not more than about 20 millions, which was the population of the United States and the United Kingdom together a hundred years ago, to a population of not less than 130 millions at the present time. Russia and Germany also showed remarkable increases, but nothing like this " (Address to the Manchester Statistical Society, October, igoo).