POSITION IN THE WEST 158 



On the other side of the picture there is now the 

 surprising opposing phenomenon in the West of the 

 gathering of the forces which represent the superses- 

 sion or the negation of every one of the ruling prin- 

 ciples of this era of the past. For the goal towards 

 which the face of civilization is set is not the individ- 

 ual integration but the social integration. It is in the 

 social integration that the soul of the world is being 

 brought to the birth. And the laws of the social 

 integration are not the laws of the individual in- 

 tegration. It is not in the heredity inborn in 

 civilized man, so accurately described by Bateson, 

 but in the immeasurably more important cultural 

 heredity imposed on civilized man by civilization 

 itself through the action of the emotion of the ideal 

 on the young of each generation that we have the 

 cause of efficiency and the seat of power in the 

 future of the world. 



This is the basal fact which underlies all phases 

 of the life of the West. The powerful and universal 

 interests of civilization are already instinctively 

 conscious of it. They may be observed on every 

 side staging themselves, often with the strangest 

 Caliban-like movements, into the particular atti- 

 tudes which represent this knowledge. Through- 

 out the West all institutions in which power is 

 centred, from the military empires to international 



