The great fact of the twentieth century is the definite emergence of a new type of civilisation different from anything that the world has known hitherto. All through the nineteenth century the new forces which were to transform human life were already at work, but their real tendency was to a great extent veiled by current modes of thought and preconceived ideas which had their origin in political and philosophical doctrines. The mind of the nineteenth century was dominated by the ideals of Nationalism and Liberalism, and the actual process of social and economic change was interpreted in terms of...

The economic crisis of the last two years has proved a godsend to the Bolsheviks. The years of the New Economic Policy in Russia and of the post-war boom in the West were a time of disappointment and trial for the leaders of the communist party. Fortunately for them the launching of the second communist offensive in Russia—the Five-Year Plan—has coincided with the apparent collapse of the capitalist system in the West and has revived the hopes of world revolution which for a time had been abandoned. Above all, these hopes are concentrated on the approaching dissolution of...

The crisis that has arisen in the modern world during the post-war period is not merely an economic one. It involves the future of Western culture as a whole, and, consequently, the fate of humanity. But it is not a simple or uniform phenomenon. It is not confined to any one state or any one continent. It is world-wide in its incidence and shows itself in a different form in every different society. The problem of Russia is essentially different from that of America, and that of Germany from that of England. And yet all are inextricably interwoven in an...

The war presumably marks the end of an age no less decisively than did the wars of the French Revolution. In this case, however, it is not a venerable and moribund society like the ancien régime that is passing away, but a transitional order, which was essentially a compromise and which never attained to a mature and consistent development.

Will the new age be a continuation of the main tendencies of the nineteenth century or a reaction against them? Will the world continue to “progress” in the old liberal sense, or shall we witness a return to older principles which...

At the present time the world is divided between four great cultures, respectively European, Islamic, Indian and Chinese. Although the first of these has attained a kind of world hegemony, it has not eliminated the other three, nor has it succeeded in penetrating them internally. Any general theory of progress must take account of the organic development of these cultures, no less than of the material and scientific advance of modern civilisation during the last four centuries, for they are the ultimate social entities in history, and on this foundation all the racial and national strands are woven.

Each of...

Ever since the rise of the modern scientific movement in the eighteenth century there has been a tendency among sociologists and historians of culture to neglect the study of religion in its fundamental social aspects. The apostles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were, above all, intent on deducing the laws of social life and progress from a small number of simple rational principles. They hacked through the luxuriant and deep-rooted growth of traditional belief with the ruthlessness of pioneers in a tropical jungle. They felt no need to understand the development of the historic religions and their influence on the course...

If we make a survey of human history and culture, we see clearly that every society has possessed a moral code, which is often clearly thought out and exactly defined. In practically every society in the past there has been an intimate relation between this moral code and the dominant religion. Often the code of ethics is conceived as the utterance of a divine law-giver, as in Judaism and Islam. In non-theistic religions, it may be viewed as a “discipline of salvation,” a harmonising of human action with the cosmic process as in Taoism (and to some extent Confucianism) or...

During recent years there has been a remarkable growth of interest in China and its civilisation among Western peoples. Chinese art and literature have at last come into their own and are being studied not as interesting curiosities, but as among the supreme achievements of the human spirit. Moreover, recent developments have caused the political and social situation in China to become a burning question of practical politics, so that the average man who knows and cares nothing about Chinese culture is forced to turn his attention to China whether he will or no.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this,...

Rationalism is usually regarded as the natural enemy of religion; in fact, rationalists have tended to conceive the history of human thought in a frankly dualist spirit as a long warfare between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, in which the cause of rationalism is the cause of civilisation, science and progress, while religion is the dark and sinister power that holds humanity back from the path of enlightenment.

And this is far from being a peculiarly modern point of view. It received a classical expression nearly two thousand years ago in that great epic of rationalism...

During recent years a great deal of attention has been devoted to the study of Mohammedan mysticism by European scholars. Nor is it difficult to understand the reason of this attraction, since of all types of mysticism that of Islam is the richest perhaps in the quantity and certainly in the quality of its literature. In the West, apart from a few outstanding exceptions, mysticism and literature have followed separate paths, and the man of letters often knows nothing of works which from the religious point of view are spiritual classics. In the East, however, this is not so. Mysticism...

The problem of spiritual intuition and its reconciliation with the natural conditions of human knowledge lies at the root of philosophic thought, and all the great metaphysical systems since the time of Plato have attempted to find a definitive solution. The subject is no less important for the theologian, since it enters so largely into the question of the nature of religious knowledge and the limits of religious experience. The orthodox Christian is, however, debarred from the two extreme philosophic solutions of pure idealism and radical empiricism, since the one leaves no place for faith and supernatural revelation, and the...

St. Augustine has often been regarded as standing outside his own age—as the inaugurator of a new world and the first mediaeval man, while others, on the contrary, have seen in him rather the heir of the old classical culture and one of the last representatives of antiquity. There is an element of truth in both these views, but for all that he belongs neither to the mediaeval nor to the classical world. He is essentially a man of his own age—that strange age of the Christian Empire which has been so despised by the historians, but which...

Western civilisation at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests. Underneath the self-conscious activity of the ruling classes the daily life of the majority of men went on unchanged. The statesmen of...

It is often said that Christianity is out of touch with life and that it no longer satisfies the needs of the modern world. And these criticisms are symptomatic of a general change of attitude with regard to religious problems. Men to-day are less interested in the theological and metaphysical assumptions of religion than in its practical results. They are concerned not so much with the truth of Christian doctrine as with the value of the Christian way of life. It is Christian ethics even more than Christian dogma that has become the principal object of attack.

This is not...

In her doctrine of man the Catholic Church has always held the middle path between two opposing theories, that which makes man an animal and that which holds him to be a spirit. Catholicism has always insisted that man’s nature is twofold. He is neither flesh nor spirit, but a compound of both. It is his function to be a bridge between two worlds, the world of sense and the world of spirit, each real, each good, but each essentially different. His nature is open on either side to impressions and is capable of a twofold activity, and his whole...