Time & Perspective Quote by Henry James Sumner Maine

The line lands like a cold shower: your comfort is not the human default. Maine is prying at a very European habit of mind - mistaking local normalcy for historical law. The “overwhelming evidence” is doing quiet, aggressive work here. He’s reminding his readers that comparative history, travel accounts, ancient law, and anthropology have already piled up enough proof to puncture complacency; the problem isn’t a lack of data, it’s a failure of imagination. “Bring thoroughly home to himself” frames this as an intimate psychological struggle, not a scholarly debate. Western Europe’s citizen can intellectually assent to the point and still emotionally refuse it.

Maine wrote in a 19th-century moment when “civilisation” was often treated as a moral badge and a teleological endpoint - the story everyone else was supposedly moving toward, with Europe conveniently at the finish line. He flips that storyline. By calling European civilisation a “rare exception,” he undercuts both triumphalism and the paternal confidence of empire. The subtext: if your social order is contingent, then your right to rule others is not self-evident, and your future is not guaranteed.

The sentence also reveals its era’s tension: Maine uses “civilisation” in the singular, a term that can smuggle in hierarchy even as he criticizes Eurocentric certainty. That’s what makes it effective. It destabilizes the reader without fully absolving the worldview it comes from, forcing a modern lesson out of Victorian prose: progress is a condition to maintain, not a destiny to assume.