08 - Chapter 5: Porro Unum Est Necessarium

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter five of Culture and Anarchy. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Nicole Lee. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, Chapter five.
The matter here opened is so large, and the trains
of thought to which it gives rise are so manifold,

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that we must be careful to limit ourselves scrupulously to
what has a direct bearing upon our actual discussion. We
have found that at the bottom of our present unsettled state,
so full of the seeds of trouble, lies the notion
of its being the prime right and happiness for each
of us to affirm himself and his ordinary self to
be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes.

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We have found at the bottom of it the disbelief
in right reason as a lawful authority. It was easy
to show from our practice and current history that this
is so, but it was impossible to show why it
is so without taking a somewhat wider sweet and going
into things a little more deeply. Why in fact, should good,
well meaning, energetic, sensible people like the bulk of our
countrymen come to have such a light belief in right reason,

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and such an exaggerated value for their own independent doing.
However crude the answer is because of an exclusive and
excessive development in them, without due allowance for time, place,
and circumstance. Are that side of human nature and that
group of human forces to which we have given the
general name of Hebrewism. Because they have thought their real
and only important homage was owed to a power concerned

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with their obedience rather than with their intelligence, a power
interested in the moral side of their nature almost exclusively.
Thus they have been led to regard in themselves as
the one thing needful strictness of conscience, the staunch adherence
to some fixed law of doing we have got already,
instead of spontaneity of consciousness, which tends continually to enlarge

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our whole law of doing. They have fancied themselves to
have in their religion a sufficient basis for the whole
of their life, fixed and certain forever, a full law
of conduct, and a full law of thought, so far
as thought is needed as well, whereas what they really
have is a law of conduct, a law of unexampled
power for enabling them to war against the law of

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sin in their members, and not to serve it in
the lust thereof the book which contains this invaluable law
they call the Word of God, and attribute to it,
as I have said, and as indeed is perfectly well known,
a reach and sufficiency co extensive with all the wants
of human nature. This might no doubt be so if
humanity were not the composite thing it is, if it

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had only, or in quite overpowering eminence, a moral side
and the group of instincts and powers which we call moral.
But it has besides and in notable eminence, an intellectual side,
and the group of instincts and powers which we call intellectual.
No doubt, mankind makes in general its progress in a
fashion which gives at one time full swing to one
of these groups of instincts, at another time to the other.

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And man's faculties are so intertwined that when his moral
side and the current of force, which we call Hebrewism
is uppermost, this side will manage somehow to provide or
appear to provide satisfaction for his intellectual needs. And when
his intellectual side and the current of force, which we
call Hellenism, is uppermost, this again will provide or appear
to provide satisfaction for men's moral needs. But sooner or

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later it becomes manifest that when the two sides of
humanity proceed in this fashion of alternate preponderance and not
of mutual understanding and balance, the side which is uppermost
does not really provide in a satisfactory manner for the
needs of the side which is undermost, and a state
of confusion is sooner or later the result. The Hellenic
half of our nature a bearing rule, makes a sort

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of provision for the Hebrew half, but it turns out
to be an inadequate provision. And again, the Hebrew half
of our nature bearing rule, makes a sort of provision
for the Hellenic half, but this too turns out to
be an inadequate provision. The true and smooth order of
humanity's development is not reached in either way. And therefore,
while we willingly admit with the Christian apostle that the world,

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by wisdom, that is, by the isolated preponderance of its
intellectual impulses, knew not God or the true order of things,
it is yet necessary also to set up a sort
of converse to this proposition, and to say likewise, what
is equally true that the world, by puritanism knew not God.
And it is on this converse of the Apostle's proposition
that it is particularly needful to insist in our own

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country just at present. Here, indeed, is the answer to
many criticisms which have been addressed to all that we
have said in praise of sweetness and light. Sweetness and
light evidently have to do with the bent or side
in humanity which we call Hellenic. Greek intelligence has obviously
for its essence the instinct for what Plato calls the true, firm,
intelligible law of things, the love of light, of seeing

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things as they are. Even in the natural sciences, where
the Greeks had not time and means adequately to apply
this instinct, and where we have gone a great deal
further than they did, it is this instinct which is
the root of the whole matter and the ground of
all our success. And this instinct the world has mainly
learnt of the Greeks, inasmuch as they are humanity's most
signal manifestation of it. Greek art again, Greek beauty, have

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their route in the same impulse to see things as
they really are inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest
on fidelity to nature, the best nature, and on a
delicate discrimination of what this best nature is. To say
we work for sweetness and light, then is only another
way of saying that we work for Hellenism. But oh,
cry many people, sweetness and light are not enough. You

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must put strength or energy along with them, and make
a kind of trinity of strength, sweetness and light, and
then perhaps you may do some good. That is to say,
we are to join Hebrewism strictness of the moral conscience
and manful walking by the best light we have together
with Hellenism, inculcate both and rehearse the praises of birth.
Or rather we may praise both in conjunction. But we

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must be careful to praise Hebrewism most culture, says an acute,
though somewhat rigid critic, mister Cidric, diffuses sweetness and light.
I do not undervalue these blessings. But religion gives fire
and strength, and the world wants fire and strength even
more than sweetness and light. By religion, let me explain,
mister Sidric. Here means particularly that Puritanism, on the insufficiency

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of which I have been commenting, and to which he says,
I am unfair. Now no doubt it is possible to
be a fanatical partisan of light and the instincts which
push us to it, a fanatical enemy of strictness of
moral conscience and the instincts which push us to it.
A fanatism of this sort deforms and vulgarizes the well
known work, in some respects so remarkable of the late

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mister Buckle. Such a fanatism carries its own mark with
it in lacking sweetness, and its own penalty. In that
lacking sweetness it comes in the end to lack light too.
And the Greeks, the great exponents of humanity, is bent
for sweetness and light, united of its perception that the
truth of things must be at the same time beauty.
Singularly escape the fanaticism which we models, whether we Hellenize

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or whether we Hebrewyze, are so apt to show and arrived,
though failing, has been said to give adequate practical satisfaction
to the claims of man's moral side, and the idea
of a comprehensive adjustment of the claims of both the
sides in man, the moral as well as the intellectual
of a full estimate of both, and of a reconciliation
of both, an idea which is philosophically of the greatest

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value and the best of lessons for us moderns. So
we ought to have no difficulty in conceding to mister
Sidric that man full walking by the best light one
has far and strength, as he calls it, has its
high value as well as culture, the endeavor to see
things in their truth and beauty, the pursuit of sweetness
and light. But whether at this or that time, and
to this or that set of persons one ought to

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insist most on the praises of fire and strength or
on the praises of sweetness and light, must depend one
would think on the circumstances and needs of that particular
time and those particular persons, and all that we have
been saying. And indeed, any glance at the world around
us shows that with us, with the most respectable and
strongest part of us, the ruling forces now and long
has been in a Puritan force, the care for fire

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and strength, strictness of conscience Hebrewism, rather than the care
for sweetness and light spontaneity of consciousness Hellenism. Well, then
what is the good of our now rehearsing the praises
of fire and strength to ourselves, who dwell too exclusively
on them Already? When Missus Citwix says so broadly that
the world wants fire and strength even more than sweetness

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and light, is he not carried away by a turn
for powerful generalization? Does he not forget that the world
is not all of one piece, and every peace with
the same needs at the same time. It may be
true that the Roman world at the beginning of our era,
or le Are the Tenths Court at the time of
the Reformation, or French society in the eighteenth century, needed
fire and strength even more than sweetness and light. But

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can it be said that the barbarians who overran the
Empire needed fire and strength even more than sweetness and light,
or that the Puritans needed them more, or that mister Murphy,
the Birmingham Lecturer, and the Reverend W. Cattle and his
friends need them more. The puritan's great danger is that
he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him
the unum neicossarium or one thing needful, and that he

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then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what
this rule really is and what it tells him thinks
he has now knowledge, and henceforth needs only to act, and,
in this dangerous state of assurance and self satisfaction, proceeds
to give full swing to a number of the instincts
of his ordinary self. Some of the instincts of his
ordinary self he has, by the help of his rule
of life conquered, but others which he has not conquered

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by this help. He is so far from perceiving to
need subjugation and to be instincts of an inferior self,
that he even fancies it to be his right and duty,
in virtue of having conquered a limited part of himself,
to give unchecked swing to the remainder. He is, I say,
a victim of hebrism, of the tendency to cultivate strictness
of conscience rather than spontaneity of consciousness. And what he

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wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him
the number of other points at which his nature must
come to its best besides the points which he himself
knows and thinks of. There is no unum neicossarium, or
one thing needful which can free human nature from the
obligation of trying to come to its best at all
these points. The real unum necessarium for us is to
come to our best at all points. Instead of our

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one thing needful justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence,
Our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touch
stones which try our one thing needful, and which prove
that in the state at any rate in which we
ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And
as the force which encourage us to stand staunch and
fast by the rule and ground we have is hebrewsm

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so the force which encourages us to go back upon
this rule and to try the very ground on which
we appear to stand is Hellenism, a turn for giving
our consciousness free play and enlarging its range. And what
I say is not that Hellenism is always for everybody
more wanted than Hebrewism, but that for the Reverend W.
Cattle at this particular moment, and for the great majority
of us his fellow countrymen, it is more wanted. Nothing

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is more striking than to observe in how many ways
a limited conception of humannas nature. The notion of a
one thing needful, a one side in us to be
made uppermost. The disregard of a full and harmonious development
of ourselves tells injuriously on our thinking and acting. In
the first place, our hold upon the rule or standard
to which we look for are one thing needful tends
to become less and less near and vital, our conception

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of it more and more mechanical, and unlike the thing
itself as it was conceived in the mind where it originated.
The dealings of Puritanism with the writings of Saint Paul
afford a note worthy illustration of this noerres so much
as in the writings of Saint Paul, and in that
great Apostle's greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans. Has
Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one
thing needful and to give it canons of truth absolute

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and final. Now, all writings, as has been already said,
even the most precious writings and the most fruitful, must inevitably,
from the very nature of things, be but contributions to
human thought and human development, which extend wider than they do. Indeed,
Saint Paul, in the very epistle of which we are
speaking shows when he asks who hath known the mind
of the Lord? Who hath known that is the true

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and divine order of things in its entirety, that he
himself acknowledges this fully. And we have already pointed out
in another epistle of Saint Paul, a great and vital
idea of the human spirit, the idea of the immortality
of the soul, transcending and overlapping, so to speak, the
expositor's power to give it adequate definition and expression. But
quite distinct from the question whether Saint Paul's expression, or

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any man's expression, can be a perfect and final expression
of truth comes a question whether we rightly seize and
understand his expression as it exists now perfectly. To seize
another man's meaning as it stood in his own mind
is not easy, especially when the man is separated from
us by such differences of race, training, time, and circumstances
as Saint Paul. But there are degrees of nearness in

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getting at a man's meaning. And though we cannot arrive
quite at what Saint Paul had in his mind, yet
we may come near it. And who that comes thus near.
It must not feel, how terms which Saint Paul employs
in trying to follow with his analysis of such profound
power and originality, some of the most delicate, intricate, obscure
and contradictory workings and states of the human spirit are

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detached and employed by Puritanism, not in the connected and
fluid way in which Saint Paul employs them, and for
which alone words are really meant, but in an isolated,
fixed mechanical way, as if they were talismans. And how
all trace and sense of Saint Paul's true movement of
ideas and sustained masterly analysis is thus lost. Who I
say that has watch Puritanism the force which so strongly hebrizes,

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which so takes in Paul's writings as something absolute and final,
containing the one thing needful handle such terms as grace, faith, election, righteousness,
But must feel not only that these terms have for
the mind of Puritanism a sense false and misleading, but
also that this sense is the most monstrous and grotesque
caricature of the sense of Saint Paul, and that his

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true meaning is by these worshipers of his words altogether lost.
Or to take another eminent example in which not Puritanism only,
but one may say, the whole religious world, by their
mechanical use of Saint Paul's writings, can be shown to
miss or change his real meaning. The whole religious world,
one may say, use now the word resurrection, a word
which is so often in their thoughts and on their lips,

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and which they find so often in Saint Paul's writings.
In one sense only, they use it to mean a
rising again after the physical death of the body. And now,
it is quite true that Saint Paul speaks of resurrection
in this sense, that he tries to describe and explain it,
and that he condemns those who doubt and deny it.
But it is true also that in nine cases out
of ten, where Saint Paul thinks and speaks of resurrection,

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he thinks and speaks of it in a sense different
from this, in the sense of arising to a new
life before the physical death of the body, and not
after it. The idea in which we have already touched,
the profound idea of being baptized into the death of
the great exemplar of self devotion and self annulment, of
repeating in our own person by virtue of identification with
our exemplar, his course of self devotion and self annulment,

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and of thus coming within the limits of our present
life to a new life, life in which, as in
the death going before it, we are identified with our exemplar.
This is the fruitful and original conception of being risen
with Christ which possesses the mind of Saint Paul, And
this is the central point round which, with such incomparable
emotion and eloquence, all his teaching moves for him. The

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life after our physical death is really, in the main
but a consequence and continuation of the inexhaustible energy of
the new life thus originated on this side the grave.
This grand Pauline idea of Christian resurrection is worthily rehearsed
in one of the noblest colleagues of the Prayer Book,
and is destined, no doubt, to fill a more and
more important place in the Christianity of the future. But

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almost as signal as is the essentialness of this characteristic
idea in Saint Paul's teaching, is the completeness with which
the worshipers of Saint Paul's words as an absolute final
expression of saving truth, have lost it, and have substituted
for the apostles living and near conception of a resurrection
now their mechanical and remote conception of a resurrection hereafter.

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In short, so faith is the notion of possessing, even
in the most precious words or standards, the one thing needful,
of having in them once for all, a full, in
sufficient measure of light to guide us, and of there
being no duty left for us except to make our
practice square exactly with them. So fatal, I say, is
this notion to the right knowledge and comprehension of the
very words or standards we thus adopt, and to such

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strange distortions and perversions of them? Does it inevitably lead that,
whenever we hear that commonplace which hebresm, if we venture
to inquire what a man knows, is so apt to
bring out against us in disparagement of what we call culture,
and in praise of a man sticking to the one
thing needful he knows, says Hebrewism his Bible. Whenever we
hear this said, we may, without any elaborate defense of culture,

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content ourselves with answering. Simply, no man who knows nothing
else knows even his Bible now the force which we
have so much neglected. Hellenism may be liable to fail
in moral force and earnestness, but by the law of
its nature, the very same law which makes it sometimes
deficient in intensity when into density is required, it opposes
itself to the notion of cutting our being in two,

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of attributing to one part the dignity of dealing with
the one thing needful, and leaving the other part to
take its chance, which is the bane of Hebreism. Essential
in Hellenism is the impulse to the development of the
whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of him,
perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance. Because the
characteristic bent of Hellenism, as has been said, is to

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find the intelligible law of things, and there is no
intelligible law of things. Things cannot really appear intelligible unless
they are also beautiful. The body is not intelligible, is
not seen in its true nature and as it really is,
unless it is seen as beautiful. Behavior is not intelligible,
does not account for itself to the mind and show
the reason for its existing unless it is beautiful. The

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same with discourse, the same with song, the same with worship,
the same with all the modes in which man proves
his activity and expresses himself. To think that when one
shows what is mean or vulgar or hideous, one can
be permitted to please, that one has that within which
passers show. To suppose that the possession of what benefits
and satisfies one part of our being can make a
larable either discourse like mister Murphy's and the Reverend W. Cattle's,

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or poetry like the hymns we will hear, or places
of worship like the chapels we all see. This is
abhorrent to the nature of Hellenism. To concede and to
be like our honored and justly honored Faraday, a great
natural philosopher with one side of his being, and a
Sandemanian with the other, would to Archimedes have been impossible.
It is evident to what are many sided perfecting of

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man's powers and activities. This demand of Hellenism for satisfaction
to be given to the mind by everything which we
do is calculated to impel our race. It has its dangers,
as has been fully granted. The notion of this sort
of equipolency in man's modes of activity may lead to
moral relaxation. What we do not make our one thing needful,

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we may come to treat not enough, as if it
were needful, though it is indeed very needful and at
the same time very hard. Still, what side in us
has not its dangers, and which of our impulses can
be a talisman to give us perfection outright, and not
merely a help to bring us towards it? Has not Hebrism,
as we have shown its dangers as well as Hellenism.

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And have we used so excessively the tendencies in ourselves
to which Hellenism makes appeal that we are now suffering
from it? Are we not, on the contrary, in our
suffering because we have not enough used these tendencies as
a help towards perfection? For we see whither it has
brought us the long exclusive predominance of Hebreism, the insisting
on perfection in one part of our nature and not
in all, the singling out the moral side, the side

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of obedience and action for such intent, regard, making strictness
of the moral conscience so far the principal thing, and
putting off for hereafter and for another world, the care
for being complete at all points the full and harmonious
development of our humanity. Instead of watching and following on
its ways the desire, which, as Plato says, forever through
all the universe, tends towards that which is lovely, we

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think that the world has settled its accounts with this desire,
knows what this desire wants of it, and that all
the impulses of our ordinary self, which do not conflict
with the terms of this settlement, in our narrow view
of it, we may follow unrestrainedly under the sanction of
some such text us not slothful in business, or whatsoever
thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,

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or something else of the same kind. And to any
of these impulses we soon come to give that same
character of a mechanical absolute law which we give to
our religion. Be regarded, as we do, our religion as
an object for strictness of conscience, not for spontaneity of consciousness,
for unremitting adherents on its own account, not for going
back upon viewing in its connection with other things, and

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adjusting to a number of changing circumstances. We treat it,
in short, just as we treat our religion as machinery.
It is in this way that the barbarians treat their
bodily exercises, the Philistines their business. Mister Spurgeon has voluntarism,
mister Bright the assertion of personal liberty, mister Beald's the
right of meeting in high park. In all those cases,

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what is needed is a freer play of consciousness upon
the object of pursuit, And in all of them hebrewsm
the valuing staunchness and earnestness. More than this free play,
the entire subordination of thinking to doing has led to
a mistaken and misleading treatment of things. The newspapers a
short time ago contained an account of the suicide of
a mister Smith, sacritary to some insurance company, who it

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was said, labored under the apprehension that he would come
to poverty, and that he was eternally lost. And when
I read these words, it occurred to me that the
poor man who came to such a mournful end was
in truth a kind of type, by the selection of
his two grand objects of concern, by their isolation from
everything else, and the ad juxtaposition to one another, of
all the strongest, most respectable and most representative part of

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our nation. He labored under the apprehension that he would
come to poverty, and that he was eternally lost. The
whole middle class have a conception of things, a conception
which makes us call them philistines, just like that of
this post man, though we are seldom, of course shocked
by seeing it take the distressing, violently, morbid, and fatal
turn which it took with him. But how generally, with

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how many of us are the main concerns of life
limited to these two, the concern for making money and
the concern for saving our souls? And how entirely does
the narrow mechanical conception of our secular business proceed from
a narrower mechanical conception of our religious business? What havoc
do the united conceptions make of our lives? It is

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because the second name of these two master concerns presents
to us the one thing needful in so fixed, narrow
a mechanical a way that so ignoble a fellow master
concerned to it as the first named becomes possible, and,
having been once admitted, takes the same rigid and absolute
character as the other. Poor mister Smith had sincerely the
nobler master concern, as well as the meaner the concern

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for saving his soul, according to the narrow mechanical conception
which Puritanism has of what the salvation of the soul
is and the concern for making money. But let us
remark how many people there are, especially outside the limits
of the serious and conscientious middle class to which mister
Smith belonged, who take up with a meaner master concern,
whether it be pleasure or field sports, or bodily exercises,

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or business or popular agitation, who take up with one
of these exclusively and neglect mister Smith's nobler master concern,
because of the mechanical form which Hebrism has given to
this nobler master concern, making it stand, as we have said,
as something talismanic, isolated, and all sufficient justifying our giving
our ordinary souls free play in amusement or business or

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popular agitation. If we have made our account square with
this master concern, and if we have not rendering other
things indifferent and our ordinary self, all we have to follow,
and to follow with all the energy that is in
us till we do. Whereas the idea of perfection at
all points the encouraging in ourselves spontaneity of consciousness, the
letting a free play of thought live and flow around

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all activity, the indisposition to allow one side of our
activity to stand it as so all important and all
sufficing that it makes other sides indifferent. This bent of
mind in us may not only check us in following
unreservedly a mean master concern of any kind, but may
even also bring new life and movement into that side
of us which alone Hebreism concerns itself, and awaken a

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healthier and less mechanical activity there. Hellenism may thus actually
serve to further the designs of Hebriism. Undoubtedly it thus
served in the first days of Christianity. Christianity, as has
been said, occupied itself, like Hebreism, with the moral side
of man, exclusively with his moral affections and moral conduct,

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And so far it was but a continuation of Hebriism.
But it transformed and renewed Hebreism by going back upon
a fixed rule which had become mechanical and had thus
lost its vital motive power, by letting the thought play
freely around this old rule and perceive its inadequacy, by
developing a new motive power which men's moral consciousness could

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take living hold of and could move in sympathy with.
What was this but an importation of Hellenism as we
have defined it into Hebreism, and as Saint Paul used
the contradiction between the Jew's profession and practice, his shortcomings
on that very side of moral affection and moral conduct,
which the jewants and poor both of them regarded as
all in awe. Thou that sayest man should not steal,

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dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not
commit adultery? Dost thou commit adultery for a proof of
the inadequacy of the old rule of life in the
Jew's mechanical conception of it, and try to rescue him
by making his consciousness play freely around this rule, that is,
by a so far hellenic treatment of it. Even so,
when we hear so much said of the growth of

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commercial immorality in our serious middle class, of the melting
away of habits or strict probity, before the temptation to
get quickly rich and to cut a figure in the world,
when we see, at any rate so much confusion of
thought and of practice in this great representative class of
our nation. May we not be disposed to say that
this confusion shows that his new motive power of grace

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and imputed righteousness has become to the Puritan as mechanical
and with as ineffective a hold upon his practice as
the old motive power of the law was to the
jew And that the remedy is the same as that
which Saint Paul employed an importation of what we have
called Hellenism into his Hebrewism, are making his consciousness flow
freely round his petrified rule of life and renew it.

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Only with this difference, that whereas Saint Paul imported Hellenism
within the limits of our moral part, only this part
being still treated by him as all in all, and
whereas he exhausted, one may say, and used to the
very uttermost the possibilities of fruitfully importing it on that
side exclusively, we ought to try and import it, guiding
ourselves by the ideal of a human nature harmoniously perfect

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at all points, into all the lines of our activity,
and only by so doing can be rightly quicken, refresh
and renew those very instincts now so much baffled to
which heboism makes appeal. But if we will not be
warned by the confusion visible enough at present in our
thinking and acting, that we are in a false line,
in having developed our Hebrew side so exclusively and our

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Hellenic sides so feebly and at random, in loving fixed
rules of action so much more than the intelligible law
of things. Let us listen to a remarkable testimony which
the opinion of the world around us offers. All the
world now sets great and increasing value on three objects
which have long been very dear to us, and pursues
them in its own way, or tries to pursue them.

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These three objects are industrial enterprise, bodily exercises, and freedom.
Certainly we have before and beyond our neighbors given ourselves
to these three things with ardent passion and with high success.
And this our neighbors cannot but acknowledge, and they must needs,
when they themselves turn to these things, have an eye
to our example, and take something of our practice. Now. Generally,

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when people are interested in an object of pursuit, they
cannot help feeling and enthusiasm for those who have already
labored successfully at it and for their success. Not only
do they study them, they also love and admire them.
In this way, a man who is interested in the
art of war not only acquaints himself with the performance
of great generals, but he has an admiration and enthusiasm

(28:16):
for them. So too, one who wants to be a
painter or a pert cannot help loving and admiring the
great painters or pets who have gone before him and
shown him the way. But it is strange with how
little of love, admiration, or enthusiasm the world regards us
and our freedom, our bodily exercises, and our industrial powers,
much as the things themselves are beginning to interest it.

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And is not the reason because we follow each of
these things in a mechanical manner as an end in
and for itself, and not in reference to a general
end of human perfection. And this makes our pursuit of
them uninteresting to humanity, and not what the world truly wants.
It seems to them mere machinery that we can knowingly
teach them to worship, a mere Fetish British freedom, British

(28:59):
Industrytish muscularity. We work for each of these three things blindly,
with no notion of giving each its due proportion and prominence,
because we have no ideal of harmonious human perfection before
our minds to set our work in motion and to
guide it. So the rest of the world desiring industry
or freedom or bodily strength, yet desiring these not as

(29:19):
we do absolutely, but as means to something else imitate. Indeed,
of our practice what seems useful for them, but us
whose practice they imitate, they seem to entertain neither love
nor admiration. For let us observe, on the other hand,
the love and enthusiasm excited by others who have labored
for these very things, perhaps of what we call industrial enterprise.

(29:40):
It is not easy to find examples in former times,
but let us consider how Greek freedom and Greek gymnastics
have attracted the love and praise of mankind, who give
so little love and praise to ours. And what can
be the reason of this difference? Surely because the Greeks
pursued freedom and pursued gymnastics not mechanically, but with constant
reference to some ideal of complete human perfection and happiness.

(30:02):
And therefore, in spite of faults and failures, they interest
and delight by their pursuit of them all the rest
of mankind, who instinctively feel that only as things are
pursued with reference to this ideal are they valuable. Here again, therefore,
as in the confusion into which the thought and action
of even the steadiest class amongst us is beginning to fall,
we seem to have an admonition that we have fostered

(30:22):
our Hebrewzing instincts, our preference of earnestness of doing, to
delicacy and flexibility of thinking too exclusively, and have been
landed by them in a mechanical and unfruitful routine. And
again we seem taught that the development of our Hellenizing instincts,
seeking skillfully the intelligible law of things, and making a
stream of fresh thoughts play freely about our stock notions

(30:43):
and habits, is what is most wanted by us at present. Well, then,
from all sides, the more we go into the matter,
the current seem to converge and together to bear us
along towards culture. If we look at the world outside us,
we find a disquieting absence of sure authority, discover that
only in right reason can we get a source of
shure authority, and culture brings us towards right reason. If

(31:06):
we look at our own inner world, we find all
manner of confusion arising out of the habits of unintelligent
routine and one sided growth, to which a too exclusive
worship of fire, strength, earnestness and action has brought us.
What we want is a fuller, harmonious development of our humanity,
a free play of thought upon our routine notions, spontaneity
of consciousness, sweetness and light. And these are just what

(31:29):
culture generates and fosters, proceeding from this idea of the
harmonious perfection of our humanity, and seeking to help itself
up towards this perfection by knowing and spreading the best
which has been reached in the world, an object not
to be gained without books and reading. Culture has got
its name touched in the fancies of men with a
sort of air of bookishness and pedantry cast upon it

(31:49):
from the follies of the many bookmen who forget the
end in the means and use their books with no
real aim at perfection. We will not stickle for a name,
and the name of culture one might easily give up
if only those who decry the frivolous and pedantic sort
of culture, but wish our bottom for the same things
as we do, would be careful on their part, not
in disparaging and discrediting the false culture, to unwittingly disparage

(32:12):
and discredit among a people with the little natural reverence
for it, the true also. But what we are concerned
for is the thing, not the name, and the thing
call it by what name we will, is simply the
enabling ourselves, whether by reading, observing, or thinking, to come
as near as we can, to the firm, intelligible law
of things, and thus to get a basis for a

(32:32):
less confused action and a more complete perfection than we
have at present. And now. Therefore, when we are accused
of preaching up a spirit of cultivated in action, of
provoking the earnest lovers of action, of refusing to land
hand at uprooting certain definite evils, of despairing to find
any lasting truth to minister to the diseased spirit of
our time, we shall not be so much confounded and

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embarrassed what to answer for ourselves. We shall say boldly
that we do not at all despair finding some lasting
truth to minister to the diseased spirit of our time,
but that we have discovered the best way of finding
this to be not so much by lending a hand
to our friends and countrymen in the actual operations for
the removal of certain definite evils, but rather in getting

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our friends and countrymen to seek culture, to let their
consciousness play freely round their present operations, and the stock
notions on which they are founded. Show what these are like,
and how related to the intelligible law of things, an
auxiliary to true human perfection. End of Chapter five