Culture medium

“ There never was a more radical misconception of a fundamental process, for culture in the true sense involves, as a process, the highest and truest development of a race, and, as a product, the most enduring spiritual expression of race genius and experience. ”

“ Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does the ideal life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves, blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. ”

“ The word culture is often used to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely a sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy training of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower. ”

“ Unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is informed with the life of nature and of society. ”

“ This in turn became the basis of culture, displacing theology, because in many ways it furnished better ideals and standards—especially in literature, sculpture, and above all in the use of reason. But since the fifteenth century vast new sources of culture have developed—the modern literatures, modern music, modern painting, and above all the great structure of modern science, which gives us ideals and standards of judgment drawn from a new field, the book of Nature herself. The reason why we differ is clear. ”

“ But where works of art can travel, ideas can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of decadence. ”

“ The imaginary and newly invented theory that culture is the result of the psychologic nature of man manifesting itself in all epochs and countries, and among all peoples, by the evolution of some new discovery made to fit a human need—that as all human needs in a given stage are the same, therefore all human culture must, per se, pass through the same phases or stages—is a theory to which I refuse adhesion. ”

“ The tone, the habits, the tastes, the pleasures, and, in a large sense, the morals of society depend upon its culture. I use the word culture with the meaning which is commonly given to it in the conversational language of this country, signifying not merely that training of the mental faculties by which useful knowledge is acquired, but the knowledge, appreciation and enjoyment of the beautiful in nature, literature and art, and of the noble, elevated and refined in sentiment and feeling. ”

“ Of the cultivation of the Beautiful through Literature I have already spoken. Bear with me whilst I urge on you to cultivate the other branches. The history of a people may be read in their arts as clearly as in their language. And no people can reach a high standard of culture, or fully develop the social and unselfish elements of its character, the aesthetic side of whose nature is left uncared for. ”

“ There is a way for the cultured: it is to discover the peasant down beneath their culture, the original elemental soil down under the artificial surface, and to allow the sweetness and richness of that soil to give expression on that surface. True culture is thus achieved ”

“ If I were called upon to exhibit the chief determinants of human life as a single chain of causes and effects—a simplification of the historical problem, I may say at once, which I should never dream of putting forward except as a convenient fiction, a device for making research easier by providing it with a central line—I should do it thus. Working backwards, I should say that culture depends on social organization; social organization on numbers; numbers on food; and food on invention. ”

“ All the above definitions of culture lack a most notable point—its development. Development is necessarily “part and parcel” of the very idea of culture and, thus, must be reflected in its definition. For example, “culture is the development of the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group” or “culture is the development of the attitudes and behavior that are characteristic of a particular social group or organization” or “culture is the development of a particular society at a particular time and place,” and so forth. ”

“ With unerring judgment they select the right stuffs, the right shapes, and the right colours; the effect they see in their mind's eye, they reproduce to the eyes of others; and it is delicious and satisfying in proportion as, with the boldness of originality, they unite the refinement and taste diffused by culture through the educated classes of society. ”

“ Further, the intellectual condition of the nation in its various grades should be depicted; not only with respect to the kind and amount of education, but with respect to the progress made in science, and the prevailing manner of thinking. The degree of æsthetic culture, as displayed in architecture, sculpture, painting, dress, music, poetry, and fiction, should be described. Nor should there be omitted a sketch of the daily lives of the people—their food, their homes, and their amusements. ”

“ Upon a thorough mental culture sit gracefully, and quite at home, philosophy, history, poetry, eloquence, music, painting—all in literature and the arts that can refine the taste, refresh the heart, and lead the fancy captive. ”

“ To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.' Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; ”

“ The next aim is self-culture, and that of a twofold kind—the cultivation at once of an intimate knowledge of the form of art which you select as your groundwork, and of a personal artistic power to work in it. ”

“ Culture and religion—here they meet in university life. Most of your time is given to culture. What are you doing? You are enriching and spading up the soil of life. That is the test of culture. Is it quickening, deepening, stimulating the mind? Is it opening the imagination and training the will? Then it is true culture and not that spurious cultivation which spreads over life gravel instead of fertilizers. Culture prepares the soil ”

“ We can scarcely conceive of art without society or society without art. The development of society has been the development of art, and human civilization has advanced through all the stages of culture into which ethnologists subdivide it as the result of successive advances in the perfection of the arts. ”

“ Abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as realistically conceived. It slumbers in the libraries, in the sepulchres of those who lived, who passed away and created it once for all. It belongs to the past, to the things that have died. ”

“ The term culture originates in human practical experiences related to nature: cultivating land, breeding and rearing animals. By extension, culture (i.e., cultivating and breeding the mind) leads to the noun describing a way of life. In the late 18th century, Herder used the plural cultures to distinguish what was to become civilization. In 1883, Dilthey made the distinction between cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, addressing the mind) and natural sciences. ”

“ I distinguish the idea of a Culture, which is the sum total of its inner possibilities, from its sensible phenomenon or appearance upon the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture 105is the progressive actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to the end. ”

“ I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connexion with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. ”

“ Culture as Aim.—Whether or no social efficiency is an aim which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the 'natural' is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something personal ”

“ Our real and our ideal are not twins. Never were! I want the books, but the clothes basket wants me. I love nature and figures are my fate. My taste is books and I farm it. My taste is art and I correct exercises. My taste is science and I measure tape. Can it be that this drudgery, not to be escaped, gives 'culture?' Yes, culture of the prime elements of life, of the very fundamentals of all fine manhood and fine womanhood, the fundamentals that underlie all fulness and without which no other culture worth the winning is even possible. ”

“ In the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between possible and actual culture, i.e., culture as an idea in the (general or individual) existence and culture as the body of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions—acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and costumes. ”

“ Culture grew out of a history that dissolved the previous way of life, but as a separate sphere within a partially historical society its understanding and sensory communication inevitably remain partial. ”

“ The admirable height of culture which mankind in the nineteenth century has attained, the astonishing progress of science and its practical applications in technology, industry, medicine, etc., gives grounds for expecting a still greater development of culture in the twentieth century. ”

“ If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances,—it is clear that culture, instead of being the frivolous and useless thing which Mr. ”

“ Cultivation, denoting primarily the process of cultivating the soil or growing crops, then the improved condition of either which is the result, is applied in similar sense to the human mind and character, but in this usage is now largely superseded by the term culture, which denotes a high development [306] of the best qualities of man's mental and spiritual nature, with especial reference to the esthetic faculties and to graces of speech and manner, regarded as the expression of a refined nature. ”

“ WHAT IS CULTURE?
“Culture” is a word with many meanings. The doctors speak of making a “culture” of a certain kind of bacteria, and ants are said to have a “culture.” Then there is the Emily Post kind of “culture”—you say a person is “cultured,” or that he isn’t, depending on such things as whether or not he eats peas with his knife. ”

“ There are, sometimes, certain superficial resemblances between the works of imaginative writers that are outside the province and beyond the charge of plagiarism. An age produces a culture, a culture produces works of art, and all the while the individual consciousness, or sub-consciousness, feeds upon and is nourished by the raw materials and the basic elements of the culture. ”

“ But I am not sure but that at this point the "practical" man, scotched but not slain, may ask what all this talk about culture has to do with an institution whose object is defined to be "to promote the prosperity of the manufactures and the industry of the country," He may suggest that what is wanted for this end is not culture, nor even a purely scientific discipline, but simply a knowledge of applied science. ”

“ Of course I can’t agree with you as to the statement of culture from outside, except in the poetical sense. Scientifically the culture movement is internal,—the responses of innumerable dead to exterior influence,—the weirdest resurrections of buried faculties. ”

“ Culture is a word which offers us an illustration of the degeneracy of language. If I may define culture, I have no objection to admitting that it is the purpose of education to produce it; but since the word came into fashion, it has been stolen by the dilettanti and made to stand for their own favorite forms and amounts of attainments. Mr. Arnold, the great apostle, if not the discoverer, of culture, tried to analyze it and he found it to consist of sweetness and light. To my mind, that is like saying that coffee is milk and sugar. The stuff of culture is all left out of it. ”

“ The works of Nature though infinite are strictly analogous, and human reason is produced by the same laws as every other natural product. The culture of the mind, by which human reason is produced, bears a strict analogy to the culture of the soil, by which we subsist In each Nature will produce to a certain degree, but the aid of art is necessary to produce a sufficiency, and to reach refinement and perfection. ”