Intellectual culture

“ Culture must be taken in the widest sense to include political, social, and legal institutions, the arts and crafts, religion, and the various forms of intellectual life which show their presence in literature, philosophy, and otherwise, all more or less connected, and all having the common characteristic that they cannot be passed on by physical descent but must be learned in after life. ”

“ The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other ”

“ This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing. But it needs times of faith and ardour, times when the intellectual horizon is opening and widening all round us, to flourish in. ”

“ But if "culture" mean intellectual breadth, judicial attitude of mind, the ability to express one's thoughts clearly, not much of it could be acquired in the old classical course and still less in a modern classical group. ”

“ This, then, it seems, is Culture—knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world—not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment—reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system. ”

“ As the true history of our own race shows that we came from a low and brutal state, common once to all mankind, so the facts of our present condition give us reasonable hope for a better future. Let us, then, stand, on the highest points of knowledge in all its departments, for these are touched with light. We must reach these heights by continual reading, observation, and experiment. The result of these is culture. All thought has an added, beauty as it approaches the truth, but what is needed is to attain to clear conceptions. ”

“ Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves and the world, I assert literature to contain the materials which suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not by any means clear, says he, that after having learned all which ancient and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. ”

“ The success of that charming series of biographies, the English Men of Letters—nay, of the little shilling Literature Primers—is a sign of it. And the same thing, too, is being done with regard to Philosophy; but, so far, the men of Science have the lead, and they deserve it; for, as I have said, theirs has been the most complete singleness of heart and soul with which Truth has been sought out, they have the most thoroughly applied the secret of the purpose and system of Culture. ”

“ If not only knowledge and art, but at the same time moral and political excellence, be taken into consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon on an ideal scale the advance or decline from stage to stage of culture. ”

“ The noblest enthusiasm, both for the search after truth and for applying it to its highest uses, pervades those writers.... In cultivating, therefore," science as an essential ingredient in education, "we are all the while laying an admirable foundation for ethical and philosophical culture." ”

“ The great need in modern culture, which is scientific in method, rationalistic in spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to find some effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal. That is the business and function of literature. ”

“ Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life. ”

“ In order to be true to my nature, which is affirmative and which concerns itself with contradictions and criticism only indirectly and with reluctance, let me state at once what the three objects are for which we need educators. People must learn to see; they must learn to think, and they must learn to speak and to write: the object of all three of these pursuits is a noble culture. ”

“ Literature reveals the ideal thought and the speculations of men, gives æsthetic and ethical culture, and in a practical way applies poetry to life. Art and ethics deal with distinct types of knowledge, cultivate the higher emotional powers, and, like ideal literature, set up standards of perfection in execution and in conduct of life. ”

“ And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit. ”

“ There are, also, interior senses, apprehensive powers of the mind, which equally crave culture, and which depend for their precision and force on careful education and diligent use. Mere observation, experience, or study, cannot give knowledge that will be of any avail. ”

“ And it must be admitted that the chief object of culture is, not merely to fill the mind with other men’s thoughts, and to be the passive recipient of their impressions of things, but to enlarge our individual intelligence, and render us more useful and efficient workers in the sphere of life to which we may be called. ”

“ Knowledge is power; we never know what bit of apparently useless insight may find application in our own lives and help us to solve our personal problems.
(3) Moreover, culture is not only informative, it is inspirational. History and biography fire the youth with a noble spirit of emulation; poetry, fiction, and the drama, and to some extent music, painting, and sculpture, arouse the emotions and direct them-if the art is good-into proper channels. ”

“ Culture is, then, properly described, not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection: it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. ”

“ We must include besides 'creative' work and literary criticism, any material which should be operative on general ideas—the results of contemporary work in history, archæology, anthropology, even of the more technical sciences when those results are of such a nature to be valuable to the man of general culture and when they can be made intelligible to him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I pass on, however, to another opinion just now much more fashionable and held by people who are, at any rate, much more elegant than the supporters of the view just mentioned, that is, the opinion that what we expect from education is “culture.” ”

“ In other words, I protest against the notion, that the study of the practical everyday problems of human life is without what we are pleased to call a culture value,—that in the proper study of those problems one is not able to see the operation of fundamental and eternal principles. ”

“ Culture, in the sense of a mode of life guided by reason and utilizing the discoveries and inventions that are the gift of science, finds its way but slowly among a people, and filters only sluggishly through its habits, its institutions and its creeds. ”

“ These, by whatever name we like to call them, are facts and not fancies, and facts which enter largely into all questions, whether of science, philosophy, religion, or practical policy. Every one who wishes to keep at all abreast with modern culture, ought to have some general knowledge of the ideas and principles which underlie them and which are embraced in the comprehensive word “polarity.” ”

“ The power to do something well is involved in the very idea of culture, and the scholar who can pass a successful written examination has acquired a power which literary culture chiefly gives, and that this power may be applied to scientific as well as literary subjects is obvious. Here is a most important distinction in connection with our subject. Culture implies the acquisition of some power of the mind in an eminent degree, and such power is constantly associated with erudition, simply because it leads to erudition. ”

“ The acquisition of this skill,—partly to subdue and eradicate the improper tendencies which have arisen within us prior to the awakening of Reason and the consciousness of our own independence,—partly to modify external things, and alter them in accordance with our ideas,—the acquisition of this skill, I say, is called Culture ”

“ But when ‘culture’ went on to tell us what God is for science, we heard words we did not understand about ‘streams,’ and ‘tendencies,’ and ‘the Eternal:’ and, had it been any one else that we were reading, we should have said that, in some literary excursion, they had picked up a metaphysical theory, now out of date, and putting it in phrases, the meaning of which they had never asked themselves, had then served it up to the public as the last result of speculation, or of that ‘flexible common sense’ which is so much better. ”

“ In all questions affecting national character and tendency, the development of civilization, public manners, morals, habits, idiosyncrasies, the influence of institutions, of education, of literature, his insight was penetrating, his point of view perfectly original, and his judgment, if not always sound, invariably suggestive. These qualities, among others, gave to such books as Essays in Criticism, Friendship's Garland, and Culture and Anarchy, an interest and a value quite independent of their literary merit. ”

“ If truth and reason have, as we believe, any natural irresistible effect on the mind of man, it must. These considerations, when culture has called them forth and given them free course in our minds, will live and work. ”

“ Now, if I have not led you too deep into social philosophy, let us turn again to culture. We find that culture comes from thought, study, observation, literary and scientific activity, and we find that men practice these for gain, for professional success, for immediate pleasure, or to gratify their tastes. The great motive of interest provides the energy and this culture is but a secondary result. It is a significant fact to observe that when the motive of interest is removed, culture becomes flaccid and falls into dilletantism. ”

“ I might answer that the intellect can be engaged without direct didactic object on an artistic and historical problem; that the demand of the intellect is merely to feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever interested men or women can cease to be a fit subject for culture. ”

“ The culture of the individual, as well as of society itself, has far overstepped its former level. On the one hand science and literature, on the other improved means of communication, have disclosed a new horizon, have presented new problems to artists. ”

“ Culture and refinement take on airs—it is the deepest artificial instinct of enlightenment to pose—in the presence of naturalness; and there is a certain style of ignorance which attitudinizes before the gate of knowledge. ”

“ To find the real ground for the very differing estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which [6] may lie a real ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. ”

“ However important it may be, it must yield precedence to those kinds of culture which bear directly upon daily duties. As before hinted, literature and the fine arts are made possible by those activities which make individual and social life possible ”

“ And culture is, at bottom, only an enlarged and clarified experience,—an experience so comprehensive that it puts its possessor in touch with all times and men, and gives him the opportunity of comparing his own knowledge of things, his faith and his practice, with the knowledge, faith, and practice of all the generations. This opportunity brings, to one who knows how to use it, deliverance from the ignorance or half-knowledge of provincialism, from the crudity of its half-trained tastes, and from the blind passion of its rash and groundless faith in its own infallibility. ”

“ The moral of this experience is, that mental culture is not secured by pouring information into passive recipients; it comes from stimulating the mind to gather knowledge for itself.... If we would fit man properly to cultivate nature ... ”

“ They imply powers and habits best nurtured by scientific, but best polished and adorned by literary, training. Both means of culture are to be combined, but duly balanced. My plea is not against any source of culture, but against exaggerating one out of proportion with another. ”