Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the
scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are,
natural and proper in an intelligent [8] being, appears as the ground
of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the
impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for
stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the
sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better
and happier than we found it,--motives eminently such as are called
social,--come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and
pre-eminent part. 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. As, in the
first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words:
"To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the
second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than
these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God
prevail!" Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be
overhasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because
its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to be [9]
beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions,
which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the
imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what
distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific
passion, as well as by the passion of doing good; that it has worthy
notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer
its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them; and
that, knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and
stable which are not based on reason and the will of God, it is not
so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of
diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that
it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless
we know how and what we ought to act and to institute.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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