Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
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. And is
not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have
long lived [10] and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights
finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a long time there was
no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and then it was of
no use to think of adapting the world's action to them. Where was
the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people
who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will of
God, in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they had
no power of looking? But now the iron force of adhesion to the old
routine,--social, political, religious,--has wonderfully yielded;
the iron force of exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully
yielded; the danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse
to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the
will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other
to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the
importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action
for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the
will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to
be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the [11]
will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit
of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible
exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas,
simply because they are new.
The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded
not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw
towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended
and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's happiness to go
along with or his misery to go counter to,--to learn, in short, the
will of God,--the moment, I say, culture is considered not merely as
the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to
make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of
culture becomes manifest. The mere endeavour to see and learn it for
our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it
prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and
is wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself, and
not only in its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got
stamped with blame, and disparaged with the dubious title of
curiosity, because [12] in comparison with this wider endeavour of
such great and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and
unprofitable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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