Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
[22] "Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable
unto all things," says the author of the Epistle to Timothy. And the
utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:--"Eat and drink such an
exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to
the services of the mind." But the point of view of culture, keeping
the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not
assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism assign to
it, a special and limited character,--this point of view, I say, of
culture is best given by these words of Epictetus:--"It is a sign of
aphuia"+ says he,--that is, of a nature not finely tempered,--"to
give yourselves up to things which relate to the body; to make, for
instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a
great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss
about riding. All these things ought to be done merely by the way:
the formation of the spirit and character must be our real concern."
This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek words aphuia, euphuia,+ a
finely tempered nature, a coarsely tempered nature, give exactly the
notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive of it: a
perfection in which the [23] characters of beauty and intelligence
are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things,"--as
Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too
little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books,--"the two
noblest of things, sweetness and light." The euphyês+ is the man who
tends towards sweetness and light; the aphyês+ is precisely our
Philistine. The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due
to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the
essential character of human perfection; and Mr. Bright's
misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, conies
itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks
having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself
a kind of homage to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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