Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
drawing the human race onwards to a more complete perfection.
Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its
desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom
from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even
while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief
men do themselves by their blind belief in some machinery or other,--
whether it is wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the
cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or whether it is a [33]
political organisation, or whether it is a religious organisation,--
oppose with might and main the tendency to this or that political and
religious organisation, or to games and athletic exercises, or to
wealth and industrialism, and try violently to stop it. But the
flexibility which sweetness and light give, and which is one of the
rewards of culture pursued in good faith, enables a man to see that a
tendency may be necessary, and even, as a preparation for something
in the future, salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals
who obey this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of
the hope of perfection by following it; and that its mischiefs are to
be criticised, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it
has served its purpose. Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech
at Paris,--and others have pointed out the same thing,--how necessary
is the present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in
order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society
of the future. The worst of these justifications is, that they are
generally addressed to the very people engaged, body and soul, in the
movement in question; at all events, that they are always seized with
[34] the greatest avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite
justifying their life; and that thus they tend to harden them in
their sins. Now, culture admits the necessity of the movement
towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows
that the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the same
time, that the passing generations of industrialists,--forming, for
the most part, the stout main body of Philistinism,--are sacrificed
to it. In the same way, the result of all the games and sports which
occupy the passing generation of boys and young men may be the
establishment of a better and sounder physical type for the future to
work with. Culture does not set itself against the games and sports;
it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its
improved physical basis; but it points out that our passing
generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.
Puritanism was necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English
race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination
over men's minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the
distant future; still, culture points out that the harmonious
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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