Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture. It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27] one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs, foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man, or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago, as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for culture. The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which they called _Kalokagathia_.[28] From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning. How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary is that it should be willed. Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation, lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.