Besides, our knowledge of men must not serve merely to help us separate the goats from the sheep and henceforth concern ourselves only with the latter; but it should serve to keep us from being deceived, and to enable us to work for the improvement of ourselves and of all with whom our lot brings us in touch, with a better understanding of their character. For when a man once abandons the belief that every single human soul has an infinite value and that it is worth any trouble taken to save it, then he finds himself upon an inclined plane on which he gradually slips back again into complete selfishness. The final word as to the knowledge of men must be--love to all. Love alone enables us to know a man exactly as he is, and yet not to flee him. To know men, without love, has always been a misfortune and the cause of the profound melancholy of many wise men in all ages; it has driven them to renounce the society of their fellows, or to take refuge in the theory of absolute government. For there are only two ways of dealing with men, when one has once learned to know them--through fear, or through love. All intermediate methods are delusions. But if any one appeals to fear, or if love is to any one only lip-service, let him hear Brother Jacopone da Todi: “That I love my neighbor I really know only when, after he has injured me, I love him no less than before. For if I then loved him less, I should thereby prove that, before, it was not he I loved, but myself.” IV. WHAT IS CULTURE? IV. WHAT IS CULTURE?[1] A prophet of Israel of the latter days of the Kings, who himself seems to have been, in a way, self-taught, announces to his nation the oncoming of a new era in about the following words: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, but of the hearing of the truth. In that day shall the fair youths and maidens faint, who now are relying upon the god at Dan and the way of Beer-sheba. For they shall so fall therewith that they shall not be able to rise again.” What Amos meant by the god at Dan and the “way of Beer-sheba” is hardly to be discovered now with exactness, and indeed, for our purposes, we may leave it undetermined. Only thus much is clear from the context, that they were for the time elements of culture whose insufficiency should later come to light--as actually happened at the beginning of the Christian era. Widely recognized phenomena of our own days fittingly remind us again of these ancient, half-forgotten words. On the other hand, a struggle that may almost be called violent is passing through the broad masses of the nations. They are striving to win culture for themselves as quickly as possible, so that they may elevate themselves to the power which, in their view, goes hand in hand with this culture, or, as they mostly conceive it, with the acquisition of certain kinds of knowledge.