"Culture" is a word generally used to denote learning and refinement in manners and art. The development of culture—the acquisition of new knowledge and the creation of beautiful things—is ordinarily the work of a comparatively small number of scientists and artists. Now if in any particular period or among any special people, we find a relatively larger group of intellectual leaders who succeed in establishing an important educated class and in making permanent contributions to the civilization of posterity, then we say that it is a cultured century or a cultured nation.
[Sidenote: Greek Culture]
All races and all generations have had some kind of culture, but within the recorded history of humanity, certain peoples and certain centuries stand out most distinctly as influencing its evolution. Thus, the Greeks of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ gathered together and handed down to us all manner of speculation about the nature of the universe, all manner of hypothetical answers to the eternal questions—Whence do we come, What are we doing, Where do we go?—and this was the foundation of modern philosophy and metaphysics. From the same Greeks came our geometry and the rudiments of our sciences of astronomy and medicine. It was they who gave us the model for nearly every form of literature—dramatic, epic, and lyric poetry, dialogues, oratory, history—and in their well-proportioned temples, in their balanced columns and elaborate friezes, in their marble chiselings of the perfect human form, they fashioned for us forever the classical expression of art.
[Sidenote: Roman Culture]
Still in ancient times, the Romans developed classical architecture in the great triumphal arches and in the high-domed public buildings which strewed their empire. They adapted the fine forms of Greek literature to their own more pompous, but less subtle, Latin language. They devised a code of law and a legal system which made them in a real sense the teachers of order and the founders of the modern study of law.
[Sidenote: Mohammedan Culture]
The Mohammedans, too, at the very time when the Christians of western Europe were neglecting much of the ancient heritage, kept alive the traditions of Greek philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. From eastern Asia they borrowed algebra, the Arabic numerals, and the compass, and, in their own great cities of Bagdad, Damascus, and Cordova, they themselves developed the curiously woven curtains and rugs, the strangely wrought blades and metallic ornaments, the luxurious dwellings and graceful minarets which distinguish Arabic or Mohammedan art.
[Sidenote: Medieval Culture]
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the height of the middle ages —came a wonderful outburst of intellectual and artistic activity. Under the immediate auspices of the Catholic Church it brought forth abundantly a peculiarly Christian culture. Renewed acquaintance with Greek philosophy, especially with that of Aristotle, was joined with a lively religious faith to produce the so called scholastic philosophy and theology. Great institutions of higher learning—the universities— were now founded, in which centered the revived study not only of philosophy but of law and medicine as well, and over which appeared the first cloud-wrapped dawn of modern experimental science. And side by side with the sonorous Latin tongue, which long continued to be used by scholars, were formed the vernacular languages—German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.—that gave a wealth of variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with pointed arch and flying buttress, with lofty spire and delicate tracery, wonderful wood carvings, illuminated manuscripts, quaint gargoyles, myriad statues of saints and martyrs, delicately colored paintings of surpassing beauty—all betokened the great Christian, or Gothic, art of the middle ages.
[Sidenote: New Elements in Culture of Sixteenth Century]