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.
On the other hand, the upper circles of the classes hitherto known as cultured are being gripped with a kind of despair over the already attained and still attainable results of this search for knowledge for its own sake, as a renowned scientist has already plainly expressed with his well-known saying, “Ignoramus, ignorabimus,” and as is becoming actually manifest in the ever-growing specializing of the sciences. For this specializing means, at bottom, nothing less than that there is no universal knowledge any more, still less a universal culture which comprehends all that men have achieved and thought; it means that there are only isolated departments of knowledge, behind which the abyss of ignorance yawns, for the most learned specialist, no less than for the most commonplace layman.
In the young generation of the civilized nations which is growing up under such auspices, there is prevailing a certain physical and mental weariness, which makes one seriously doubt whether the whole of modern education must not be on the wrong track if, instead of producing mental and physical power and joy in the lifelong acquisition of new and newer knowledge, it only prematurely dulls and destroys all these capacities, and if it is bringing on a too weakly organized and nervous race which would as little prove a match for the onset of some horde of healthy barbarians as did, once upon a time, the Roman or Greek cosmopolitan culture, outwardly brilliant, but likewise undermined by just such over-civilization as ours.
With this, we have arrived at once at the heart of our question. By culture we must understand something greater, something other than knowledge, or learnedness in special subjects, if it is at all to be something beneficial and desirable. Relatively speaking, the most striking result of general culture must be the healthy and vigorous development of every man’s personality into a full and rounded human life, inwardly at peace. Otherwise it will be of no very definite value, either to himself or to his state.
If it does not effect this it does not justify the hopes that have, for so long a time, been set upon it, and there may stand before us a time such as humanity has already more than once experienced, when the most highly civilized peoples have been overpowered by barbarians, simply by virtue of greater physical strength and greater mental freshness and originality, and when too delicately constituted republics have not been in a condition to withstand the momentum of such onslaughts, directed by some single powerful will.
Therefore the question “What is Culture?” is a question of the life of our whole present race, as well as, in a special degree, of our native land and the nature of its government.
I
By this very ambiguous and therefore often misunderstood word “culture” we must understand ourselves to mean an evolving from an originally formless, rough condition into a condition in which the development into the best of which the material is capable is completed, or at least is in the process of unfolding without hindrance.
Every man at the beginning is a rough block that can only be fashioned into a true human form and a true work of art partly by the formative power of life itself with its manifold influences, and partly by the hand and sagacity of men. And as an unskilful sculptor may so misshape and spoil a stone intrusted to him that no real work of art can any longer be made of it, or may carve it so delicately that it loses the massiveness and strength necessary to resist all outer influences, so also, in the art of human culture, we often speak from painful experience of a man’s culture as neglected, or distorted, or too excessive and refined.
In true culture (one that does not injure but benefits men), three things seem to be essential: the conquering of natural sensuality and natural selfishness through higher interests, the wholesome and symmetrical training of the physical and mental faculties, and a correct philosophical and religious conception of life. Where one of these three is lacking, there is a drying up in the man of something that had been capable of a better development.