Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/659

Rh which includes such attributes is of inestimable value in the practical work of life, and especially in work of a pioneer kind. It is precisely in a country which presents new problems, where novel difficulties of all sorts have to be faced, where social and political questions assume complex forms for which experience furnishes no exact parallel, it is precisely there that the largest and best gifts which the higher education can confer are most urgently demanded.

But how is culture, as distinct from mere knowledge, to be attained? The question arises as soon as we turn from the machinery of the higher education to consider its essence, and the general aims which it has in view. Culture can not be secured by planning courses of study, nor can it be adequately tested by the most ingenious system of examinations. But it would be generally allowed that a university training, if it is really successful, ought to result in giving culture, over and above such knowledge as the student may acquire in his particular branch or branches of study. We all know what Matthew Arnold did, a generation ago, to interpret and diffuse in England his conception of culture. The charm, the humor and also the earnestness of the essays in which he pleaded that cause render them permanently attractive in themselves, while at the same time they have the historical interest of marking a phase in the progress of English thought and feeling about education. For, indeed, whatever may be the criticisms to which Arnold's treatment of the subject is open in detail, he truly indicated a great national defect; and by leading a multitude of educated persons to realize it, he helped to prepare the way for better things. Dealing with England as it was in the sixties, he complained that the bulk of the well-to-do classes were devoid of mental culture—crude in their perceptions, insensible to beauty, and complacently impenetrable to ideas. If, during the last thirty or forty years, there has been a marked improvement, the popular influence of Matthew Arnold's writings may fairly be numbered among the contributory causes, though other and much more potent causes have also been at work. When we examine Arnold's own conception of culture, as expressed in successive essays, we find that it goes through a process of evolution. At first he means by 'culture' a knowledge and love of the best literature, ancient and modern, and the influence on mind and manners which flows thence. Then his conception of culture becomes enlarged; it is now no longer solely or mainly esthetic, but also intellectual; it includes receptivity of new ideas; it is even the passion for 'seeing things as they really are.' But there is yet a further development. True culture, in his final view, is not only esthetic and intellectual; it is also moral and spiritual; its aim is, in his phrase, 'the harmonious expansion of all the powers which made the beauty and worth of human nature.' But whether the scope which Arnold, at a