UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE. 653 



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 educa- 

 tion 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 ex- 

 aminations. 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 par- 

 ticular 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 earnest- 

 ness of the essays in which he pleaded that cause render them per- 

 manently 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 in- 

 fluence 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 



