428 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



BAEBAEISM, CULTURE, EMPIRE, UNION 



By De. benjamin IVES GILMAN 



BOSTON MUSEDM OF FINE ABTS 



THE word "barbarism" voices the contempt of the Greeks for the 

 peoples of other speech about them. Barbarian {/Sdp/Sapoi;) is 

 one of the words called onomatopoetic, whose sense is in its sound. 

 It sounds like mere mouthing, and "bellower" or "inarticulate 

 speaker" is its original sense. A barbarian meant to the Greeks one 

 denied the main channel of human sympathy — the gift of compre- 

 hensible utterance. His language is pure babble. The word traces 

 the undeveloped manners, customs, polity, trade, craftsmanship, art, 

 science, religion, of rude communities back to mutual misunderstanding 

 among their members. They are barbarians because unable to take 

 each other's point of view. A custom is barbarous when it can not be 

 followed without offending the sensibilities of others. A punishment is 

 barbarous when its anguish to the victim would stay the executioner^s 

 hand were he really alive to it. Mr. Chesterton has just told us that 

 the barbarian is he who "lacks that little mirror in the mind in which 

 we see the mind of the other man " ; or, to vary the phrase, " in which 

 we see what the other man has a mind to." 



The opposite of barbarism we call culture. Culture is the reflection 

 within my mind of what my neighbor has a mind to. We owe the word 

 to the Latins, who applied their term for "care" or "tillage" to that 

 mellowed condition of the mental soil in which we come to feel things 

 as other men have felt them. The culture of an individual is the whole 

 body of the ideals he has absorbed from others. The culture of a 

 nation, race or period is the sum and substance of the ideals transmitted 

 from one individual to another until they have become the common 

 property of all within its limits. It is in this collective sense that we 

 speak of Swedish culture, Latin culture, the culture of the Renais- 

 sance. Civilization implies culture. The multiplication of common 

 observances, common achievements, is impossible without mutual under- 

 standing, without tastes and aspirations shared. A civilization is a 

 precipitate of all the ideals current among its citizens. 



High civilization tends to confirm what it leaves of man's native 

 barbarism. The argument "Our ways are good; therefore no other 

 ways are worth notice " is a non-sequitur dear to the human mind. The 

 legendary order of Caliph Omar for the destruction of the Alexandrian 

 Library bespoke culture and barbarism at once: "If these books con- 



