EDITOR'S TABLE. 



557 



of Congress and of the State Legisla- 

 tures and their accompanying lobbyists, 

 who devote themselves to the regula- 

 tion of social affairs, well-instructed 

 men who have availed themselves of 

 what there is of social science, or are 

 they not as a class distinguished by their 

 ignorance and contempt of the subject ? 

 Not much knowledge is required to 

 make laws ; much to make them wisely 

 and intelligently. Laws of every sort for 

 the control of society are blindly en- 

 acted, amended, repealed, or left to be- 

 come dead letters, while only so much 

 of legislation gets executed as happens 

 to conform to the actual state of gen- 

 eral intelligence. Such hap-hazard, ill- 

 adapted action does not give a very ex- 

 alted idea of " mind as a social factor." 



THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO CULT 

 URE. 



Culture may, we think, be prop- 

 erly described as that knowledge or 

 training which is essential to, at least, 

 a provisional completeness of human 

 nature. To secure such provisional 

 completeness all the lines of a normal 

 human activity must be more or less 

 occupied, all the permanent faculties 

 and capacities of the normal human in- 

 tellect must have a certain exercise and 

 development, and so be made channels 

 of happiness and of usefulness to the 

 individual. Viewing the matter in this 

 light, we see that while this or that 

 special piece of knowledge may not be 

 necessary to culture, each 'branch of 

 knowledge and of thought must bring 

 some contribution to it. Culture im- 

 plies understanding, appreciation, and 

 some power of action. To have a 

 mind wholly unexercised in some im- 

 portant region or regions of knowl- 

 edge, and therefore wholly incapable 

 of appreciating what may thence be 

 drawn for the general nourishment of 

 thought and advancement of civiliza- 

 tion, is to have a culture so far incom- 

 plete ; and an incomplete culture is, ac- 

 cording to our present definition, the 



negation of culture. It may be that in 

 the case of no human being is our 

 idea of culture fully realized ; still, for 

 all that, the idea may be a good one. 

 Manifestly, the aim of culture is to give 

 such perfection to human nature as it 

 is capable of — to develop not one set 

 of faculties only, but all faculties ; and 

 so far it is correct to speak of (realized) 

 culture as " a provisional completeness 

 of human nature." 



It may, perhaps, be objected by some 

 that the definition of culture here given 

 is calculated to lend aid and comfort to 

 that spirit of dilettanteism which has 

 proved itself so serious an impediment 

 in the past to the progress of true knowl- 

 edge. Under the pretext, it will be said, 

 of aiming at some kind of completeness 

 of intellectual outfit, many will be found 

 contenting themselves with mere sur- 

 face knowledge, and shirking all the hard 

 work inseparable from a proper ground- 

 ing in any one branch of study. To this 

 we can only reply that the require- 

 ments of our definition would not really 

 be met by such a course as this, and 

 that nothing would be easier than to 

 expose the charlatan who, not only 

 knew nothing well, but had no proper 

 measure of his own ignorance. A large 

 part of culture, as we here understand 

 it, consists in having some due appre- 

 ciation of the extent and importance of 

 those fields of knowledge which we have 

 not been able to make our own. We 

 recognize the man of culture not less by 

 his diiBdence in regard to those things 

 he has not mastered, and upon which 

 he does not venture even to have an 

 opinion, than by the confidence and pre- 

 cision with which he moves in subjects 

 that he has more or less made his own. 

 Show us the man who, on the strength 

 of a little general reading, will express 

 opinions right and left, or who argues 

 deductively, with reckless confidence, 

 from a few general principles settled in 

 his own mind, and we shall show you 

 one who has never risen to the concep- 

 tion of culture which we are here en- 



