[thus]

removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it— motives eminently such as are called social-come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good." Not only so, but this passion for doing good derives vastly increased force and effectiveness when it is regarded as a part of culture, since it manifests itself in rational and regulated effort for reformation, and no longer in undisciplined activity and vain beating of the air, for where it has formerly acted by blind intuition reason now comes in and guides good impulse by judgment. So to the ethical teacher who maintained that social usefulness really means "losing oneself in a mass of disagreeable and mechanical details," Arnold replies that the most valuable social service which a man can render is to "find himself." And how? By finding "the intelligible law of things." Placing himself under this law, a man is released from the thrall of prejudice and preconception, and by gaining the free atmosphere of thought he becomes for the first time

1 In a letter of February 22, 1868, he writes: "The Spectator does me a very bad service by talking of my contempt for unintellectual people. It is not at all true, and it sets people against me."

capable of living a rational life as an individual and of serving society intelligently.

This idea of culture as an inward condition of perfection is obviously at variance with much of the mechani-cal and material civilisation most esteemed amongst us. "The actual civilisation of England and America," he writes in Irish Essays, is "a civilisation with many virtues, but without lucidity of mind andĮ without largeness of temper. And now we English, at any rate, have to acquire them, and to learn the necessity for us to live,' as Emerson says, ' from a greater depth of being.' The sages and the saints alike have always preached this necessity; the so-called practical people and men of the world have always derided it.”

To the Englishman's blind faith in machinery in particular Arnold shows little consideration; it is an idol, and before his worship can be directed to the highest and truest objects of desire the idol must be put away. And what are the possessions and institutions most valued and exalted amongst us but such machinery?— freedom, wealth, population, even those religious organisations with which England is so amply provided? These things are not ends in themselves, though generally regarded as such, but instruments-machinery by the aid of which the purposes of culture may be served, though only if they are properly employed.

Take political liberty. It is a valuable good so long as it is not converted into a fetish and credited with talismanic powers. This, however, is just the danger

which exists in England, where everybody has been taught to believe that "the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature." Whether political liberty be really serviceable or not depends on whether the owner of that liberty is intelligent and enlightened enough to understand his duties as a citizen and is determined to discharge those duties with honesty and rectitude. Hence Arnold holds that "The idea which culture sets before us of perfection - an increased spiritual activity, having for its character increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy-is an idea which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of its own industrial performances."

Again, it is another of the Englishman's proudest claims that nowhere is speech so free as within his own shores. However it may be with other unfortunate countries, here, at any rate, a man can say what he likes, when and where he likes. Vain boast, says Arnold, unless his saying is wise and worthy to be said, for otherwise what profit the freest thought and utterance in the world? Nay, unless that condition be fulfilled, the very wideness of freedom's limits may be the standard of its disadvantage and harm for the man himself and the community to which he belongs.

So, too, with the current ideas as to national great

ness. The political economist will tell you that national pre-eminence consists in material wealth; the commercial man, accustomed to concrete ideas, will point to his bales of merchandise; while religious leaders will point to the Bible and England's multiplicity of churches. "Machinery again!" answers Arnold. All these things, too, prove nothing as to England's greatness independently of the results for culture, for perfection, in the totality of the individual and national life, which are actually achieved by them. "Never did people believe anything more firmly than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so."

He allows that commerce and industrialism are necessary as a foundation of future material well-being, and to that extent are justifiable elements in the national life, but he laments that this is not a truth which needs to be emphasised in modern days, and, besides, they exact a terrible penalty. "The worst of these justifications is that they are generally addressed to the very people engaged, body and soul, in the movement in question; at all events, that they are always seized with the greatest avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite justifying their life; and that thus they

tend to harden them in their sins. Culture admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows that the future may derive benefit from it, but insists, at the same time, that the passing generations of industrialists-forming, for the most part, the stout main body · of Philistines-are sacrificed to it."

But religion, at any rate religion in the abstract, religion conceived wholly without regard for the rivalries of sect and party,—that surely is a positive good; nay, is it not perfection itself? Yet even to this plea the answer again is-machinery! Tried by results, "the English reliance on our religious organisations and on their ideas of human perfection just as they stand is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful."

Culture, which is bent on seeing things as they are, and on bringing the human race to a more complete, more harmonious conception of life, is here likewise the true corrective. Religion at its best has only value in so far as it sets a man on the path to perfection and furnishes him with a continual forward impetus. Here Arnold's advice is-Put not your trust in feelings, for nothing is so deceptive. Even the inward peace and satisfaction which come when the more obvious defects of the animal part of human nature have been suppressed is only a relative gain, and must not be confused with that absolute inward peace and satisfaction