e Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own
image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for
culture.

The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one
of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it
is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and
the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it
is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though
directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which
they called _Kalokagathia_.[28]

From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German
thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of
the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has
written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward
the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or
indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.

How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary
is that it should be willed.

Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a
force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of
the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.

When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in
family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of
style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly
ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all
questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material
interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so
that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual
understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as
they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the
Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be
this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking
and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and
growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of
his class-ideas, or h