_clairvoyant_ culture.
But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years that
man has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of its
presence. In individuals, yes--in the Greek Plato, and I think in your
English Milton and Bishop Berkeley--but in humanity, never; and hardly
in any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, is
not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is
concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course,
conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first
requisite to a _regime_ of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop
of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious
person--he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if
that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at
novelty--once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling
on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty
civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. A
certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded
his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a
hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in
general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the
Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years
of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its
part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that
it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my
profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means
anything, can only mean the art by which men live musically
together--to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, to
triumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formula
defining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled,"
should surely at this hour be _too_ primitive--_too_ Opic--to bring
anything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and the
very fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptance
in all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: _idea_]
which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed--far,
perhaps, by ages and aeons--from becoming part of the general
conception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of living
ever so much as approached solution, much less