I will thus ask you, my friend, not to confound this culture, this
sensitive, fastidious, ethereal goddess, with that useful
maid-of-all-work which is also called 'culture,' but which is only
the intellectual servant and counsellor of one's practical
necessities, wants, and means of livelihood Every kind of training,
however, which holds out the prospect of bread-winning as its end and
aim, is not a training for culture as we understand the word; but
merely a collection of precepts and directions to show how, in the
struggle for existence, a man may preserve and protect his own person.
It may be freely admitted that for the great majority of men such a
course of instruction is of the highest importance; and the more
arduous the struggle is the more intensely must the young man strain
every nerve to utilise his strength to the best advantage.

"But--let no one think for a moment that the schools which urge him on
to this struggle and prepare him for it are in any way seriously to be
considered as establishments of culture. They are institutions which
teach one how to take part in the battle of life; whether they promise
to turn out civil servants, or merchants, or officers, or wholesale
dealers, or farmers, or physicians, or men with a technical training.
The regulations and standards prevailing at such institutions differ
from those in a true educational institution; and what in the latter
is permitted, and even freely held out as often as possible, ought to
be considered as a criminal offence in the former.

"Let me give you an example. If you wish to guide a young man on the
path of true culture, beware of interrupting his naive, confident,
and, as it were, immediate and personal relationship with nature. The
woods, the rocks, the winds, the vulture, the flowers, the butterfly,
the meads, the mountain slopes, must all speak to him in their own
language; in them he must, as it were, come to know himself again in
countless reflections and images, in a variegated round of changing
visions; and in this way he will unconsciously and gradually feel the
metaphysical unity of all things in the great image of nature, and at
the same time tranquillise his soul in the contemplation of her
eternal endurance and necessity. But how many young men should be
permitted to grow up in such close and almost personal proximity to
nature! The others must learn another truth betimes: how to subdue
nature to themselves. Here is an end of th