re from a thorough disinterested
study of human nature and human experience learns to conceive it,--is a
harmonious expansion of _all_ the powers which make the beauty and worth
of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-development of any
one power at the expense of the rest. Here culture goes beyond religion
as religion is generally conceived by us.

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious
perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in
becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward
condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of
circumstances,--it is clear that culture, instead or being the
frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright,[395] and Mr. Frederic
Harrison,[396] and many other Liberals are apt to call it, has a very
important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is
particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole
civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of
Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become
more so. But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to
perform, because here that mechanical character, which civilization
tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree. Indeed
nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to fix
them, meet in this country with some powerful tendency which thwarts
them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection as an _inward_
condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and
material civilization in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so
much in esteem as with us. The idea of perfection as a _general_
expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong
individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the
individual's personality, our maxim of "every man for himself." Above
all, the idea of perfection as a _harmonious_ expansion of human nature
is at variance with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for
seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic
absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following. So
culture has a rough task to achieve in this country. Its preachers have,
and are likely long to have, a hard time of it, and they will much
oftener be regarded, for a great while to come, as elegant or spurious
Jeremiahs than as friends and benefactors. That, however, will