"But there is of culture another view...in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of 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...As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu’s words: “To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!” so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: “To make reason and the will of God prevail!” Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be overhasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to be beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific passion, as well as by the passion of doing good; that it has worthy notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them; and that, knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and stable which are not based on reason and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to institute."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. 1: Sweetness and Light
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Culture_and_Anarchy
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Culture and Anarchy
Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism is a series of periodical essays by the English poet-critic Matthew Arnold, first published in the Cornhill Magazine 1867–68 and collected as a book in 1869, when the preface was added.
21 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Culture and Anarchy →
Related Quotes
"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being…"
"One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life…"
"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Ba…"
"I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believ…"
"[A]s there is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so there is certainly a c…"
"Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of per…"
"Where was the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people who had a routine which they had christe…"
"Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end whic…"
"Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessi…"
"[T]he use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but m…"