NOTES ON CULTURE
153
cntlCism, any more than I am insensible to the possibility that the
highest achievements of a culture may mark the end of that culture;
that history goes on, and that men cannot remain settled in any
approximation to perfection that they attain-for all our approxima–
tions are too imperfect. My reply must be that to think in terms of
historical inevitability can, at most, only be one side of our intellectual
activity; that if we are to think towards action we must first enquire
what things are valuable, whether it is possible to have them
all
at
once or not; and that it is much more worthy of the human spirit to
suffer from paradise lost or paradise unattainable than to content
itself with its fallen state in ignorance. And the magnitude of the
crisis of the world today may itself prevent our being hypnotized by
the admonitions of history: for we are not now in a position in which
old peoples and old cultures are likely to be supplanted by new-we
are in a common danger to all the races of the world.
I do not propose to explore in all the directions to which a con–
sideration of culture naturally leads.
It
is obvious that there is a
bearing on the theory of Education, which might, I hope, provide
a corrective to some of our educational assumptions. Unless we have
a right notion of what is valuable, of what we mean by success, and
of what types of man we admire, our reforms of education may go
little farther than a multiplication of sanitary school-buildings and a
further proliferation of diplomas. The assumption that clerical labor
is more dignified than manual labor, that manual labor in a factory
is more dignified than labor on the land, is always liable to creep in
unsuspected; as is also the assumption that "culture" is something to
be brought down to everyone, instead of something to which a few
can be raised. But the only affirmation about education, perhaps, that
comes within the scope of this paper, is this: that it is only in a very
restricted sense that education produces culture-it is more widely
true
t~
say that the culture produces the education: just as the
political system of a people must issue from its culture.* Which is not
*
It is possible that we are about to lay more burdens upon "Education"
than it will bear. In an" article in
The Sociological Review
for July-October, 1940,
Mr. A. M. Carr-Saunders writes:
"I have said that the responsibility of the universities is heavy. Upon them
rests the training of the elite. It is coming to be recognized that any civilization
which is vital and progressive, depends upon smaller groups whose influence
directs changes in the cultural pattern and determines whether they are for the
better or the worse. These groups were once united by blood; later they were
bound together by the possession of property; in the society of the future they
will emerge by selection. In the selection and training of those who will compose
these groups, the universities must play a large part. I have used the plural
advisedly. It is not a question of producing
an
elite. The health of civilization
