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94 <strong>The</strong> Human Cycleactivities of the sense-mind, but in the activities of knowledgeand reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities of thecultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened willwhich make for character and high ethical ideals and a largehuman action, not to be governed by our lower or our averagementality but by truth and beauty and the self-ruling will is theideal of a true culture and the beginning of an accomplishedhumanity.We get then by elimination to a positive idea and definitionof culture. But still on this higher plane of the mental life weare apt to be pursued by old exclusivenesses and misunderstandings.We see that in the past there seems often to havebeen a quarrel between culture and conduct; yet according toour definition conduct also is a part of the cultured life andthe ethical ideality one of the master impulses of the culturedbeing. <strong>The</strong> opposition which puts on one side the pursuit ofideas and knowledge and beauty and calls that culture and onthe other the pursuit of character and conduct and exalts thatas the moral life must start evidently from an imperfect view ofhuman possibility and perfection. Yet that opposition has notonly existed, but is a naturally strong tendency of the humanmind and therefore must answer to some real and importantdivergence in the very composite elements of our being. It isthe opposition which Arnold drew between Hebraism and Hellenism.<strong>The</strong> trend of the Jewish nation which gave us the severeethical religion of the Old Testament, — crude, conventional andbarbarous enough in the Mosaic law, but rising to undeniableheights of moral exaltation when to the Law were added theProphets, and finally exceeding itself and blossoming into a fineflower of spirituality in Judaic Christianity, 1 — was dominatedby the preoccupation of a terrestrial and ethical righteousnessand the promised rewards of right worship and right doing,but innocent of science and philosophy, careless of knowledge,1 <strong>The</strong> epithet is needed, for European Christianity has been something different, evenat its best of another temperament, Latinised, Graecised, Celticised or else only a roughTeutonic imitation of the old-world Hebraism.

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