CHAPTER
IX
Civilisation and Culture
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perfect harmony and synthesis, and she brings him back
violently to her original principles, sometimes even to something like her
earlier conditions so that he may start afresh on a larger curve of progress and
self-fulfilment.
It would seem at first sight that
since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental
faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,- his
preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life
and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs
which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art,
thought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is man's real business, these are
his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get
his livelihood, support a family and then die, -
the vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human
enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to
become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as
well as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive
of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from
her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to control,
create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner
existence, his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his
environment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and
the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of
the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there
comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations
and impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand
inwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he
has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than
mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot
do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern
his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something
greater than himself. Man's consciousness of the divine within himself and the
world is the supreme fact of his
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existence and to grow into that may very well be the
intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident
object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a
complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of
integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the
meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his
society.
The pursuit
of the mental life for its own sake is what we ordinarily mean by culture; but
the word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense
according to our ideas and predilections. For our mental existence is a very
complex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we have its lower and
fundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital.
And we have in that stratum two sides, the mental life of the senses,
sensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates
although with the objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of
the mental being concerned with the organs of action and the field of conduct
in which her objective purpose predominates although with the subjective as its
occasion. We have next in the scale, more sublimated, on one side the moral
being and its ethical life, on the other the aesthetic; each of them attempts
to possess and dominate the fundamental mind stratum and turn its experiences
and activities to its own benefit, one for the culture and worship of Right,
the other for the culture and worship of Beauty. And we have, above all these,
taking advantage of them, helping, forming, trying often to govern them
entirely, the intellectual being. Man's highest accomplished range is the life
of the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of
intelligent will, the buddhi, which
is or should be the driver of man's chariot.
But the intelligence of man is not
composed entirely and exclusively of the rational intellect and the rational
will; there enters into it a deeper, more intuitive, more splendid and
powerful, but much less clear, much less developed and as yet hardly at all
self-possessing light and force for which we have not even a name. But, at any
rate, its character is to drive at a kind of illumination, - not the dry light
of the reason, nor the moist and
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suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar
splendour. It may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and
heart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its natural urge,
which exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to
illuminate the ethical and aesthetic, to illuminate the emotional and the
active, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of
revelation, it unveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic
or psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a
super- natural light, a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by
Reason and Science, a Right larger and more divine than the moralist's scheme
of virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous
or imaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility
which leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid, a Sense beyond the senses
and sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which man's ordinary conduct of life hides
away from his impulses and from
his vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading
are its effects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this
in the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred deformations. It
is caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and
pious observances; it is unmercifully traded in and turned into poor and base
coin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of
which the religious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some
pale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations.
This very complexity of his mental
being, with the absence of anyone principle which can safely dominate the
others, the absence of any sure and certain light which can guide and fix in
their vacillations the reason and the intelligent will, is man's great
embarrassment and stumbling-block. All the hostile distinctions, oppositions,
antagonisms, struggles, conversions, reversions, perversions of his mentality,
all the chaotic war of ideas and impulses and tendencies which perplex his
efforts, have arisen from the natural misunderstandings and conflicting claims
of his many members. His reason is a judge who gives conflicting verdicts and
is bribed and influenced by the suitors;
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his intelligent will is an administrator harassed by the
conflicts of the different estates of his realm and by the sense of his own
partiality and final incompetence. Still in the midst of it all he has formed
certain large ideas of culture and the mental life, and his conflicting notions
about them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his
nature and shaped into a general system of curves by his many attempts to
arrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony.
We have
first the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. In its ordinary
,popular sense civilisation means the state of civil society, governed,
policed, organised, educated, possessed of knowledge and appliances as opposed
to that which has not or is not supposed to have these advantages. In a certain
sense the Red Indian, the Basuto, the Fiji islander had their civilisation;
they possessed a rigorously, if simply organised society, a social law, some
ethical ideas, a religion, a kind of training, a good many virtues in some of
which, it is said, civilisation is sadly lacking; but we are agreed to call
them savages and barbarians, mainly it seems, because of their crude and
limited knowledge, the primitive rudeness of their appliances and the bare
simplicity of their social organisation. In the more developed states of
society we have such epithets 'as semi-civilised and semi-barbarous which are
applied. by different types of civilisation to each other, - the one which is for a time dominant and
physically successful has naturally the loudest and most self- confident say in
the matter. Formerly men were more straight- forward and simple-minded and
frankly expressed their stand- point by stigmatising all peoples different in
general culture from themselves as barbarians or Mlechchhas. The word
civilisation so used comes to have a merely relative significance or hardly any
fixed sense at all. We must therefore get rid in it of all that is temporary or
accidental and fix it upon this distinction that barbarism is the state of
society in which man is almost entirely preoccupied with his life and body, his
economic and physical existence, - at first with their sufficient maintenance,
not as yet their greater or richer well-being, - and has few means and little
inclination to develop his mentality, while civilisation is the more evolved
state of society in which to a
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sufficient
social and economic organisation is added the activity of the mental life in
most if not all of its parts; for sometimes some of these parts are left aside
or discouraged or temporarily atrophied by their inactivity, yet the society
may be very obviously civilised and even highly civilised. This conception will
bring in all the civilisations historic and prehistoric and put aside all the
barbarism, whether of Africa or Europe or Asia, Hun or Goth or Vandal or
Turcoman. It is obvious that in a state of barbarism the rude beginnings of
civilisation may exist; it is obvious too that in a civilised society a great
mass of barbarism or numerous relics of it may exist. In that sense all
societies are semi- civilised. How much of our present-day civilisation will be
looked back upon with wonder and disgust by a more developed humanity as the
superstitions and atrocities of an imperfectly civilised era! But the main
point is this that in any society which we can call civilised the mentality of
man must be active, the mental pursuits developed and the regulation and
improvement of his life by the mental being a clearly self-conscious concept in
his better mind.
But in a civilised society there is
still the distinction between the partially, crudely, conventionally civillsed
and the cultured. It would seem therefore that the mere participation in the
ordinary benefits of civilisation is not enough to raise a man into the mental
life proper; a farther development, a higher elevation is needed. The last
generation drew emphatically the distinction between the cultured man and the
Philistine and got a fairly clear idea of what was meant by it. Roughly, the
Philistine was for them the man who lives outwardly the civilised life,
possesses all its paraphernalia, has and mouths the current stock of opinions,
prejudices; conventions, sentiments, but is impervious to ideas, exercises no
free intelligence, is innocent of beauty and art, vulgarises everything that he
touches, religion, ethics, literature, life. The Philistine is in fact the
modern civilised barbarian; he is often the half-civilised physical and vital
barbarian by his unintelligent attachment to the life of the body, the life of
the vital needs and impulses and the ideal of the merely domestic and economic
human animal; but essentially and commonly he is the mental barbarian, the
average sensational man. That is to
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say, his mental
life is that of the lower substratum of the mind, the life of the sensations,
the life of the emotions, the life of practical conduct - the first status of
the mental being. In all these he may be very active, very vigorous, but he
does not govern them by a higher light or seek to uplift them to a freer and
nobler eminence; rather he pulls the higher faculties down to the level of his
senses, his sensations, his unenlightened and unchastened emotions, his gross
utilitarian practicality. His aesthetic side is little developed; either he
cares nothing for beauty or has the crudest aesthetic tastes which help to
lower and vulgarise the general standard of aesthetic creation and the
aesthetic sense. He is often strong about morals, far more particular usually
about moral conduct than the man of culture, but Ills moral being is as crude
and undeveloped as the rest of him; it is conventional, unchastened,
unintelligent, a mass of likes and dislikes, prejudices and current opinions,
attachment to social conventions and respectabilities and an obscure dislike
- rooted in the mind of sensations and not in the
intelligence - of any open defiance or
departure from the generally accepted standard of conduct. His ethical bent is
a habit of the sense- mind; it is the morality of the average sensational man.
He has a reason and the appearance of an intelligent will, but they are not his
own, they are part of the group-mind, received from his environment; or so far
as they are his own, merely a practical, sensational, emotional reason and
will, a mechanical repetition of habitual notions and rules of conduct, not a
play of real thought and intelligent determination. His use of them no more
makes him a developed mental being than the daily movement to and from his
place of business makes the average Londoner a developed physical being or his
quotidian contributions to the economic life of the country make the bank-clerk
a developed economic man. He is not mentally active, but mentally reactive,
- a very different matter.
The Philistine is not dead, - quite the
contrary, he abounds, - but he no longer reigns. The sons of Culture
have not exactly conquered, but they have got rid of the old Goliath and
replaced him by a new giant. This is the sensational man who has got awakened
to the necessity at least of some intelligent use of the
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higher faculties and is trying to be mentally active. He
has been whipped and censured and educated into that activity and he lives
besides in a maelstrom of new information, new intellectual fashions, new ideas
and new movements to which he can no longer be obstinately impervious. He is
open to new ideas, he can catch at them and hurl them about in a rather
confused fashion; he can understand, or misunderstand ideals, organise to get
them carried out and even, it would appear, fight and die for them. He knows he
has to think about ethical problems, social problems, problems of science and
religion, to welcome new political developments, to look with as understanding
an eye as he can attain to at all the new movements of thought and inquiry and
action that chase each other across the modem field or clash upon it. He is a
reader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature, - you will find in him perhaps a student of
Tagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about
beauty and aesthetics, but he has heard that Art is a not altogether
unimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is
the great reading public; the newspapers and weekly and monthly reviews are
his; fiction and poetry and art are his mental caterers, the theatre and the
cinema and the radio exist for him: Science hastens to bring her knowledge and
discoveries to his doors and equip his life with endless machinery; politics
are shaped in his image. It is he who opposed and then brought about the
enfranchisement of women, who has been evolving syndicalism, anarchism, the war
of classes, the uprising of labour, waging what we are told are wars of ideas,
or of cultures, - a ferocious type of conflict made in the very image of this
new barbarism, - or bringing about in a few days Russian revolutions which the
century-long efforts and sufferings of the intelligentsia failed to achieve. It
is his coming which has been the precipitative agent for the reshaping of the
modem world. If a Lenin, a Mussolini, a Hitler have achieved their rapid and
almost stupefying success, it was because this driving force, this quick
responsive acting mass was there to carry them to victory - a force lacking to
their less fortunate predecessors.
The first results of this
momentous change have been
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inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the
thinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to some
extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at
first sight to have elevated or strengthened it by this large accession of the
half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more
directly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before.
Commercialism is still the heart of modem civilisation; a sensational activism
is still its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the
sensational man; it has only made necessary to him things to which he was not
formerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even
aesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital
substratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army of
writers to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual
pabulum for him; he has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he
does not care or has not time to co-ordinate or assimilate, for popularised
scientific knowledge, for such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put
before him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation of
many kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and
which do give it sometimes a certain colour. It is still the activism and
sensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the
cultured, the intelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as
they never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first stimulate or
amuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never
had before. The result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to
make talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular suc- cess, to put the
writer and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of the
cultured Greek slave in a Roman house- hold where he has to work for, please
amuse and instruct his master while keeping a careful eye on his tastes and
preferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught
his fancy. The higher mental life, in a word, has been democratised,
sensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the
eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude
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but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge,
if not yet Beauty, can get a hearing
and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for
their results; the mass of culture and of men who think and strive seriously to
appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man
has begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods of
education, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of
practical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown
phenomenon, a race of men - not only a class - who have to some extent found
and developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity.
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