ng.

And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual
moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which
announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note,
closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour,
Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written
something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both
sides, little conviction on either.

It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely
suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these
difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday
term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we
to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is
still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26]
I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday
conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow
us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at
the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular
phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that
they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.

Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make
actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And
since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by
sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be
associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process
and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.

It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have
written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond
recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and
significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27]
one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many
overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and
English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the
overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man,
or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago,
as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the
full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this
sens