ing kicked out of decent society, or perhaps even getting ourselves abolished altogether as pestiferous and unlimited nuisances. One may say, indeed, that the world leads a hand-to-mouth existence in its dealing with these terms; it is never quite sure that in a little while it may not have to require of them very different service from that which it has been getting from them. Hence, completely and permanently to clarify our understanding of these terms is impossible. If by any chance there comes to be a fairly general agreement about the meaning of one of them to-day, by to-morrow the sweep of thought or of events may have brought into high light some phases of the matter which the term attempts to identify, will have obscured or completely darkened other phases, and lo! the process of clarification is all undone. For some of us are always lagging behind the sweep of events, and shall therefore to-morrow be using the old term in to-day's sense, instead of in to-morrow's; doing, it may be, deadly mischief thereby. And as laggers do not all lag alike, consider how utterly the work of clarification is likely to be undone by day after to-morrow, or even later in the week yet, when I, perhaps, have fallen behind three or four days, my next-door neighbor two days, and even you yourself one day; while, to make the confusion utterly hopeless, Smith, with the everlasting obtrusiveness of his race, has thrust himself where, for your comfort and mine, he has no business to be, namely, two or three days ahead of the sweep of thought and events; from which vantage point he yells back at us peaceable and slower-going citizens absurd drivel about being in advance of his time, the gloriousness of martyrdom for the sake of truth and progress, and other like boastful and insulting remarks.

It is hardly necessary to give any example of this fluidity of terms. Any good dictionary is crammed with such examples. No dictionary, indeed, can ever tell the thousandth part of the story, since even modern dictionaries have a limited capacity, and since a far more important reason--oblivion speedily passes over the greater part of the story which the dictionary maker would have to tell, if he wanted to give a complete account of any word in the popular vocabulary; any word, that is to say, that has been much used by all sorts of persons, or nearly

that the plan is never finished to the satisfaction of anybody, or that the building is never begun? Is it any wonder that Justice is never realized in the world, since those whose business it is to realize it and whose blessing it would be to enjoy it, do not know what it is?

Our comparison is in some respects not fortunate. In the building of a house, such proceedings as have here been described would be unutterably grotesque. The facts which the comparison was meant to illustrate are not in the least grotesque. Reason and logic are among the guides of human life. They are perhaps its most important, and, on the whole, its safest guides; but as a mere matter of fact we know very well that they are far from being its absolute rulers. Not a little of the charm of existence comes from the effort to achieve the unattainable, and what is often, more or less dimly, no doubt, recognized as such. You and I know full well that, worry about it as much as ever we may, we shall not succeed in making our neighbors much better than they are. Do and say what we will, we know they are sure to go on violating the plainest dictates of common sense, in the simplest as well as in the more difficult relations of life; they will continue to be dull and stupid, failing absurdly in the future as they have done in the past, to appreciate the good things we say and do, and putting an utterly exaggerated estimate upon their own rather pitiful accomplishments in similar directions; and they will make themselves ridiculous in the future as they have done in the past, parading their weakness before the world under the curious delusion that they are not weaknesses but most amiable characteristics, perhaps, even, virtues so fine and rare as to make their possessors unique in their generation, or at least in their neighborhood. But does the fact-which we early learn to be a fact-does the fact that our neighbors are practically unimprovable, make us any the less disposed to give them a sharp disciplinary whack on this occasion, a good piece of advice on that one; and, in general, does it render us any the less disposed to hold over them the whips of correction and let loose upon them the tongue of rebuke, in so far as these things can be done without too serious inconvenience or danger to ourselves? Or again, do not all of us, no matter what our

tion of social forces shall have levelled all the differences between men which the word in the course of its long life will have denoted and connoted, as the books on rhetoric say. But now having conceded the worst that can be said against our term culture, and therefore against the usefulness of the distinction, or the supposed distinction, which the term names, let us turn our attention to the more pleasant and perhaps more profitable task of seeking, very briefly, a few of the more important elements making up what we conceive to be the indisputable and invariable part of the contents of the term. For part at least of the contents of almost any term of the kind I have been speaking of is not seriously disputable, is, if not exactly invariable in all cases, at least not so rapidly variable but that the world can at any given time hope to have a fairly working conception of it. Such a conception will satisfy plain people who think in the rough and think chiefly to live; though it will be far, of course, from satisfying either the idealist or the pedant. But as neither the idealist nor the pedant can ever be satisfied in this world anyway, plain, practical people may ignore them here, as they generally do.

We can perhaps get at the heart of our term most conveniently if we turn the abstract into the concrete, or, more properly, turn from the abstract to the concrete, and ask ourselves, not what are indisputable elements in culture, but what, if anything, it is that must indisputably characterize the person whom we are willing to call a person of culture.

Perhaps it would be well first to mention a few of the marks which a person does not need, necessarily, to possess, in order that we may rightly regard him as a person of culture. The person of culture, then, need not have all the virtures. Culture, that is to say, is not synonymous with perfection. People of fine instincts but of loose habits of thinking do not a little mischief by thus reading into a word of good implication a long list of admirable things that constitute no proper part of its meaning; and probably they do a good deal more mischief by treating words of bad implication in the same way. Who, for example, does not remember how all the categories of criminality were confused in the frenzied popular discussions of the term