man is born into possession of a world of knowledge and truth which
has been explored, settled, and organised for him. To the discovery
and regulation of this world every race has worked with more or less
definiteness of aim, and the total result of the incalculable labours
and sufferings of men is the somewhat intangible but very real thing
we call civilisation.

At the heart of civilisation, and determining its form and quality, is
that group of vital ideas to which each race has contributed according
to its intelligence and power,--the measure of the greatness of a race
being determined by the value of its contribution to this organised
spiritual life of the world. This body of ideas is the highest product
of the life of men under historic conditions; it is the quintessence
of whatever was best and enduring not only in their thought, but in
their feeling, their instinct, their affections, their activities; and
the degree in which the man of to-day is able to appropriate this rich
result of the deepest life of the past is the measure of his culture.
One may be well-trained and carefully disciplined, and yet have no
share in this organised life of the race; but no one can possess real
culture who has not, according to his ability, entered into it by
making it a part of himself. It is by contact with these great ideas
that the individual mind puts itself in touch with the universal mind
and indefinitely expands and enriches itself.

Culture rests on ideas rather than on knowledge; its distinctive use
of knowledge is to gain material for ideas. For this reason the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey" are of more importance than Thucydides and
Curtius. For Homer was not only in a very important sense the
historian of his race; he was, above all, the expositor of its ideas.
There is involved in the very structure of the Greek epics the