our feelings--our sentiments; and culture must touch them, or it is
vague and empty. Therefore it is that I would say that we should think
with Goethe--to whom we must often recur for an insight into the
profoundest trends of human nature--must recur to him; and we find
that he lays down the principle of culture in the individual to be "A
general sympathy with all the highest ideas which have governed and
are governing the human mind." He said: "We should keep ourselves
first (each man and woman should keep himself and herself) in touch
with the highest elements of his and her own nature." He said, "It is
not so difficult, if we give but a little time to it--provided we give
that time regularly. We must remember," he says, "to cultivate our
intellect by some study, every day and our sense of the beautiful by
looking at something which is beautiful; and there is much around us
which costs us nothing to look at were we to observe it--the cloud,
the sunlight, the tree, the flower, a butterfly--anything of that kind
studied for a few minutes each day would continue to develop in man's
mind the sense of the beautiful. We should also appreciate carefully
our actions and govern them and measure them, as to whether they are
just to others--a matter which a very few minutes a day will probably
enable us to do;" and so also he would go further and seek to find, in
the idea of truth itself, as to what we ought and ought not to
believe--trying to discover some one test of truth which we can apply.

Indeed, we may therefore formulate and apply to nations at large what
Goethe has there suggested; and we shall find it can be arranged in
what I may call a pentatonic scale of culture. You may be aware that
all musical scales of all savage and barbarous and primitive tribes
are not in the octave, as ours, but in five notes only; they all have
one musical scale only, and that is a pentatonic scale; and it is
perhaps because they feel that their own minds are based upon some