particularly the public schools and universities; it does not cease
recommending these to foreigners, and never doubts that if the Germans
have become the most cultivated and discriminating people on earth, it
is owing to such institutions. Culture-Philistinism believes in
itself, consequently it also believes in the methods and means at its
disposal. Secondly, however, it leaves the highest judgment concerning
all questions of taste and culture to the scholar, and even regards
itself as the ever-increasing compendium of scholarly opinions
regarding art, literature, and philosophy. Its first care is to urge
the scholar to express his opinions; these it proceeds to mix, dilute,
and systematise, and then it administers them to the German people in
the form of a bottle of medicine. What conies to life outside this
circle is either not heard or attended at all, or if heard, is heeded
half-heartedly; until, at last, a voice (it does not matter whose,
provided it belong to some one who is strictly typical of the scholar
tribe) is heard to issue from the temple in which traditional
infallibility of taste is said to reside; and from that time forward
public opinion has one conviction more, which it echoes and re-echoes
hundreds and hundreds of times. As a matter of fact, though, the
aesthetic infallibility of any utterance emanating from the temple is
the more doubtful, seeing that the lack of taste, thought, and
artistic feeling in any scholar can be taken for granted, unless it
has previously been proved that, in his particular case, the reverse
is true. And only a few can prove this. For how many who have had a
share in the breathless and unending scurry of modern science have
preserved that quiet and courageous gaze of the struggling man of
culture--if they ever possessed it--that gaze which condemns even the
scurry we speak of as a barbarous state of affairs? That is why these
few are forced to live in an almost perpetual contradiction. What
could they do against the uniform belief of the thousands who have