tributory causes, though other and much more potent causes have also been at work. When we examine Arnold's own conception of culture, as expressed in successive essays, we find that it goes through a process of evolution. At first he means by culture a knowledge and love of the best literature, ancient and modern, and the influence on mind and manners which flows thence. Then his conception of culture becomes enlarged; it is now no longer solely or mainly aesthetic, but also intellectual; it includes receptivity of new ideas; it is even the passion for "seeing things as they really are." But there is yet a further development. True culture, in his final view, is not only aesthetic and intellectual; it is also moral and spiritual: its aim is, in his phrase, "the harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature." But, whether the scope which Arnold, at a particular moment, assigned to culture was narrower or wider, the instrument of culture with which he was chiefly concerned was always literature. Culture requires us, he said, to know ourselves and the world; and, as a means to this end, we must "know the best that has been thought and said in the world." By literature, then—as he once said in reply to Huxley—he did not mean merely belles lettres; he included the books which record the great results of science. But he insisted mainly on the best poetry and the highest eloquence. In comparing science and literature as general instruments of education,
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