This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[161]
in lucidity, we do not see clear or think straight, and the Americans have here much the advantage of us.
Yet we find an acute and experienced Englishman saying that there is no country, calling itself civilized, where one would not rather live than in the United States, except Russia!
The civilization of the United States must some-how, if an able man can think thus, have shortcomings, in spite of the country's success and prosperity.
What is civilization?
It is the humanization of man in society, the satisfaction for him, in society, of the true law of human nature.
Man's study, says Plato, is to discover the right answer to the question how to live? our aim, he says, is very and true life.
We are more or less civilized as we come more or less near to this aim, in that social state which the pursuit of our aim essentially demands.
But several elements or powers, as I have often insisted, go to build up a complete human life.
There is the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners; we have instincts responding to them all, requiring them all. And we are perfectly civilized only when all these instincts in our nature, all these elements in our civilization, have been adequately
Boston. De Wolfe, Fiske &c Co. 361 and 365 Washington Street. 1888.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.