... The Human Cycle Chapter X Aesthetic and Ethical Culture The idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little more clearly, or at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast its natural opposites. The unmental, the purely physical life is very obviously its opposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or the... the beautiful,—understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,—which creates the artistic and aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each... instance of the ethical turn the middle-class puritanism touched with a narrow, tepid and conventional religiosity which was so marked an element in nineteenth-century England; that was not an ethical culture, but simply a local variation of the general type of bourgeois respectability you will find everywhere at a certain stage of civilisation,—it was Philistinism pure and simple. Nor should we take ...
... in our being which seeks after such a rule. The sattwic will in our nature has to govern us and not the rajasic and tamasic will. This is the meaning of all high reason in action as of all true ethical culture; it is the law of Nature in us striving to evolve from her lower and disorderly to her higher and orderly action, to act not in passion and ignorance with the result of grief and unquiet, but in ...
... and splendid picture. All his work is of this tissue. His great literary epic, the "House of Raghu", treats the story of a line of ancient kings as representative of the highest religious and ethical culture and ideals of the race and brings out its significances environed with a splendid decoration of almost pictorially depicted sentiment and action, noble or beautiful thought and speech and vivid ...
... civilised human society,—the animal completely unleashed—it wonders how these brute passions could subsist along with so much of intellectual and cultural advancement. When an unsophisticated man of ethical culture hears of great scientists (science is the parent of culture, it is claimed) betraying the political or military secrets of their own motherland; eminent university professors (the universities ...
... identity makes its own demands upon us. My religion tells me to love my neighbour. But when I go out into the world, I am under such a pressure to make an extra buck that I forget all about love. Our ethical culture tells me to be tolerant, kind to others, treat everyone impartially, be honest and industrious and so on. But in the world of the struggle for survival all these counsels of good will are drowned ...
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