Ed Essays |
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Author:
| Arnold, Matthew |
ISBN: | 978-0-217-23698-0 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2009 |
Publisher: | General Books LLC
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $19.99 |
Book Description:
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: property is expedient for our civilisation and welfare. But this assumption, of which the distinguished personages who adopt it seem so sure that they think it needless to produce grounds for it, is just what we have to examine. - Now, there is a sentence of Sir Erskine May, whom I have already quoted,...
More DescriptionPurchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: property is expedient for our civilisation and welfare. But this assumption, of which the distinguished personages who adopt it seem so sure that they think it needless to produce grounds for it, is just what we have to examine. - Now, there is a sentence of Sir Erskine May, whom I have already quoted, which will bring us straight to the very point that I wish to raise. Sir Erskine May, after saying, as you have heard, that France has pursued social equality, and has come to fearful troubles, demoralisation, and intellectual stoppage by doing so, continues thus: ' Yet is she high, if not the first, in the scale of civilised nations.' Why, here is a curious thing, surely A nation pursues social equality, supposed to be an utterly false and baneful ideal; it arrives, as might have been expected, at fearful misery and deterioration by doing so; and yet, at the; same time, it is high, if not the first, in the scale of civilised nations. What do we mean by civilised? Sir Erskine May does not seem to have asked himself the question, so we will try to answer it for ourselves. Civilisation is the humanisation of man in society. To be humanised is to comply with the true law of our human nature: servare moiium, fincmquc tenere, Naturamquc scqui, says Lucan; ' to keep our measure, and to hold fast our end, and to follow Nature.' To be humanised is to make progress towards this, our tme and full humanity. And to be civilised is to make progress towards this in civil society; in that civil society ' without which, ' says Burke, ' man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it.' To be the most civilised of nations, therefore, is to be the nati6n which comes nearest to human perfection, in the...