One may be well-trained and carefully disciplined, and yet have no
share in this organised life of the race; but no one can possess real
culture who has not, according to his ability, entered into it by
making it a part of himself. It is by contact with these great ideas
that the individual mind puts itself in touch with the universal mind
and indefinitely expands and enriches itself.
Culture rests on ideas rather than on knowledge; its distinctive use
of knowledge is to gain material for ideas. For this reason the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey" are of more importance than Thucydides and
Curtius. For Homer was not only in a very important sense the
historian of his race; he was, above all, the expositor of its ideas.
There is involved in the very structure of the Greek epics the
fundamental conception of life as the Greeks looked at it; their view
of reverence, worship, law, obligation, subordination, personality. No
one can be said to have read these poems in any real sense until he
has made these ideas clear to himself; and these ideas carry with them
a definite enlargement of thought.
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