With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. To find the real ground for the very different estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity.
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