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Updated: September 24, 2025
There is only one way in which people are now able to obtain a genuine education, and it goes by the name applied with more or less contempt of self-culture. The process consists simply in the individual choosing his own subjects and studying them as best he can.
The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor spirit for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery.
Part of this real or assumed sensibility was the interest in scenery and the beauties of nature, which in Pliny, as in the eighteenth century authors, is cultivated for its own sake as an element in self-culture.
They propose many important reforms, such as the abolition of caste, the remodeling of marriage customs, the emancipation and education of women, the abolition of infanticide and the worship of ancestors, and a general moral regeneration. Their chief aid to spiritual growth may be summed up in four words, self-culture, meditation, personal purity, and universal beneficence.
Malibran practically threw her on her own resources. She was admirably fitted for self-culture. Ardent, resolute, industrious, thoroughly grounded in the soundest of art methods, and marvelously gifted in musical intelligence, she applied herself to her vocal studies with abounding enthusiasm, without instruction other than the judicious counsels of her mother.
Samuel Lee; and it is but the counterpart of numerous similarly instructive examples of the power of perseverance in self-culture, as displayed in the lives of many of the most distinguished of our literary and scientific men. There are many other illustrious names which might be cited to prove the truth of the common saying that "it is never too late to learn."
A nobleman once contemptuously asked of a sage, "What have you got by all your philosophy?" "At least I have got society in myself," was the wise man's reply. But many are apt to feel despondent, and become discouraged in the work of self-culture, because they do not "get on" in the world so fast as they think they deserve to do.
It is not sufficient that we have a fund laid up at home, but not a farthing in the pocket: we must carry about with us a store of the current coin of knowledge ready for exchange on all occasions, else we are comparatively helpless when the opportunity for using it occurs. Decision and promptitude are as requisite in self-culture as in business.
"We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus.
Lessing also felt the duty of self-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this or that faculty as of strengthening character, the only soil in which real mental power can root itself and find sustenance. His advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to write for the stage, is two parts moral to one literary.
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