The impression of thinness which Arnold's 'culture' conveys to a modern reader is partly due to the absence of social background to his picture.
We may be thinking of refinement of mannersor urbanity and civility: if so, we shall think first of a social class, and of the superior individual as representative of the best of that class. 2014. We do not find, for instance, that an understanding of music or painting figures explicitly in Arnold's description of the cultured man: yet no one will deny that these attainments play a part in culture.
But while the individuals of a tribe, or of a group of islands or villages, may have separate functionsof which the most peculiar are those of the king and the witch-doctorit is only at a much further stage that religion, science, politics and art become abstractly conceived apart from each other. When it is applied to the improvement of the human mind and spirit, we are less likely to agree as to what culture is. To start with, Eliot uses the term culture in three different senses: in the sense of the development of an individual, a class, or a whole society. This seems to me a very obvious reflection: but it is frequently overlooked. THE THREE SENSES OF 'CULTURE' developed societies, and especially our own contemporary society, we have to consider the relationship of the three senses. I do not think that the most ardent champions of social equality dispute this: the difference of opinion turns on whether the transmission of group culture must be by inheritancewhether each cultural level must propagate itselfor whether it can be hoped that some mechanism of selection will be found, so that every indiv Sociol. S. EliotSource: T. S. Eliot (1958), Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. Therefore it is the culture of the society that is fundamental, and it is the meaning of the term 'culture' in relation to the whole society that should be examined first. This is a book notable not only for its sanity but for its deep and sincere feeling.
Elliot attempts to define culture as a more complex idea. A religion requires not only a body of priests who know what they are doing, but a body of worshippers who know what is being done.
The general, or anthropological sense of the word culture, as used for instance by E. B. Tylor in the title of his book Primitive Culture, has flourished independently of the other senses: but if we are considering highly208CULTURAL STRATIFICATION and we are driven in the end to find it in the pattern of the society as a whole. Elliot "The Three Senses Of Culture" In this Paper: T.S. We only mean that the culture of the individual cannot be isolated from that of the group, and that the culture of the group cannot be abstracted from that of the whole society; and that our notion of 'perfection' must take all three senses of 'culture' into account at once.