Culture in private and public life

Culture has something of the elusive, attractive quality of the rainbow. When it appears it is generally welcomed and admired, and all the more so by those who find its composition nature and essence, like its beginning and end, something of a mystery.
The attempts that have been made to explain the real nature and essence of culture have been almost as various as the notions which, over the ages, have been imagined by different people in different places to account for the origin and significance of the rainbow. Human thought and inquiry which has robbed the rainbow of its mystery has so far been less successful in its efforts to analyse accurately all that goes to make up the notion of culture. Confusion about its meaning has been worse confounded by the very welter of competing explanations which have been proposed from time to time in order to clear up the mystery. A large book could be filled with an account of these different definitions and descriptions of culture. Many of them throw light on the problem and some of the more striking of them will be summarized in Part III of this book.