  Du Bois’s articulation of his commitment to the ideal of holistic self-cultivation is perhaps most explicit when, in amplifying his criticism of Booker T. Washington, he defends the importance of liberal arts education (Gooding-Williams, 2009, 133–139).  Explicitly echoing Matthew Arnold, Du Bois advocated liberal arts education as a means to self-cultivation or, as he sometimes writes, self-development, through “getting to know…the best that has been said and thought in the world” (Arnold, 1869, 5). Self-development through the acquisition of culture is the purpose of the education elites require to uplift the masses.  The Negro college, Du Bois writes, “must develop men…Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist that higher individualism which centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human souls that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development” (1903a, 52).