it.  But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it.  There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—­ motives eminently such as are called social,—­come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and preeminent part.  Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.  It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.  As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu’s words:  “To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!” so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson:[392] “To make reason and the will of God prevail!"[393]

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be overhasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because its turn is for acting rather than thinking and it wants to be beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific passion as well as by the passion of doing good; that it demands worthy notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them.  And knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and stable which is not based on reason and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to institute.

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing.  But it needs times of faith and ardor, times when the intellectual horizon is opening and widening all around us, to flourish in.  And is not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have long lived and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights finding free passage to shine in upon us?  For a long time there was no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and then it was of no use to think of adapting the world’s action to them.  Where was the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will