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 toward 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 pre-eminent 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:  “To make reason and the will of God prevail.”

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be over-hasty 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....

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.  He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.  He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion.  Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.  It has one even yet greater!—­the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.  If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk