he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.  In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate it, in my judgment, was.  And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this:  that in our English way it left out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to stamp Monsieur Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that Monsieur Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy of blame [7] and not of praise.  For as there is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity,—­a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are,—­which is, in an intelligent being, natural and laudable.  Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we blame curiosity.  Montesquieu says:—­“The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent.”  This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term curiosity stand to describe 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 [8] being, appears as the ground of it.  There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of 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: