e other hand, was the sequel to the
literature of the French "great century," to this literature of
intelligence, as by comparison with our Elizabethan literature we may
call it; what did it lead up to? To the French literature of the
eighteenth century, one of the most powerful and pervasive intellectual
agencies that have ever existed,--the greatest European force of the
eighteenth century. In science, again, we had Newton, a genius of the
very highest order, a type of genius in science if ever there was one.
On the continent, as a sort of counterpart to Newton, there was
Leibnitz; a man, it seems to me (though on these matters I speak under
correction), of much less creative energy of genius, much less power of
divination than Newton, but rather a man of admirable intelligence, a
type of intelligence in science if ever there was one. Well, and what
did they each directly lead up to in science? What was the intellectual
generation that sprang from each of them? I only repeat what the men of
science have themselves pointed out. The man of genius was continued by
the English analysts of the eighteenth century, comparatively powerless
and obscure followers of the renowned master. The man of intelligence
was continued by successors like Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, and
Laplace, the greatest names in modern mathematics.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

From 'Culture and Anarchy'

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed,
they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is
supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture
which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued
either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social
and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title,
from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this
_culture_, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find the
real ground for the very differing estimate which serious people will
set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of
which may lie a real ambiguity; and such a motive the word
_curiosity_ gives us.

I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense.
With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A
liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be