meant by a foreigner when 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, M. 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 M. 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 M. 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 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 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 d