animal
frame, and "virtue," with reference to our moral nature. I am not able
to find such a term;--talent, ability, genius, belong distinctly to the
raw material, which is the subject-matter, not to that excellence which
is the result of exercise and training. When we turn, indeed, to the
particular kinds of intellectual perfection, words are forthcoming for
our purpose, as, for instance, judgment, taste, and skill; yet even
these belong, for the most part, to powers or habits bearing upon
practice or upon art, and not to any perfect condition of the intellect,
considered in itself. Wisdom, again, is certainly a more comprehensive
word than any other, but it has a direct relation to conduct, and to
human life. Knowledge, indeed, and science express purely intellectual
ideas but still not a state or quality of the intellect; for knowledge,
in its ordinary sense, is but one of its circumstances, denoting a
possession or a habit; and science has been appropriated to the
subject-matter of the intellect, instead of belonging in English, as it
ought to do, to the intellect itself. The consequence is that, on an
occasion like this, many words are necessary, in order, first, to bring
out and convey what surely is no difficult idea in itself,--that of the
cultivation of the intellect as an end; next, in order to recommend
what surely is no unreasonable object; and lastly, to describe and make
the mind realise the particular perfection in which that object
consists. Every one knows practically what are the constituents of
health or of virtue; and every one recognises health and virtue as ends
to be pursued; it is otherwise with intellectual excellence, and this
must be my excuse, if I seem to anyone to be bestowing a good deal of
labour on a preliminary matter.

In default of a recognised term, I have called the perfection or virtue
of the intellect by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge,
enlargement of mind, or illumination, terms which are not uncommonly
given to it by writers of this day: but, whatever name we bestow on it,
it is, I believe, as a matter of history, the business of a university
to make this intellectual culture its direct scope, or to employ itself
in the education of the intellect,--just as the work of a hospital lies
in healing the sick or wounded, of a riding or fencing school, or of a
gymnasium, in exercising the limbs, of an almshouse, in aiding and
solacing the old, of an orphanage, in prote