cting innocence, of a
penitentiary, in restoring the guilty. I say, a university, taken in its
bare idea, and before we view it as an instrument of the church, has
this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression
nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in
art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave
its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this.
It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out
towards truth, and to grasp it.

This, I said in my foregoing discourse, was the object of a university,
viewed in itself, and apart from the Catholic Church, or from the state,
or from any other power which may use it; and I illustrated this in
various ways. I said that the intellect must have an excellence of its
own, for there was nothing which had not its specific good; that the
word "educate" would not be used of intellectual culture, as it is used,
had not the intellect had an end of its own; that, had it not such an
end, there would be no meaning in calling certain intellectual exercises
"liberal," in contrast with "useful," as is commonly done; that the very
notion of a philosophical temper implied it, for it threw us back upon
research and system as ends in themselves, distinct from effects and
works of any kind; that a philosophical scheme of knowledge, or system
of sciences, could not, from the nature of the case, issue in any one
definite art or pursuit, as its end; and that, on the other hand, the
discovery and contemplation of truth, to which research and
systematising led, were surely sufficient ends, though nothing beyond
them were added, and that they had ever been accounted sufficient by
mankind.

Here then I take up the subject; and having determined that the
cultivation of the intellect is an end distinct and sufficient in
itself, and that, so far as words go, it is an enlargement or
illumination. I proceed to inquire what this mental breadth, or power,
or light, or philosophy consists in. A hospital heals a broken limb or
cures a fever: what does an institution effect, which professes the
health, not of the body, not of the soul, but of the intellect? What is
this good, which in former times, as well as our own, has been found
worth the notice, the appropriation of the Catholic Church?

I have then to investigate, in the discourses which follow, those
qualities and characteristics of