ellectual excellence, and this must be
my excuse, if I seem to any one to be bestowing a good deal of labour on a
preliminary matter.

In default of a recognized 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 protecting 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.

2.

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 systematizing
led, were surel