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
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,[390] 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."[391] 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 towards
action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human e