rror,
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 preeminent part. Culture is then
properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having
its origin in the love of perfection; it is _a study of perfection_. It
moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion
for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing
good. As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto
Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more
intelligent!" so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto
which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson:[392] "To make
reason and the will of God prevail!"[393]

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be overhasty in
determining what reason and the will of God say, because its turn is for
acting rather than thinking and it wants to be beginning to act; and
whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its
own state of development and share in all the imperfections and
immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what distinguishes culture
is, that it is possessed by the scientific passion as well as by the
passion of doing good; that it demands worthy notions of reason and the
will of God, and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to
substitute themselves for them. And knowing that no action or
institution can be salutary and stable which is not based on reason and
the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting, even with
the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before its
thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of
little use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to
institute.

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that other,
which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing. But it
needs times of faith and ardor, times when the intellectual horizon is
opening and widening all around us, to flourish in. And is not the close
and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have long lived and
moved now lifting up, and are not new lights finding free passage to
shine in upon us? For a long time there was no passage for them to make
their way in upon us, and then it was of no use to