e 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, and a very inadequate
estimate of it in my judgment it 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." 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 tho 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 toward action, help, and beneficence; the desire for removing
human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing hu