man 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: "To
make reason and the will of God prevail!"....

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and
light. He who works for sweetness and light works to make reason and
the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for
hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery,
culture hates hatred, culture has one great passion, the passion for
sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater!--the passion for
making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect
man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be
imperfect, until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched
with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we
must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from
saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light
for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are
the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a
people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and
art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national
glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest
measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and
alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness
and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they
call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they
think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary
popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses.
Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of
ideas and judgment