When we turn, indeed, to the
particular kinds of intellectual perfection, words are forthcoming for
our purpose, as, for instance, judgment, taste, and skill; yet even
these belong, for the most part, to powers or habits bearing upon
practice or upon art, and not to any perfect condition of the intellect,
considered in itself. Wisdom, again, is certainly a more comprehensive
word than any other, but it has a direct relation to conduct, and to
human life. Knowledge, indeed, and science express purely intellectual
ideas but still not a state or quality of the intellect; for knowledge,
in its ordinary sense, is but one of its circumstances, denoting a
possession or a habit; and science has been appropriated to the
subject-matter of the intellect, instead of belonging in English, as it
ought to do, to the intellect itself. The consequence is that, on an
occasion like this, many words are necessary, in order, first, to bring
out and convey what surely is no difficult idea in itself,--that of the
cultivation of the intellect as an end; next, in order to recommend
what surely is no unreasonable object; and lastly, to describe and make
the mind realise the particular perfection in which that object
consists.
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