A more equal, if threadbare illustration of the antithesis between humanism and the gospel of scientific progress is found, of cou...rse, in Montaigne and Bacon.... The sovereignty of man, says Bacon in one of his massive phrases, lieth hid in knowledge. Montaigne would agree, but his terms would have an entirely different meaning. Bacon means that through scientific knowledge man can conquer external nature for his own use and benefit. Montaigne would mean that through study of his own inner strength and weakness man can learn to conquer himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual lib...eration, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in Lon...don--he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell--turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The resemblance between the two movements covers far more than the speed and extent of their conquests. It can be argued that in s...ome measure both are great Christian heresies. And like Communism, the Moslem faith in its relations with Europe has tended to follow the pattern of relentless pressure on all weak points and undefended frontiers and to advance its banners wherever there were found to be no defenders at the gate.... Islam derived its power to attract educated and intellectual groups from the use it made of ideas deeply congenial to the Oriental mind. Its rejection of the Greek and Christian heritage of humanism and incarnation in favor of a purely transcendent deity accorded well with the other-worldly tradition of Oriental religious thought. At the same time, the Moslem appeal to the people at large lay in the social evils which it promised to redress. Mohammedanism was in part a harking back to traditional intellectual and religious ideas, in part an outburst of social protest against an unjust and unstable social order. Modern Communism has something of the same character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can g...et them for himself without grace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such... progress is relished because it feels nice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty... stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is ...intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards him like a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »