Humanism and America

“Life’s a long headache in a noisy street,” sang the poet Masefield in _The Widow in the Bye Street_ seventeen years ago. Since then, we have all come to live in Main rather tha...

As the reader will soon perceive, the contributors agree in certain broad, fundamental opinions. Without exception they have sought to work their way free of the dogmatic incrus...

It is significant that during Galileo’s lifetime, so swift was the movement, Descartes saw the trend of the new science and its inevitable effect on philosophy and religion. In...

In a world of ever-shifting circumstance, this maxim is not always of easy application. Whoever has succeeded in bridging the gap between the general precept and some particular...

For my own part, I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists. Though I see no evidence that humanism is necessarily ineffective apart from dogmatic and rev...

Occasional humanists may appear under existing conditions, but if there is to be anything deserving to be called a humanistic movement, it will be necessary that a considerable...

As a matter of fact the radical writers of to-day who are accomplishing anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school of realism. But a few restless souls, those...

[24] There are passages in Mr. Whitehead’s books in which the word “God” is used properly, even nobly, with its religious connotation; and indeed, as Professor A. E. Taylor has...

Emerson’s effect on young men is most significant, I think, in the case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford days, Newman impressed him with a sense of the laborious difficulty...

This truly catholic attitude, which is essential for modern humility, is not palatable to the pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We have fancied, especially in America, that...

I have just one note to add, which is the preface to an extensive sequel. I believe that at the present time the problem of the unification of the world and the problem of the u...

One would like to think that the oncoming generation, with unparalleled advantages in museums and in collegiate instruction in art, endowed with a great open-mindedness, audacit...

This interest in mental abnormality has not diminished. O’Neill’s plays are studies in psychopathology. _Beyond the Horizon_ deals with a weak romantic who takes refuge from har...

Those limitations, at the same time, were extreme. The Dreiser household was one combining almost unrelieved ignorance with perfect tastelessness, presided over by a father whos...

Not even Mr. Dreiser’s expert care and long practice, however, are sufficient to enable him to evade a difficulty inherent in the nature of his theme. For the predicament of Rob...

Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American literature is Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch and New England parents proud and conservat...

The most significant history of our national quest for a material happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly...

Here, then, in our own native tradition is a sort of hope which led to happiness. Can such a hope, however, be reconciled with the artist’s devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as to...

Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness of the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April (1929) _Harper’s_. A young intellectual...

The humanist is aware that poetry, like mythology, possesses no power of conferring immediate revelation of truth; he knows that its scenes and personages, its thoughts and pass...

Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,” and the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his style should be passably good but inc...

Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his style, who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said of Mr. Mencken, the stupidity of many a...

But “behaviour in society” and “the determining factors of environment” are vague phrases. If there is to be a science of behaviour and society two conditions are necessary: fir...

The Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man is a biological way of dealing with a reflection old in the tradition of humanism. From Plato down, curiosity has toyed with theor...

This courage of the past--this self-confidence of the past by which it was enabled to broaden the scope of its life and pass on to us a social and imaginative heritage by which...