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But in every case the humanist has what is, in a sense, an objective because a formal standard; he looks without himself as an individual, yet to himself as a part of the composite experience and wisdom of his race, for understanding and for guides. Thus the individual conforms to the needs and wisdom of the group. Humanism, at its best, has something heroic, unselfish, noble about it.
The essentially new factors in sixteenth-century culture may be reckoned as the diffusion of knowledge as a result of the invention of printing; the development of literary criticism by means of humanism; a golden age of painting and architecture; the flowering of national literature; the beginnings of modern natural science.
From the time of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Italian princes were well taken care of in this respect, and the custom was transplanted into Germany by Aeneas Sylvius, who addressed detailed exhortations to two young German princes of the House of Habsburg on the subject of their further education, in which they are both urged, as might be expected, to cultivate and nurture humanism.
That spirit should pervade and inspire all we do in the work of education. There has much been said during the war to the effect that the great struggle was essentially a conflict between the spirit of humanism and some principle or other which was conceived to be the opposite of humanism.
The new humanism, which took its rise with the rediscovery of Greek culture, extended the intellectual horizon and intensified the enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life and the mortification of the flesh.
For in such preaching there is no call to humility, no plea for grace, no sense that the achievement of self-unity is as much a rescue as it is a reformation. But this sense of the need of salvation is integral to religion; this is where it has parted company with humanism. Humanism makes no organic relations between man and the Eternal.
The University of Groningen taught a humanism, which created a reaction towards the ancient confessors of the creed, the 'reveal, or awakening. Subsequently modern cosmosophy tried to adjust its opinions to modern science and the results of modern research in every branch of human knowledge. This was a great blow to the ancestral faith and the venerable Confession.
Chastity could now only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by unchastity, but sometimes even physical force. The Renaissance and the rise of humanism undoubtedly affected the feeling towards asceticism and chastity.
So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class.
This theoretic curiosity seems to be the characteristically human differentia, and humanism recognizes its enormous scope. A true idea now means not only one that prepares us for an actual perception.
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