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Humanism includes an interest in personality, which is of course the most basic of the common possessions of man, and it is therefore interested in justice and in freedom.
Humanism appears to be most deeply felt as the appreciation of the common and fundamental things in human nature. It inclines toward the employment of feeling, or at least to subjective rather than to purely objective principles in the determination of fundamental values in life.
In the Germanies, the extraordinary influence of humanism at first militated against the development of literature in the vernacular, but the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, in his desire to reach the ears of the common people, turned from Latin to German. Luther's translation of the Bible constitutes the greatest monument in the rise of modern German.
Nor had he that awful sense which no humanism could extinguish in Milton, of service as 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye. Nor had he, finally, that civil and secular enthusiasm which made men like Bentham and Mill into great workers and benefactors of their kind. Pattison was of the mind of Fra Paolo in a letter to Casaubon. 'As long as there are men there will be fanaticism.
Our schools of to-morrow, we should conclude, must still be inspired by the scientific spirit, but what we need is science humanised, and science in the service of moral principles. One may well ask whether it is not now the most opportune time to leave our classical learning behind, and try to find a more adequate culture in which to convey the spirit of our new humanism.
In literature, this movement took the form of humanism; in architecture and sculpture, it exhibited itself in the persons of Alberti, Ghiberti, Della Robbia, and Donatello; in painting, it showed itself in Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Verrocchio....
The foregoing statements reproduce the essential content of the lecture on Truth in my book PRAGMATISM. Schiller's doctrine of 'humanism, Dewey's 'Studies in logical theory, and my own 'radical empiricism, all involve this general notion of truth as 'working, either actual or conceivable.
His influence had indeed been profound, and he left as his disciples and successors men of gifts scarcely inferior to his own; but the fashion had changed; Italian humanism and the sway of the Press destroyed worship, destroyed spontaneity, and by the year 1600 the pure vocal style and the Volkslied had both passed away. Our results so far can be very shortly summed up.
But he is not haunted by any vision of the end of the world, or the coming of Antichrist; three centuries of humanism lay between him and Roger Bacon. And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there.
Those then who, like the Medici, aspired to tyranny and sought to found a dynasty of princes, entered the arena against a host of unknown and unseen gladiators. On his deathbed, in 1492, Lorenzo lay between two men Angelo Poliziano and Girolamo Savonarola. Poliziano incarnated the genial, radiant, godless spirit of fifteenth-century humanism.
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