The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.
The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.
A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.
For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.
Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.
We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.
Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.
The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.
The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.
To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.
The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.
The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.
According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.
The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.
The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.
