ks or minimizes, and those imponderable and supersensuous
values which it tends to ignore and which are not ordinarily included
in its definition of experience, return to vex and plague it. Indeed
the worst foe of humanism has never been the religious view of the
world upon whose stored-up moral reserves of uncompromising doctrine
it has often half-consciously subsisted. Humanism has long profited
from the admitted truth that the moral restraints of an age that
possesses an authoritative and absolute belief survive for some time
after the doctrine itself has been rejected. What has revealed the
incompleteness of the humanistic position has been its constant
tendency to decline into naturalism; a tendency markedly accelerated
today. Hence, we find ourselves in a disintegrating and distracted
epoch. In 1912 Rudolph Eucken wrote: "The moral solidarity of mankind
is dissolved. Sects and parties are increasing; common estimates and
ideals keep slipping away from us; we understand one another less
and less. Even voluntary associations, that form of unity peculiar to
modern times, unite more in achievement than in disposition, bring men
together outwardly rather than inwardly. The danger is imminent that
the end may be _bellum omnium contra omnes_, a war of all against
all."[12]

[Footnote 12: _Harvard Theo. Rev._, vol. V, no. 3, p. 277.]

That disintegration is sufficiently advanced so that we can see the
direction it is taking and the principle that inspires it. Humanism
has at least the value of an objective standard in the sense that it
sets up criteria which are without the individual; it substitutes a
collective subjectivism, if we may use the term, for personal whim
and impulse. Thus it proclaims a classic standard of moderation in all
things, the golden mean of the Greeks, Confucius' and Gautama's law
of measure. It proposes to bring the primitive and sensual element in
man under critical control; to accomplish this it relies chiefly upon
its amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human nature. But
the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue was the product of a
personality distinguished, if we accept the dialogues of Plato, by
a perfect harmony of thought and feeling. Probably it is not wise to
build so important a rule upon so distinguished an exception!

But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. It likewise
proposes to rationalize those supersensuous needs and convictions
which lie in the imagi