k accidence. This is what
one of the greatest of them, Goethe, meant when he said: "Anything
which emancipates the spirit without a corresponding growth in
self-mastery is pernicious."

All humanists then have two characteristics in common: first,
they assume that man is his own arbiter, has both the requisite
intelligence and the moral ability to control his own destiny;
secondly, they place the source and criterion of this power in
collective wisdom, not in individual vagary and not in divine
revelation. They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the
perfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that is
binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most significantly,
this authority is not rigid, complete, fixed. There is nothing
complete in the humanist's world. Experience accumulates and man's
knowledge grows; the expectation and joy in progress is a part of it;
man's code changes, emends, expands with his onward marching. But the
humanistic point of view assumes something relatively stable in life.
Hence our phrase that humanism gives us a classic, that is to say, a
simple and established standard.

It is to be observed that there is nothing in humanism thus defined
which need be incompatible with religion. It is not with its content
but its incompleteness that we quarrel. Indeed, in its assertion of
the trustworthiness of human experience, its faith in the dignity and
significance of man, its respect for the interests of the group, and
its conviction that man finds his true self only outside his immediate
physical person, beyond his material wants and desires, it is quite
genuinely a part of the religious understanding. But we shall have
occasion to observe that while much of this may be religious this is
not the whole of religion. For the note of universality is absent.
Humanism is essentially aristocratic. It is for a selected group that
it is practicable and it is a selected experience upon which it rests.
Its standards are esoteric rather than democratic. Yet it is hardly
necessary to point out the immense part which humanism, as thus
defined, is playing in present life.

But there is another law which, from remotest times, man has
followed whenever he dared. It is not the law of the group but of
the individual, not the law of civilization but of the jungle. "Most
men," says Aristotle, "would rather live in a disorderly than a sober
manner." He means that most men would rather con