"Humanism" has used to mean too many things to be a very satisfactory
term. 57. Nevertheless, and in the lack of a better word, 58. I
shall use it here to explain for the complex of attitudes which this discussion
has undertaken to defend. 59. In this sense a humanist is
anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account of man wholly on the basis
of physics, chemistry, and animal behavior. 60. He is anyone who believes
that will, reason, and purpose are real and significant: that value and justice,
are aspects of a reality called good and evil and rests upon some foundation
other than custom; 61. that consciousness is so far from a mere
epiphenomenon that it is the most tremendous of actualities; 62. that the
unmeasured may be significant; or, to sum it all up, 63. that those human
realities which sometimes seem to exist only in human mind are the perceptions
of the mind. 64. He is, in other words, anyone who says
that there are more things in heaven and earth than those dreamed of in the
positivist philosophy. 65. Originally, to the sure, the
term humanist meant simply anyone who thought the study of ancient literature
his chief concern. Obviously it means, as I use it, very much more. 66.
But there remains nevertheless a certain connection between the aboriginal
meaning and that I am attempting to give it. 67. Because those whom I
describe as humanists usually recognize that literature and the arts have been
pretty consistently "on its side" and 68. because it is often to
literature that they turn to renew their faith in the whole class of truths
which the modem world has so consistently tended to dismiss as the mere figments
of a wishful thinking imagination. 69. Insofar as this
modern world gives less and less attention to its literary past, insofar as it
dismisses that as something outgrow and 70. to be discarded as much as
the imperfect technology contemporary with it has been discarded, 71.
just to that extent it facilitate the surrender of humanism to
technology. 72. The literature is to be found, directly expressed or,
73. more often, indirectly implied the most effective correction to the views
now most prevalent among the thinking and unthinking. 74.
The great imaginative writers present a picture of human nature and of human
life which carries conviction and thus giving the lie to all attempts to reduce
man to a mechanism. Novels and poems, and dramas are so persistently concerned
with the values which relativism rejects that one might even define literature
as the attempt to pass value judgments upon representations of human life.
75. More often than not those of its imaginative persons who fail to achieve
power and wealth are more successful than those who do not--by standards which
the imaginative writer persuades us to accept as valid.