Irving Babbitt Quotes
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To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.
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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.
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When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians.
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Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.
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A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.
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Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.
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To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image.
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The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.
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According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.
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Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.
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Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.
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The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas.
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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.
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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.
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Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma.
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Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
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If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.
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The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.
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What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.
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The true dualism I take to be the contrast between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and the other as vital control (frein vital).
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Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks.
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pp. 7-8