Word: humanation
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Wordsworth had been convinced, perhaps against his will, that a great part of human suffering had its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. Where was the remedy to be found, if remedy indeed there were? It was to be sought at least only in an improvement wrought by those moral influences that build up and buttress the personal character. Goethe taught the self-culture that results in self-possession, in breadth and impartiality of view, and in equipoise of mind. Wordsworth inculcated that self-development through intercourse with man and nature which leads...
...often fail to the bard as the bard to them), there would only be love. I merely put the case as a comment on the assertion we sometimes hear that if we have no poetry it is the fault of the poets, since the material always abundantly exists in human nature. Undoubtedly it does,- the passions and desires, the loves, hopes and despairs of men are the raw material,- but there are periods in which that material is more abundant or of finer staple, when the passions have freer play and on a more heroic stage, when human nature...
...difficulty in the domain of conduct, for this latter is the study of our relations with our fellow men. In the domain of conduct we must, not as in science, have first ideas and conform to them acts and facts. Such ideas are meant as those instinctive in the human mind, as personal freedom, popular autonomy, and social justice. These always have been controlling agencies of society...
...implicit faith in the validity of their own minds and the competency of their own natures, I suppose Montaigne to have been as striking an instance as could readily be found. He more than any other man cut loose the modern from the ancient world, and emancipated the human mind from a pedantic and slavish deference to the past. I do not mean that he did it consciously, but he had the courage to trust in his own instincts and to read the world with his own eyes-not in a Greek or Latin or Hebrew translation...
...spite of it. We Americans are apt to undervalue tradition, and for this very reason I think a study of the motives and principles of such men as Dante of great value in deprovincializing our minds. Its guidance in politics may save the huge baggage wagon of human progress from many a sorry jolt and sometimes even from such a total overturn as that of the French Revolution. Montaigne's unconscious errand was not to break away from tradition, but to show that the past was even more valuable in certain ways as contrast than as example. In literature...