For -- so I felt then and often thereafter
-- this was Europe's great gift to mankind's domain: "humanism."
The concept had an ideological flavor, it gave off the smell of
libraries. There were great cultures, remote civilizations that
created moral and metaphysical concepts of the universe, but only
in Europe was humanism a living imperative shaping life, human
destiny, intellectual attitudes and social existence. What is
"humanism"? The measure of man. It holds that the individual
is the measure of all things. The individual is the significant
element of development. (If indeed there is such a thing as "development"
if it is at all possible for man to rule over the instincts
he brought with him from the cave.) The human attitude which does
not hope for a supernatural reply to the problem of death and
does not expect solutions to human problems from superhuman powers:
a two-legged mammal abandoned and shaped by blind, accidental
will in an indifferent and hostile universe, man is the only living
creature who can find his way in the world independently of his
instincts.