Word: babbittism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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With the twentieth century and the war came a closer approach to comprehension. Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Mencken, furnished blocks for the building; but none was sufficient architect to complete the edifice. Others were sidetracked, as Irving Babbitt to Humanism, Thornton Wilder to Catholicism, Krutch, Jeffers, and Faulkner to Pessimism. Hemingway tried to dodge the problem of values in bullfights and drink without success...
Winthrop: Morse, l.e.; Dunton, l.t.; Nusbaum, l.g.; Foley, c.; Downes, r.g.; Carman, r.t.; Babbitt, Emerson, r.e.; Crampton, q.b.; Bottomley, Mendell, h.b.; Holmes...
There is a great deal more. The chapter on the psychology of Irving Babbitt analyzes the higher and lower will and the other matters so familiar to Babbitt's students. The "rationalistic materialism" of Ernest Seilliere is checked against the Babbitt doctrine, and found essentially sound...
...effort is made to prove the continuity of the New or Babbittian Humanism with that first use of the word, to describe the effort of Erasmus and his contemporaries to place the "literae human-iores" beside the "literae divinae" which claimed a monopoly of medieval erudition. Rabelais, Montaigne and Babbitt are found together, all on the side of the angels: the famous sign over the door of the Abbey of Theleme has mislead those who forget that only the "well born, well instructed, conversing in honest company" were invited. Humanism is not hedonism, which is in fact a potential consequence...
...case for humanism is in the records of human experience. In its very methodology it opposes naturalism; human experience is not the data of consciousness furnished by the egocentric self, but the complete record of the race, i.e., history and literature. Hence the labors of Babbitt, reflected in that mass of reading which made his lectures famous for their references...