Word: humanistic
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thus reasoned a lanky, hardheaded Californian whose Irish blood fears no fight but whose humanist mind hates folly. Lawyer John Francis ("Jack") Neylan, onetime political and financial reporter, was until 1937 lord high chancellor of the Hearst empire. Before that (1911-17) he was chairman of the State finance body which put California on a budget. For eleven years he has been a regent of the University of California. He is a director of great National City Bank (Manhattan). Nowadays he commutes to San Francisco from his ranch in the mountains to the south. Last fortnight Jack Neylan appeared before...
Edman's own philosophy is a humanist cocktail whose chief ingredients are Plato, Santayana and Manhattan. It is the last component that shines, like a pickled cherry, out of Philosopher's Holiday, a tall, watery glassful of reminiscences, anecdotes and essays devoted to "persons and places, many of them obscure, about which I have occasionally told my friends over a glass of sherry. . . ." Son of a shirt & blouse manufacturer, Philosopher Edman still lives in the neighborhood where he was born and brought up, a stone's throw from Columbia University. He has "spent a long life...
...about. "I have written one word," he announces, "God." Altogether he intends to write three. The second will be "Is." The third: "Love." The announcement of this program makes dawning sense, for if Saroyan appears in his stories in any consistent role, it is as a sort of humanist jumping jack, waiting only until he has written a few more Books of Saroyan to leap forward as a U. S. prophet...
More aggressive, wittier and compact is 42-year-old Lancelot Hogben (Mathematics for the Million), an English biologist who calls himself a "scientific humanist" and is a kind of English version of iconoclastic Thorstein Veblen. Writers and statesmen he attacks for their ignorance of science, scientists for their ignorance of social matters. In addition he attacks Marxists, liberals, classical scholarship, "sentimental internationalists," theology, economists, and educators who permit children to study what they like rather than what is good for them (science). On the constructive side, he advocates biotechnology as a way to make nations self-sufficient, thermodynamics...
Instead I heard a humanist, the best...