Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...books are of that exemplary kind which no gentleman's library can be without, but there is another and rarer kind without which no man's education is complete. These are the representative books in which epochs culminated like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,- or which mark the transitions of the human mind like Cervantes and Gothe. But here Nature deals kindly and mercifully with us, and it is seldom that she gives more than one great speaker or singer to one race. There is a New England proverb which says of a fastidious person-"the best is not good enough...
...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...
...fiction to another, the attention is caught by the contrast between Pierre la Rose's "Toy Drama" and the "Solitude" of H. C. Greene. The former is a well told story, interesting through its clever introduction and treatment of persons who are acting from the most common of human impulses. "Solitude," on the other hand, while well told, derives its whole interest from the trials of an individual whom philosophical doubts have thrown out of harmony with the world. The meaning of the story is evasive, and to many who search for it will probably remain but imperfectly understood...
give our powers to the spirit of Christ. If we try to do this for ourselves, Christ's thought, love, purpose, and genius will reproduce themselves in us. His resurrection is the eternal assertion of the human being over the animal...