"Humanism" has used to mean too many things to be a very satisfactory term. 57. Nevertheless, and in the lack of a better word, 58. I shall use it here to explain for the complex of attitudes which this discussion has undertaken to defend.
59. In this sense a humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account of man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry, and animal behavior. 60. He is anyone who believes that will, reason, and purpose are real and significant: that value and justice, are aspects of a reality called good and evil and rests upon some foundation other than custom; 61. that consciousness is so far from a mere epiphenomenon that it is the most tremendous of actualities; 62. that the unmeasured may be significant; or, to sum it all up, 63. that those human realities which sometimes seem to exist only in human mind are the perceptions of the mind.
64. He is, in other words, anyone who says that there are more things in heaven and earth than those dreamed of in the positivist philosophy.
65. Originally, to the sure, the term humanist meant simply anyone who thought the study of ancient literature his chief concern. Obviously it means, as I use it, very much more. 66. But there remains nevertheless a certain connection between the aboriginal meaning and that I am attempting to give it. 67. Because those whom I describe as humanists usually recognize that literature and the arts have been pretty consistently "on its side" and 68. because it is often to literature that they turn to renew their faith in the whole class of truths which the modem world has so consistently tended to dismiss as the mere figments of a wishful thinking imagination.
69. Insofar as this modern world gives less and less attention to its literary past, insofar as it dismisses that as something outgrow and 70. to be discarded as much as the imperfect technology contemporary with it has been discarded, 71. just to that extent it facilitate the surrender of humanism to technology. 72. The literature is to be found, directly expressed or, 73. more often, indirectly implied the most effective correction to the views now most prevalent among the thinking and unthinking.
74. The great imaginative writers present a picture of human nature and of human life which carries conviction and thus giving the lie to all attempts to reduce man to a mechanism. Novels and poems, and dramas are so persistently concerned with the values which relativism rejects that one might even define literature as the attempt to pass value judgments upon representations of human life. 75. More often than not those of its imaginative persons who fail to achieve power and wealth are more successful than those who do not--by standards which the imaginative writer persuades us to accept as valid.
(56)