"THE sudden capture of the national attention by humanism in the year 1930," says Professor Mercier, "might at first seem strange." Strange, but not unprecedented. To a large section of the national attention, the New Humanism was only one more new doctrine in a long train--transcendentalism, pragmatism, New Thought, Christian Science--which had suddenly captured in turn various intellectual layers of the popular imagination. The national attention which humanism captured probably grasped little more of it than the fact that it was something earnestly preached by Irving Babbitt which had a great deal to say against Rousseau, and that it was furnishing a great deal of amusement to those who found Mr. Mencken's critical style amusing. Humanism, as Professor Mercier demonstrates but does not say, is a philosophy and an attitude which by its nature must be as indifferent as truth itself to how much of and how successfully the popular attention has been captured by it.

The title might be misleading. A book with such a title is generally in opposition and in reply to the challenge. But Professor Mercier is one of the challengers, and the challengees are all those who feel confident that the new and revolutionary philosophies of the last few hundred years are putting us on the right track, however confusedly. The book is a set of definitions and explanations: most useful in the welter of shibboleths and manifestoes that have been piling up under the heading of humanism in the last few years.

First, to clear the confusion about the name itself. A brief footnote dismisses, with restraint, those left-wing Unitarians who have appropriated the name to describe a sort of non-religious religion based on extreme naturalism--the antithesis of traditional humanism. A vigorous 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 of that naturalism which humanism challenges. It is not secularism, either. The Renaissance pioneers only demanded a hearing for Cicero; they did not think of abolishing the "literae divinae," but only of breaking the monopoly.

Humanism is what its name implies. It is concerned with man, not as a part of a monistic universe, but as a unique being, intelligent and responsible, able to discover right ways with his reason and able to follow them with his will. It is equally opposed to idealistic and materialistic unity. It may be pessimistic, in reflecting that man is prone to evil from his youth, but it is the opposite of fatalism. It may be guardedly optimistic, in finding that the intellectually discovered key to the good life is easily used by the will, but it is equally the opposite of that Rousseauian naturalistic optimism, that Alice-in-Wonderland adventure of the self which finds the whole of goodness concealed in its own closets, and which reads Rabelais's Theleme injunction wrenched from its context. The philosophy of humanism is essentially and necessarily dualistic, and is continuous with the best expressions of that philosophy in history; with Aristotle and with scholasticism and, today, with neo-scholasticism without, however, giving to any of these systems a monopoly of the humanistic principle. Almost paradoxically, but logically enough, it is not too sympathetic with the Cartesian dualism; a separation so violent that all succeeding philosophic innovators fell to one side or the other to naturalism or to idealism.

The 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.

Humanism is a great deal more than an attitude toward art and letters. It has a sociology as important as its psychology. Aristotle's social animal is permitted by the humanist to have a safe refuge, the "Civitas Del, so dear to the Middle Ages, from the potential tyranny of his incorporated fellow animals, the State. A monism which can find nothing outside of that unity of which the social group is an essential part can find no sphere outside of which the State is not supreme. Hence, says your good humanist, intense nationalism and war.

So Professor Mercier defines humanism, and he does a very good job of defining something to which he is attached, without sentiment and without heroics. He could not, in truth, be a good humanist otherwise.

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.

The book makes no important original contribution to the humanist's argument, nor was it intended to. It is an excellent summing up, a clearing of issues. The convinced disciple will revel in it. The opponent will do well to study it, if only to find what he is opposed to