The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.

The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.