Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of all he says.  He believes that man at his noblest lives the life of obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature discourages him in this.  He holds that man should rise from the plane of nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live according to one’s temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature.  He takes the view that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they have made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and boastful view of himself.  “If men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good.”  Not that Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation.  He objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps to precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme—­“the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are now suffering.”  It was, perhaps, in reaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful announcements of his righteousness.  “Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his Confessions in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, ’Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare:  “I am better than that man."’” Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of life:  for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility.  Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting “No.”  Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling.  At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our troubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit.  He wishes our men of letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks.  “True classicism,” he observes, “does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal.”  The romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great writers, but mere wonder.  He takes Poe as a typical romanticist.  “It is not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom of awe or reverence.  On the other hand, he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith.”