Here, then, the nature of morality, the inspiration for character, the solution of human destiny, are not sought outside in some sort of cosmic relationship, but within, either in the experience of the superman, the genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collective experience and consciousness of the group.  Thus this, too, throws man back upon himself, makes a new exaltation of personality in sharpest contrast to the scholastic doctrine of the futility and depravity of human nature.  It produces the assertion of the sacred character of the individual human being.  The conviction of the immeasurable worth of man is, of course, a characteristic teaching of Jesus; what it is important for the preacher to remember in humanism is the source, not the fact, of its estimate.  With Jesus man’s is a derived greatness found in him as the child of the Eternal; in humanism, it is, so to speak, self-originated, born of present worth, not of sublime origin or shining destiny.

So man in the humanistic movement moves into the center of his own world, becomes himself the measuring rod about whom all other values are grouped.  In the place of inspiration, or prophetic understanding, which carries the implications of a transcendent source of truth and goodness, we have a sharply limited, subjective wisdom and insight.  The “thus saith the Lord” of the Hebrew prophet means nothing here.  The humanist is, of course, confronted with the eternal question of origins, of the thing-in-itself, the question whose insistence makes the continuing worth of the absolutist speculations.  He begs the question by answering it with an assertion, not an explanation.  He meets it by an exaltation of human genius.  Genius explains all sublime achievements and genius is, so to speak, its own fons et origo.  Thus Diderot says:  “Genius is the higher activity of the soul.”  “Genius,” remarks Rousseau in a letter, “makes knowledge unnecessary.”  And Kant defines genius as “the talent to discover that which cannot be taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than a definition!  But the intent here is to refer all that seems to transcend mundane categories, man’s highest, his widest, his sublimest intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source of light and power.

[Footnote 8:  Anthropologie, para. 87 c.]

Such an anthropocentric view of life and destiny in exalting man, of course, thereby liberated him, not merely from ecclesiastical domination, but also from those illusive fears and questionings, those remote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and those consequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of the religious interpretation of life.  Humanistic writing is full of the exulting sense of this emancipation.  These superconsiderations do not belong in the world of experience as the humanist ordinarily conceives of it.  Hence, man lives in an immensely contracted, but a very real and tangible world and within the small experimental circumference of it, he holds a far larger place (from one viewpoint, a far smaller one from another) than that of a finite creature caught in the snare of this world and yet a child of the Eternal, having infinite destinies.  The humanist sees man as freed from the tyranny of this supernatural revelation and laws.  He rejoices over man because now he stands,