HUMANISM IN EDUCATION[1].
Petrarch was born in 1304, when Dante was thirty-nine years old, and died in 1374. That great movement in which he was a pioneer, and which we call the Renaissance, had its central inspiration in the belief that the classical literatures, which were being gradually recovered, were the supreme products of the human mind; that they were the best means of self-culture; that there alone one could see the human reason moving freely, the moral nature clearly expressed, in a word, the dignity of man, as a rational being, fully displayed. All this is implied in humanism, when we speak of humanism as the direction in which the Renaissance chiefly tended. It is larger than the Roman idea of humanitas; the scope of which is well illustrated by Cicero when he says in one of his letters that Roman officials ought to treat Greeks with "humanitas" (gentleness), since it is from Greece that Italy first received "humanitas,"—i.e., as the context explains, the refining influences of literature and art.
It is difficult adequately to realize now the whole meaning of humanism for the early Renais-
- ↑ The Romanes Lecture, delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, June 7, 1899.
