Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Allen Tate

Critical Essay by Allen Tate

SOURCE: Tate, Allen. “The Fallacy of Humanism.” In The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium, edited by C. Hartley Grattan, pp. 131-66. New York: Brewer and Warren, 1930.

In the essay below, Tate analyzes the ideas of New Humanists Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Norman Foerster, dismissing them as vague, self-contradictory, and lacking in cohesiveness.

If the necessity for virtue could tell us how to practice it, we should be virtuous overnight. For the case of the American Humanists against modern culture is damaging to the last degree. The truth of their indictment, negatively considered, cannot be denied. But this is not enough.

There is a widespread belief that the doctrines of Humanism are fundamentally sound. It would be truer to say that they are only partly and superficially so, and that they are being rejected for superficial reasons—the Humanists are dogmatic, they ignore contemporary literature, they lack the “esthetic...
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