Its historical horizon,
racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction,
moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted
religious ideas and practices. They led the revival of study of the
Aryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and the
inhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that critical
and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present
civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism
of the moment. Thus the nature and place of _man_, under the influence
of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more
important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased
to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence
of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures,
which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophic
absolutism of the Catholic theologies.
But the humanism of the eighteenth century comes most closely to grips
with the classic statements and concepts of religion in the critical
philosophy of Kant. It is the intellectual current which rises in
him which is finding its last multifarious and minute rivulets in the
various doctrines of relativity, in pragmatism, the subjectivism of
the neo-realists, and in the superior place generally ascribed by
present thinking to value judgments as against existential ones.
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