This painstaking critic owes much to Professor Babbitt, far more than does Mr. Lippmann. There is in fact much overlapping between his views and modern humanism. Yet there is an issue between the new humanists and Mr. T. S. Eliot: it resolves itself into the question of Authority. Let us trace out the evolution of Mr. Eliot’s ideas and we shall see the latent weakness of his position, and those who wish may compare it with the new humanists’ position. In _The Sacred Wood_ (1921) he began as an acute æsthetic critic, basing the exercise of criticism upon sensibility and intellect. He professed to be a classicist. Opposed to romantic excesses he was, in spite of an admiration for certain decadent poets, but was he a classicist? If so, what about the essay on _Tradition and the Individual Talent_, in which the idea of “creative imitation” is pushed to an extreme that makes one suspicious? Matters became explicit a few years later when he debated with Mr. J. Middleton Murry. In this debate Mr. Eliot admitted that such were the instabilities and insufficiencies of private judgment and private experience that a man should discipline himself in allegiance to some outside Authority, and for the literary critic this meant loyalty to the classical literary tradition. Something was here given away: the strict corroboration by personal experiment of classical wisdom was left out. Mr. Eliot was revealed as by disposition a neo-classicist (with some romantic elements) thoroughly dependent upon literary authority. The next step for him, as a man too intelligent and too serious to evade the problems of social and moral chaos, was to acknowledge that criticism in our age could not be so limited as it was conceived to be in _The Sacred Wood_. On the contrary, the critic he saw must become philosophic: he must be a creator of values. But here again he was neo-classical, for he searched for external Authority in politics and in religion. In the former he is Royalist, in the latter Anglo-Catholic.