The most fruitful approximation to such a distinction, in the twentieth century, has been the work of two American scholar-critics, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. The characteristic thought of Irving Babbitt was already adumbrated in 1895 in an address at the University of Wisconsin on “The Rational Study of the Classics,” published two years later in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in 1908 included in his book on _Literature and the American College_. This book contains in essence, one may almost say, everything in the series of volumes in which he has since applied his humanistic standards to various aspects of modern life and thought. With a tenacity of purpose unexampled in an age shifting aimlessly from one enthusiasm and disillusionment to another, with an effect growing more massive as he has worked out his ideas in such fields as æsthetics, literary criticism, ethics, psychology, education, and politics, with a remarkable power of relating his sense of permanent values to an historical sense (so that his books are in one view works of history, and in another, doctrinal inductions from facts), with a vast accumulation of learning that has been thoroughly assimilated, and with a mode of expression notable for weighty vigour, earnestness, brilliant ridicule, and an instinct for ruinous quotation, Professor Babbitt has done more than any one else to formulate the concept of humanism and gain for it an ever-widening hearing. A great teacher as well as writer, lecturing to students at Harvard for some thirty-five years, he has done much to shape the minds and purposes of a whole generation of young men, and thus to render possible the continuance of his task in the future.