Practically the assertion of a “universal centre” means the setting up of some pattern or model for imitation. The idea of imitation goes even deeper than that of decorum, but is an idea that humanism shares with religion. Humanism, however, differs from religion in putting at the basis of the pattern it sets up, not man’s divinity, but the something in his nature that sets him apart simply as man from other animals and that Cicero defines as a “sense of order and decorum and measure in deeds and words.”[4] It dwells on the danger of any attempt to pass too abruptly to the religious level; it holds, if I may be pardoned for quoting myself, that the world would have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting out to be superhuman. The virtue that results from a right cultivation of one’s humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living, is poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The difference is none the less marked between the man who is moving towards poise and the man who is moving away from it. Since the break with the somewhat artificial decorum of the eighteenth century most men have been moving away from it. It would not be easy to argue with any plausibility that the typical modernist is greatly concerned with the law of measure; his interest, as a glance at our newspapers should suffice to show, is rather in the doing of stunts and the breaking of records, in “prodigies, feats of strength and crime,”[5] the very topics that, according to the traditional report, Confucius banished from his conversation. “Let us confess it,” says Nietzsche, speaking not merely for the rank and file but for the leaders, “proportionateness is foreign to us.” It is foreign to us because we no longer refer our experience to any centre. With the growth of the naturalistic temper, the normal has come to have less appeal than the novel. The pursuit of poise has tended to give way to that of uniqueness, spontaneity, and above all intensity. “The last remnant of God on earth,” says Nietzsche himself, “are the men of great longing, of great loathing, of great satiety.” Once grant that there is no constant element in life and one might agree with Walter Pater that a man’s highest ambition should be “to burn with a hard gem-like flame,” to get “as many pulsations as possible into the given time.”[6] Æsthetic perceptiveness is an excellent thing, but thus to set it up as an end in itself is almost at the opposite pole from humanism. Yet Pater has been called a humanist. One might so regard him if one accepted his view that the distinctive humanistic trait is an all-embracing curiosity.[7] Humanism appears primarily, not in the enlargement of comprehension and sympathy, desirable though this enlargement may be, but in the act of selection, in the final imposition on mere multiplicity of a scale of values.