Though we have in America the semblance of a new movement, humanism itself is not new. It was new, I conceive, when human wisdom was new. It was comparatively new in ancient Greece, Judea, India, and China. It was rather old by the time of the Renaissance, when the word humanist came into currency. In one way or another, its doctrine and discipline have been clarified by persons as various as Homer, Phideas, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, Goethe; more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England and Emerson and Lowell in America: a strange assortment of names, no doubt, but also an indication of the inner diversity as well as the central unity of the humanist ideal. For into the aim of human perfection enter many elements, no less than that central order which is the fruit of discipline. Yet, if humanism is never new, it must constantly confront new problems in time and place. In the Renaissance, its great foe was mediæval otherworldliness; to-day its great foe is thisworldliness, obsession with physical things and the instincts that bind us to the animal order--in a word, the many forms of naturism that have all but destroyed humane insight, discipline, and elevation. In a given age, humanism may have the task of urging the claims of beauty; in another age the claims of science, or of conduct. It may have one problem in France, and another across the Channel. So long as America tends to set the pattern for the twentieth century, so long will the greatest problem of humanism lie here in the United States. This relativity of humanistic needs will perhaps go far toward explaining the special traits of the movement in America and the corresponding special lines of attack by its naturistic opponents. Romantics, realists, and sceptics are daily attacking on four fronts: humanists, it is held, are academic, un-American, reactionary, and Puritanic.