Humanists are supposed to be reactionary. According to those who pride themselves on living in the present if not in the future, humanists want “to return to Buddha and the Bho Tree, to Socrates and the ilex.” Being, in the main, historically educated men, however, humanists are well aware that a return to the past is impossible. On the other hand, they are also aware that, as cultural movements must draw upon foreign supplies, so they must also draw upon past culture. If a present age appears to be bad, it can be changed only by the introduction of forces not vitally existing in that age, and since the future is always a blank, these forces can be found only through a reinterpretation of the past. Thus, to a large extent the Renaissance was rendered possible through the “revival of learning” by the humanists, and the romantic movement of the late eighteenth century was in part a “return” to the Middle Ages and the national past. Even the typical modernist, in his efforts to escape being a Victorian or a Puritan, is plainly bent on “returning” to the primitive. This brings us to the last and most frequent charge: that humanists are Puritans in disguise. It is hard to answer. Nobody knows what a Puritan is, and when he is disguised such a person is not easy to deal with. Even Professor Percy Gardner, a leading English authority on Greek art, ventures to speak of the “puritanism” of the Dorians. While in America humanists are attacked as Puritan, in France they are attacked as Catholic, and Mr. T. S. Eliot has been attacked as both. Even though American historians do not agree as to what the distinguishing virtues and vices of the seventeenth-century Puritans were, it may be suggested that one of their plainest virtues was the possession of a certain faith, now extinct. Their successors, wanting this faith, cannot well be said to have even the Puritan defects of that virtue. Sometimes those dire opposites of the humanists, the promoters of Uplift, are called Puritans. For my part, I think of our Uplifters rather as misguided humanitarians, followers not of Calvin but rather of that other Genevan, Rousseau.