Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
2. From Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p.28:
For the essence of humanism is [the] belief … that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.
COMMENTARY: Pater here echoes the Roman poet Terrence's declaration that Homo sum--"I am a man" (i.e., a human being)--and what follows from that fact is that "I consider nothing human alien to me" (nihil humanum alienum a me puto).
3. From Ralph Waldo Emerson,"History" in Essays: First Series:
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
COMMENTARY: If there is no history, only biography, we should not be surprised to learn that biography and autobiography are crucial genres for understanding the history of religions.
That does not mean that the academic study of religion becomes nothing but the memoirs of scholars; it means that the study of religion is a branch of aesthetics (as found in Walter Pater, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Santayana, and Wallace Stevens).
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