XIII. Before the Door of the Spiritual Soul

A time arises, when amongst mankind there begins to stir a feeling that their insight no longer brings them to themselves. There begins a search after the Knowledge of the Human Being. Men fail to satisfy their seeking by anything which the Present can supply. They go back in history to earlier times. ‘Humanism’ makes its appearance in the evolution of the human mind. Humanism becomes men's ideal object, not because they possess the human being but because they have lost him. So long as they still possessed him, their soul which animated the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam and others would have worn a very different colour from anything that their Humanism could give it.