ABSTRACT
The genuine Puritan had a lively and even exaggerated sense of the ' Old Adam'; President Eliot, for his part, scarcely allows at all for a law of the members. The illusion of a President Eliot is that of a man who, himself born to great riches, deems it 'natural' that everyone should have cash in the bank. The humanitarian idealism based on the faith in progress will be found on analysis to be either utilitarian or sentimental. Practically, in education as elsewhere, a utilitarian and sentimental movement has been displacing traditions that are either religious or humanistic. One may discover an important agreement not only between different forms of humanism but between humanism and religion— the assumption, namely, that man needs to be disciplined in his natural self to some standard; that he needs, in short, in the almost literal sense of the term to undergo conversion.
