Time & Perspective Quote by Irving Babbitt

Babbitt is drawing a scalpel line between loving "humanity" and actually understanding humans. By insisting that the admirer of mankind "in the lump" be labeled a humanitarian rather than a humanist, he’s not nitpicking vocabulary; he’s staging a critique of modern moral fashion. The phrase "in the lump" does the work: it suggests a comforting abstraction, a crowd viewed from a safe distance, where sympathy can be broad and effortless because no one in particular has to be faced, forgiven, or judged.

The subtext is suspicion of progress-talk as a substitute for moral seriousness. "Faith in its future progress" sounds benign until Babbitt frames it as a creed: belief, cause, service. That religious cadence is deliberate. He’s implying that humanitarianism can become a secular religion, complete with saints, heretics, and a tendency to flatten complexity in the name of uplift. If you’re serving "the great cause", individual flaws start to look like obstacles to be managed rather than realities to be reckoned with.

Context matters: Babbitt, a leading figure in New Humanism, wrote amid the early 20th century’s confidence in reform, mass politics, and technocratic solutions. His humanism isn’t the poster-friendly kindness-to-all; it’s disciplined, classical, skeptical of sentimental optimism. He’s warning that compassion without limits, and hope without a tragic sense of human nature, easily turns into moral self-congratulation - and, at scale, into coercion done with a clear conscience.