Education Quote by Irving Babbitt

Babbitt’s move here is to smuggle a moral diagnosis into what looks like a tidy taxonomy. Calling them “main types” suggests neutral classification, the calm voice of the critic sorting human motives. Then he springs the trap: they’re not drives or “interests” but “lusts,” a word that drags the modern self-image back into the courtroom of older religious vocabulary. The line works because it flatters the reader’s appetite for system while quietly indicting that appetite as part of the problem.

The borrowed authority of “traditional Christianity” matters. Babbitt, a leading figure in early-20th-century humanism, is not preaching doctrine so much as raiding Christianity’s psychological realism. He wants a language strong enough to describe how high-status pursuits can become forms of moral intemperance. Knowledge becomes acquisitive and status-bearing rather than truth-seeking; sensation becomes a politics of stimulation; power becomes the most socially sanctioned addiction of all. By putting them on the same shelf, he denies the comforting hierarchy where intellectual ambition is “noble” and bodily desire is “base.” All can be compulsions, all can masquerade as virtues.

Contextually, this is Babbitt taking aim at the age’s faith in progress-through-expansion: more information, more experience, more control. His subtext is that modern culture doesn’t lack energy; it lacks restraint and an inner standard capable of telling desire when to stop. The classification is less a map than a warning label.