uman being at the center of the universe, as the object created especially by God to have reason, and as the one animal capable of understanding and appreciating the world in which he lived. The Humanist first of all studied the Humanities, or the classics of Greece and Rome. To many of the first Humanists, that is all that was involved. They saw Humanism as ancient literature, especially that of the Greek, and when they later spoke of the "New Learning," they were referring to an equation of Greek thought with Protestantism. The deeper sort of Humanist saw that paganism at its noblest pointed towards the Christian revelation, and saw as well that the corruptions of paganism were an unconscious dissatisfaction with the best that paganism could attain. Humanism is defined more specifically today as any system of thought or action which assigns a predominant interest in the affairs of men as opposed to the supernatural or the abstract, though this was not the sense of the term in use in the Renaissance. More would have thought that the real Humanist had to take God into account. The Humanist saw that philosophy could be more profound and have better scientific tools at its command for investigating the ways of the world (Maynard, 1947: 41-42).
Maynard further notes that More's version of Humanism fought against certain tendencies, such as the odd consequenc
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