Humanity

Use in the book

III.41–422 makes humanity one of the two most excellent kinds of learning, alongside divinity. The preceding survey of arts and sciences has distinguished knowing a subject for display, conversation, or passing advantage from knowing its value and one’s real interest in it. Humanity supplies a way to understand that interest. It investigates the powers of the soul, the worth of human nature, its wants and inclinations, and the ends to which these are fitted.

The discipline is therefore explanatory and practical at once. It asks what a human being is in this world, what happiness such a being seeks, and what means can attain it. Wisdom is not a further collection of information added to this inquiry; it is knowledge exercised in discovering the way to happiness through an understanding of genuine wants and governing desires. Self-knowledge becomes knowledge of the divine goodness when the investigator sees why such capacities were implanted and what objects answer them.

Traherne’s catalogue gives the approach an unexpectedly generous scope. Curiosity, ambition, emulation, concern for one’s reputation, and the desire to possess things can each have a rightful object. The task is to understand their intended reach and use, rather than condemn their names without discrimination. Intellect is made to see widely; compassion and tenderness join one to other people; the power to admire and prize makes possible union with divine beauty. These claims explain why humanity leads into divinity instead of competing with it.

The passage offers more than a curriculum label. It supplies a method for reading the Centuries’ repeated rehabilitation of desires commonly suspected of being vicious: examine a power’s cause, fitness, object, and end. This does not mean that every actual indulgence of desire is good. It distinguishes the designed capacity from a narrowed or misdirected exercise. Humanity is consequently a study the reader practises upon the self, with felicity as its governing question.

Places to read

1. III.41Ranks humanity and divinity above learning pursued merely for talk, display, or temporary use.
2. III.42Defines humanity through the soul’s faculties, wants, ends, and the means to happiness.

In this edition

The supplied 2026 note to III.41 glosses humanity as humane learning or the study of man. III.42 is the fullest primary definition; its particular account should not be reduced to the modern institutional category of the humanities.