humanism

Estimated CEFR level: C2 — Proficiency

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

noun the doctrine that people's duty is to promote human welfare
noun the doctrine emphasizing a person's capacity for self-realization through reason; rejects religion and the supernatural
noun the cultural movement of the Renaissance; based on classical studies

From human + -ism, borrowed from German Humanismus, coined by Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer in 1808.

These fourteen prose idyls have a mellow humanism which portrays the last autumn fires of a dying tradition. — The best short stories of 1920, and the yearbook of the American short story, Unknown
It consists, as it seems to me, essentially in this--that the play is one of the most truly spontaneous products of English "humanism" in its later phase. — Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, George Chapman
It stands outside other things--a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. — Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais

humanitarianism

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