The humanists, scholars like Erasmus (C.1466 -1536), believed in the powers of the human intellect and in the value of the study of works of great men… ‘It was the substitution of humanism for divinity , of this word for the net , as the object
Of living , and therefore of education, that differentiated the humanists form their predecessors…The humanists’ progress consisted in the adoption of the dogma The noblest study of mankind is man’
(Leach, quoted in Howson,1982,page9)