It might be objected that "human" beings have never existed and never could exist without others, nor, consequently, without judgements of right and wrong. This was the common eighteenth-century opinion. But Rousseau really escapes this criticism, since the creature he paints is admittedly not human, but pre-human, "living in a state of animality".

—Lester Crocker, "Introduction", in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Luther reflected the humanism of the sixteenth century. This new approach is not to be confused with the secular humanism of our own day. Humanism expressed the Renaissance spirit emphasizing a return to Greek and Roman cultures. It was, in many ways, a reactionary movement against the Medieval traditions. That approach, called scholasticism, underscored the later Latin fathers and Aristotle's thought. Scholasticism emphasized the Medieval commentaries on Aristotle—and even on the commentaries on the commentaries—rather than on Aristotle's writings primarily. Like scaffolding around a building, these commentaries blocked a direct line to the sources themselves. Humanism proposed moving beyond the scaffolding with the battlecry, "Ad Fontes," to the fount, or to the source. And in this spirit, Luther went beyond the scaffolding that obstructed the Bible and went straight to the biblical text.

—Stephen J. Nichols, Martin Luther: A guided tour of his life and thought

Many people first begin to approach the Christian Faith with a mental attitude wholly or largely secular in its operations. Thus a man may recognize a need to posit a God behind the universe because otherwise he finds the origin and purpose of life inexplicable. Having posited a God, he may go further and persuade himself that Jesus Christ comes nearest to representing what divinity must be like.

Tenuous intellectual admissions of this kind often no doubt lead to something solider and more nourishing. As they stand, they represent a state of mind far removed from the Christian. A God is posited because the brain likes it like that: it wants to dwell upon a cause as well as an effect, upon a purpose as well as an activity. In other words, the individual intellect summons up a God in order to satisfy its thirst for system and order. Man's intellect wants a complete picture of the shape and meaning of things, and it proves artistically desirable to insert a God in the top right-hand corner of the composition.

It is important not to denigrate the demands of the human intellect. The Christian believes that God has given us our reasoning powers: we haven't manufactured them ourselves. Nevertheless it is equally important not to miss the sharp distinction between an intellectual demand for a God to fill up a humanly composed picture, and the Christian's awakening to the fact of a divine revelation in time by which an institution, a book, a tradition are presented to him charged with the weight of an absolute and transcendent authority. A mere intellectual demand for a God to fill up the picture is essentially secularist in spirit and in motive, in that it claims a God only to enrich and complete a finite situation. but the Christian's awakening to the fact of divine revelation serves to shatter the apparent completeness of the finite and to impoverish human experience in so far as it has been confined by that delusive "completeness".

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

Charles Fourier, a businessman from Lyons, put forward some even more extravagant notions. He predicted the ideal world he was creating would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them an era of Perfect Harmony, during which the North Pole would be milder than the shores of the Mediterranean, the sea, no longer salt, would turn into lemonade, and the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 mathematicians equal to Newton, and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, though he modestly added, “These are approximate estimates.”

—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

But it cannot be denied also that, for some—and for an increasing number as the decades went by—the new kind of transcendent music Beethoven wrote, and the new importance he gave to music in the intellectual and moral cosmos, did constitute a secular substitute for religion: There was a new faith, and Beethoven was its prophet. It was no accident that, about this time, new concert halls were being given temple-type facades, thus exalting the moral and cultural status of the symphony and chamber music.
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

It has been said that the character of the philosophy of the eighteenth century was a sort of adoration of human intellect, an unlimited confidence in its power to transform at will laws, opinions, customs. To be accurate, it must be said that the human intellect which some of these philosophers adored was simply their own.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution