Humanistic naturalism places the emphasis upon a naturalistic outlook based upon the scientific method of reasoning, qualified by a complementary emphasis upon the humanities. It is a term that has been used by Kenneth Lee Patton, John Dewey, James Gutman, Warren Allen Smith, and William Carlos Williams. In "Humanistic Naturalism," found in Warren Allen Smith's Who's Who in Hell, each has been cited as using the expression.
From this point of view it is natural that each sphere of existence should have its own separate group of studies connected with it; it is even natural that the growth of scientific studies should be viewed with suspicion as marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy to encroach upon the domain of spirit.
Naturally, this application of physical science (which was the most conspicuously perceptible one) strengthened the claims of professed humanists that science was materialistic in its tendencies.
The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with a tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past.
Naturalism (philosophy): the view that nothing exists but the natural universe, either methodologically or ontologically — that there are no supernatural entities or at least no observations that show them to exist.
Natural history: a broad area of the natural sciences concerned with living things.
Sociological naturalism: the view that the natural world and the social world are roughly identical and governed by similar principles.
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