Renan grounded modern rationalism, criticism, and liberalism in philology.

Evidence

Between the Friedrich August Wolf of 1777 and the Friedrich Nietzsche of 1875 there is Ernest Renan, an Oriental philologist, also a man with a complex and interesting sense of the way philology and modern culture are involved in each other. In L’Avenir de la science (written in 1848 but not published till 1890) he wrote that “the founders of modern mind are philologists.” And what is modern mind, he said in the preceding sentence, if not “rationalism, criticism, liberalism, [all of which] were founded on the same day as philology?” Philology, he goes on to say, is both a comparative discipline possessed only by moderns and a symbol of modern (and European) superiority; every advance made by humanity since the fifteenth century can be attributed to minds we should call philological. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 353

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that philology is a comparative discipline ‘possessed only by moderns’ prefigures the Orientalism argument that the West authored the knowledge of the East; connects to how Islamophobia discourse inherits this superiority framing.
• QUESTION: L’Avenir de la science was written 1848 but published 1890 — the delay itself, from revolution to the fin de siècle, is a story worth chasing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 353