Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism is one of the great classics of architectural theory. The book came out in 1914 and has enjoyed massive appreciation for more than a century–paradoxically, this is true even of the era when the targets of Scott’s criticism (the four “fallacies” that he describes) came to be universally endorsed as the core tenets of modernist architecture. The paper analyses the aesthetic-theoretical background for Scott’s views. Because of a reference to Theodor Lipps, many authors have placed Scott’s book in the tradition of empathy-based architectural theories. The paper shows that it was rather the German formalist tradition going back to Kant that influenced Scott and underwrote his analysis of the “fallacies”. The core contribution of Scott’s book is its application of the formalist programme to architectural history. In order to present the implications of this programme, the paper compares Scott’s views to the conception of art history exposed by Hans Georg Gadamer in his Truth and Method.